midnight rain

Well to be fair it's a personal pinnacle of gaming. Otherwise I'd pick something obvious (and boring) like Tetris. But I think it perfected what made GTA great in the first place; insane, over-the-top gameplay with awesomely unrealistic physics and a zany art style. It had a cartoony, humorous side to it that perfectly counterbalanced the (for it's time) very violent gameplay. Above all, the San Andreas world was a place to behold back in 2004. It was easily one of the most awe inspiring game maps I had seen at the time.

GTA IV took the series in a new direction, no doubt, by preferring gritty realism to the cartoonish violence of past games. Which I find odd, because that was the exact thing that "GTA clones" used to get ridiculed for back in the day; that is, taking themselves too seriously (DRIV3R, The Getaway, etc.). I prefer it to GTA IV because when in GTA IV do you take a bulldozer and bury a foreman hiding in a portapotty under 6 feet of concrete? When do you fly an RC copter? Break into Area 51? This is the kind of stuff I missed while playing GTA IV.

In GTA IV, it was the same premise 95% of the time (with maybe a little wiggle room here and there). Drive to your destination and either A.) Exchange gunfire with your target or B.) Pursue them in a vehicle and take them out in a high speed chase. That seems to comprise the vast majority of the IV missions. that's not even mentioning GTA IV's physics and how driving a car in the game is like trying to drive on ice (I'd like to accelerate to 200 MPH in 5 sec in my video games, thank you very much). I preferred the characters and storyline in SA (not nearly as dark as IV, though I can easily see why someone would prefer IV's storyline). I found IV's map pretty amazing at first, but it grew very stale. Where's the planes, jet packs, tanks, fire trucks, ambulances, taxis, jets? How about forests, mountains, deserts, valleys?


I think you get the idea.