11 Grand Theft Anecdotes
So by the time you're reading this, you may very well have been playing the just-released Grand Theft Auto IV for 8 straight hours, and in that time, formed some pretty firm opinions on the game to go along with the magnificent odor you've also probably developed. Sadly I can't count myself amongst your number, as having both a job and a girlfriend, I have certain non-optional sleep and odor-maintenance regimes. Consequently I haven't played a bit of the game, so were I actually to attempt a review here, I'd be making a mockery of the journalistic standards that Cracked magazine has long stood for.
Instead, I'm going to recap some of the absolute favorite things I enjoyed about the past GTA games, which should be a good way for me to fill out a blog post, and also not get too stinky.
My Favorite Things about Grand Theft Auto:
Reverse 180's. In some cars like the taxi or police car, these are so easy to do, it's delicious. I think I pulled one of these accidentally about 5 minutes into the original GTA III. As I recall, after my eyes resocketed themselves, I stood up and exclaimed "Holy Crap, I'm awesome!" It's such a small thing, but making the player feel like the Golden God of All Things On Wheels is one thing that makes this series so great.
Creating a whole logjam of cars and then blowing them up in a chain reaction. Once you realized that multiple gunshots could destroy cars, tell me within minutes you weren't piling up cars in an intersection like a lunatic valet?
This one time in Vigilante mode. This mode seemed kind of lame at first - mostly just chasing crooks down, smacking their rear quarter panel and shooting the hell out of them with an uzi. But there was one criminal who I couldn't pin down at all, and as the clock was running out, in an act of desperation I slammed him off the side of a bridge and into the ocean. One of my favorite gaming moments ever, and it hopefully sent a message to everyone else in Liberty City who had four outstanding parking tickets: there was a new sheriff in town.
Big dirty handbrake turns through intersections. Drifting used to be so cool before the Japanese ritualized it and turned it into something incomprehensible. They did the same thing with sex, and I'm still pissed off about it.
The Sentinel. I find that all the love in this series goes to the street bikes or the sports cars, but for my money the Sentinel and it's variants are the best cars in the game. Not over-awingly fast, but just so unflappable in bumps, hard turns and under braking. I can't count the number of times I lost the handle on a Cheetah while traveling at top speed and spun out into three prostitutes, snuffing out their already tragic lives. But that almost never happened in the Sentinel. This goes back to that whole "feeling like a Driving God" thing I spoke of earlier.
Motorcycle assisted BASE jumping. Just like watching a Vin Diesel movie, except you don't feel embarrassed talking about it afterward.
On that subject, check out some guy's hilariously ruined Quad Bike BASE jump:
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Harrier dogfights. San Andreas had such a retarded amount of unlockable content, that this probably shouldn't have surprised me when it happened, but it did. Sure, the dogfighting was actually pretty terrible, but it boggled my mind that it was even in there, and again, allowed me to relive some favorite movie moments.
My roommate:
Me: "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOSE!"
Turning the turret in the tank around 180 degrees and repeatedly firing the cannon to accelerate forward. You almost never see tanks do this in real life, and I've always wondered why.
Running over Crockett and Tubbs in their own Ferrari. In Vice City when you achieved a certain wanted level, a Cheetah with two cops in pastel suits will come after you, just like Miami Vice. However unlike Miami Vice, they were about as hard to kill as a baby duck. Which I found perfectly delightful. "People who hate and want to murder Don Johnson" have been a curiously under served gaming demographic for a long time.
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And while we're all sitting here,
My Least Favorite Things about Grand Theft Auto: Molotov Cocktails. Fuck those things. I don't think I've ever used one of these things that didn't end up with me in a heap, a polyester suit permanently fused to me corpse.
Eating. In San Andreas you had to eat food periodically otherwise your character would bitch and moan at you. Who's great idea was a video game that simulates eating? Fucking Taco Bell? The whole point of video games is letting the player do stuff they can't do normally, i.e. drive a firetruck at full speed off a ramp, and into a fountain where they'd earlier parked two helicopters.
Stuff appearing and disappearing when you turn your head. The game wasn't too bad about spawning stuff when you were driving, although it was far from perfect. But when you're on foot, cars and swarms of gangster would appear or disappear as soon as you turned around. It was really disorienting and unsettling, and I'm guessing it's exactly how old people feel all the time.
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So what were some of your favorite GTA moments? And who's got GTA IV? Is it any good? Can you send me your copy? Why not? What's your problem, dick?
I got GTA IV but I found it kind of boring, I guess it was because I got SR2 around the same time and although I felt that GTA had a better storyline I just fell out of love with it when I saw SR2 post game: in SR I was an extraterrestrial crime lord in an F1 car who delivered beatdowns with a foam glove, but in GTA I was just some a*****e from Russia who John McClaned his way through a bunch of bad guys, but would you watch Die Hard if it ended four hours after he killed the terrorists and then got bored and did dumb s**t for fun?
ReplyGrand Theft Auto III, hurtling along in a Banshee (open top) towards the overpass that runs up to the construction site. I wasn't being chased, just tooling around to see how fast it would go and to see how many intersections I could blast through before getting smashed to a jibbery, weeping heap by a truck or something.
ReplyI hit the barrier at the side of the over pass with my thumb mashed so far into the go button I'm surprised I didn’t push hit through the bottom of the controller.
I was expecting carnage, airbag induced comas and general destruction of my horseless carriage.
What happened next was that the car took to the air…almost vertically…gracefully flipping backwards in a lazy 360 as I reached the apex of my gentle parabola.
Remarkably, the car landed rubber side down in the car park of the apartment complex below…no bounce, no roll…just THUNK.
That was weird.
You musta suck at Molotovs cause I wuv them and don't leave home without them. They don't have a timer, so unlike grenade, it impact something...those caught in the AOE are dead. You dont need to switch to a remote so it kills instantly! And it's the only other weapon (other than the mostly useless flame thrower) that can hunt down tanks! You just need to learn how to throw it that's all!
ReplyIn Vice City, being chased by cops on a 6 star wanted level; when they started to crash everywhere, going off into the ocean, and a cop and I duking it out while a police car on fire ramped off a tank and flew over our heads and exploded; and I f*****g survived. Awesome, just f*****g awesome. (Not to mention, the whole town looked like occupied Germany).
ReplyYou read mi mind... I spent too many hours doing this stuff, but there are other fun stuff to do... for example: punching people randomly on the sidewalks just to see how many morons follow you to fight you back, trying to steal a FBI rancher on 4 stars wanted level is also really fun, the radios on vice city were the best, all the stuff said in VCPR y espantoso almost made me die laughing... There were those tow trucks on San Andreas I used to employ them to tow squad cars and driving them full speed crashing them till' they blow. Sometimes I was too lazy to drive and I used to spawn the stunt plane to commute quickly but the funniest part was when I crash landed them into the destinations causing many, many deaths and fire. Vice City is really awesome but San Andreas is the most resourceful ever... another really fun thing to do is to pick the vortex then jumping from Mt. Chilliad or The Library Tower in order to get some really sweet rides... So many memories...
Replycool story bro
VCPR really really highlights and lampoon everything that was wrong about the '80's, tape salesman badgering on and on about various programs? Check, drug hazed hippies? check? Self governed movements? check! and of course, TV evangelism? Check check and double check! Other than the songs, when I got into VCPR, I just park my car on the side of the road listen to it all the way through...By god when Pastor Richards shot Barry Stark the nudist and went on about scamming money to build palaces in Hawaii and going out with his concubines whose only duty was to carry on his genes...That had me in stiches!
GAMES DONT MAKE PEOPLE CRAZY ,WHATEVER YOUR DEFINITION OF CRAZY IS.
Replyi remember in GTA: SA there is one mountain that is so high the planes would fly into it. they made no move to get out of the way. one memory i will never forget is that IRL, I'm a firefighter, so i was driving the firetruck up the mountain and out of nowhere a plane slams into the road in front of me and careens out of control on fire, into other cars. it looked just like a real airplane crash. I just flicked on the sirens, put the fire out, and went on my way :)
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesYou didn't call for help? Because there was a plane.. who slammed into the road? So you were like "LOL DIS IS JUS LIEK TEH GAYME" and you left? f*g.
@GaryOak: !? What are you, f**king retarded?Did you think this guy was telling you a real-life anecdote about the time he was cruising around a mountain in his fire truck when he just happen to see a plane crash into a bunch of cars BECAUSE IT HAD GONE AS HIGH AS PLANES COULD GO? Are you really that stupid?
Calm down. GaryOak is about as high as planes can go.
Good thing I wasn't trolling, or you'd look like an idiot, wouldn't you?
Not to mention that before GTA 4, only black people could swim.
ReplyAfter GTA 4, only blacks AND Serbs could swim.
Original Playstation version taught me a valuable life lesson: super-bikes at full speed into walls = fun.
ReplyBest thing ever in GTA games- get a tank, infinte ammo, flying cars, and 5 star wanted level cheats all at once and watch the chaos unfold in your flying doom tank while being chased by helicopters
ReplyGood reading,thanks
ReplyYou sir, are my hero.
ReplyWe need to be friends :]
Yeah, so I have every grand theft auto game, and right now i’m playing liberty city stories and i dont know where my memory card is, so i started a new game, looked up some cheats and im just kinda passing the time of my pathetic life.
well i’m in shoreside vale and i dont know where the safe house is, so i googled it on the map and its like “safehouses are purple” and guess what?
There’s no damn purple ANYWHERE on that effing map…..
so i googled "where the fuck is the fucking hideout in shoreside fucking vale in liberty city fucking stories" and it brought me to this website.
Just so you know.
Of course there's no damn purple. It's VIOLET, man.
You sir, are my hero.
ReplyWe need to be friends :]
Yeah, so I have every grand theft auto game, and right now i'm playing liberty city stories and i dont know where my memory card is, so i started a new game, looked up some cheats and im just kinda passing the time of my pathetic life.
well i'm in shoreside vale and i dont know where the safe house is, so i googled it on the map and its like "safehouses are purple" and guess what?
There's no damn purple ANYWHERE on that effing map.....
fml.
Ahaha, these are all the things I love about GTA. Right, off to play VC now. Thanks.
Replyx_x My worst moment, in GTA, was in GTA IV. I sped past a barricade on a motorcycle, and got shot in the head. I didn't know it was possible, and I flew off the bike, into another barricade, following that, the bike hit me.
ReplyBut, it's not my copy, or I'd totally send it.
Butnotreally, of course.
i was like 11 when i played San andreaws for the first time.
Replyi didnt even knew what was the "purple stick". LOL haha
In San Andreas, I loved the strip clubs you could go to. They gave me a hard on everytime I bought a private dance.
Replyi was surprised to find out that CJ could use a big, purple, double sided dildo in S. Andreas.
ReplyI love the sentinel too, perfect car for misions and getaways
ReplyWhen I read the firetruck ramp jump into two helicopters bit, I just trailed off into a day dream and sat there for long enough that the boss whipped me.
ReplyNice one.