Grand Theft Auto: A Retrospective

But when all is said and done, Saints Row is a great achievement. It feels like the game was born out of a personal goal of Volition's to fix what was wrong with Grand Theft Auto in the first place. While each installment of GTA was getting bigger, it wasn't necessarily getting better. Before each release you'd read countless previews about how they fixed this and that, especially the aiming system. Then the game is released and you find out the targeting still performs more horribly than the Something Awful Forums.

Give everybody at Volition the Pulitzer prize, an Oscar, a Webby Award, or Bishie Ted's Best Sailor Moon Erotic Piss Fetish Story award because they are geniuses. They did what Rockstar couldn't, fix the aiming system. And they did it by removing the godforsaken feature entirely. They were the only ones in the industry who believed that a console gamer could aim at an object on the screen and hit it after five or six attempts. Thank you Volition, for believing in us.

The success of Saints Row has created a rift between Grand Theft Auto devotees and Saints Row converts. In the spirit of such ongoing wars as Coke vs. Pepsi, Mac vs. PC, and cumming on the tits vs. cumming on the butt, the GTA vs Saints Row arguments rage on. Of course, the rest of us who don't rely on our parents for allowance money just end up buying both with the money we got from our grandmas.

Besides, Mafia 2 will be better than both of them put together.

A New GTA Game is Less Than Two Weeks Away, Time to Act Retarded

I love big game releases, if only for the completely retarded discussions that are posted to message boards across the Internet. From blue sky wish lists to rampant speculation over the smallest detail in a trailer, few can help themselves.

IS THAT A GAS STATION? THINK U COULD BLOW IT UP??? THINK U COULD GET GAS AND FILL UR CAR UP??? I THINK IN-GAME GAS PRICES SHOULD UPDATE IN REAL-TIME WITH REAL-WORLD PRICING INFORMATION THAT WOULD BE SWEEEEEET AND YOU COULD USE THE SQUEEGEE ON UR CAR!!!!

It's true, the worst game designers in the world are people who play video games.

One of my favorite questions to see on these forums is, "wat r u gunna do 1st???" Well, DbZ_bOdUkIsupaSAIYIN94 I'm going to play the game's missions consecutively until it's over and then place the game neatly on my shelf. It's like these people have personal planners where April 29th is circled and they already have everything they are going to do in-game planned out.

Okay, first I'm going to open the box. Then I'm going to play the first mission. Then I'm going to do taxi driver missions. Then I'm going to try a little multiplayer and scream the n-word at the first person I see. Then I'm gonna tell my mom to shut up.

Absent from that list is, "Take a shower."

But despite this site's cynical slant I can't help but be excited too. Sure, on the surface I'm too cool for school. GTA4 is coming out? Meh. I prefer a more mature game such as Master of Orion 2. Heh, you wouldn't understand as it is a thinking man's game and not mindless trash like today's dumbed down console titles.

Fuck it. I might as well admit I'm going to be standing at some game store at midnight waiting to buy the latest GTA game. Sure, I'll be covering my face, hoping no one I know notices me, but I'll be there. I'll rip into it as if I were a kid again and have the time of my life. And then I'll return to the Forums and bitch, and bitch, and bitch about how they took out bicycles and planes. Besides, the PC version will be better anyway since all those things can be modded in.

Then I can work on my mod that turns that Russian bastard into an American dude, as God intended.

– Hassan "Acetone" Mikal