I didn’t have a 360 or a PS3 when GTA4 came out. The release of the game was therefore of no interest to me. Particularly as I’d already played and finished GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas on the PS2. Based on what I saw on the regular tv spots, GTA4 basically offered more of the same, but with better graphics. And that’s more or less the case, but it doesn’t mean that the bastards at Rockstar have not succeeded in literally eating a chunk of my life and then shitting it back out in the form of this review. Which you are now smelling/reading with your nose/eyes.

Much has been made of GTA’s violence and apparent lack of moral code. But not to worry, because every single person that has ever said this is a complete cretin that should be turned into solid fuel and given to the elderly to burn in order to prevent them freezing to death during this ridiculous winter. How violent is it? Not very. Sure there’s shooting, blowing stuff up, whacking people round the chops with baseball bats and so on. All that. But it’s violent in the same way that an episode of The A-Team is violent. That is, in such a way that only insufferable bores and Keith Vaz would find offensive. But whatever. I’m not here to talk about that. It’s got an ’18′ certificate. ‘Kay, Keith? Tosser.

The game follows the same basic format as all GTA games have since GTA3. You start off as a veritable bedwetter in gangster terms, and must gradually do stuff to become a bit of a Billy-big-bollocks. .That’s basically it. There’s a wafer thin plot of sorts, which can be summarised as follows: shady illegal immigrant has shady past life, seeks revenge against other shady illegal immigrant over something shady that happened once. It’s riveting stuff.

But come on. This isn’t Heavy fucking Rain here. Nobody plays GTA for the complex plotting and well observed characterisation. It’s a chance to run about in an incredibly realised virtual cityscape blowing the shit out of helicopters and stuff. Here, then, is my handy summary of some of the best and worst aspects to the mighty GTA4.

Worst portrayal of a gay character in any entertainment media, ever

Ok, so it turns out that one of Niko’s old army friends has moved to Liberty City and he’s a bit… you know. Keeps his coins in his wallet. Drives on the other bus (the one full of men bumming). With a little bit of luck, you have realised that so far in this paragraph, I have been using the tools of irony and humour in order to (hopefully) raise a smile. Despite the fact that I’m as thick as a bucket of shit, even I understand that, whilst a sweeping generalisation like ‘keeps his in coins in his wallet’ might strike a chord, it is in no way an accurate description of gay men in general. I also understand that if you filled a bus with gay men, they wouldn’t immediately all start bumming each other.

Well, they probably would. But let’s pretend they sat there quietly listening to the new Mika album or something.

Gay men can be funny. They can be irritating. They can be outspoken. They can be introverted. They can, in short, be like everyone else. Because they are like everyone else. (Except they like cocks and that.) But for some reason, Rockstar thought that they needed to MASSIVELY overstate the SHEER GAYNESS of their one GAY character. Just look at this:

For fuck’s fucking sake.

The clothes are shit

Pikey chic. Two words that have no business being adjacent to one another.

With friends like these, kill yourself

One of GTA4′s new features is your ability to befriend various NPCs. And all I can say is, if my real life friends were this much of a pain the cock, either they or me would have been killed a long time ago. Being a complete fucking idiot, I played along with it for the first few hours. So when Roman called and asked me if I wanted to play pool, of course I accepted. About an hour later (an actual real earth hour), I realised that I’d been playing virtual pool with a virtual friend listening to a conversation I had no means to affect. It was a dark moment.

And it never ends. The fuckers keep phoning. Darts, bowling, a comedy club… The possibilities are literally not endless. Pointless, irritating and a classic example of a gaming concept being much better while it remained a concept.

Pedestrians: still thick as pigshit

Would it be too much to ask for the coding nerds to add some kind of AI for the pedestrians? It’s as if they all woke up in the morning with one thought in their tiny virtual minds: ‘I must make sure that I get run over today’. It hasn’t been funny for the best part of a decade. Sort it out.

Niko Bellic is an arsehole

Fallout 3 uses a karma system, in which your karma is affected by your actions in the game. This in turn will lead to different situations and your meeting different NPCs. It’s pretty rudimentary stuff, but it works. Because I am a girly fart pants, I chose to play as a ‘good’ character, rescuing all sorts of innocent people and keeping my slaughtering of passers-by to a minimum. GTA4 does not have a system like this, and as a result your relationship with the playing character is weirdly distorted. Through the many cut scenes in the game, the player builds up an impression of Niko Bellic. The developers clearly want us to think that he is a decent, if flawed individual. Blah blah blah.

But the fact is, he’s a total fucking wanker. It’s not possible to play GTA4 without stealing a car from someone at gunpoint. Or shooting dozens of policemen to death. Or running someone over without stopping the car to see if they’re ok. Etc. Your actions in the game make this character a properly horrible dude. So cut the bullshit, Rockstar. Let’s have a proper version of Niko in the cut scenes. That of an evil, narcissistic, murderous war criminal with mental health problems.

It’s a polished turd

What makes the GTA series such fun to play is Rockstar’s continuing ability to bring a shine to a lump of age old gaming shit. We’re like magpies. We like shiny things. If they’re shiny enough, we don’t even notice the fact that they’re shit.

I’m going to drop this analogy now. It’s rubbish.

But look, there’s no getting away from the fact that GTA4 follows the same basic template of the majority of games these days: get mission, get key/object to help with mission, go from one place to another place, try to complete mission, find out that you need to do something else first, go back to first place, and so on and SO FUCKING ON.

The controls are a bit shit sometimes

I’m no expert in gangster-type activities*, but I’m pretty sure that if I was chasing a senior mafioso with a view to executing him and needed to get on a motorbike, I wouldn’t suddenly change my mind and climb down a ladder instead. This happened to my twice on the last mission. TWICE! The first time it happened, I was prepared to accept that my inherent mongness had caused the problem. So I gave it another go. And if you’ve played the game, you’ll know that there’s a bloody lot you’ve got to get through to get to this point in the mission. And then it happened again. As a result I still haven’t finished the bloody game. Had that happened in the first couple of hours, there’s a good chance I’d have ditched it straight away.

Also, the cover system ain’t exactly Gears of War or Uncharted 2.

*Obviously I am an expert in gangster-type activities, but I can’t admit to that in case the pigs are reading this.

Ignore all that, it’s actually quite good

Well it can’t be a huge pile of shite for me to have racked up 50+ hours on it. It’s not perfect, and of course there is an element of having been here before with a lot of the missions. But that still doesn’t detract from the pleasure to be derived from a speedboat chase and gunfight, followed by blowing a helicopter out of the sky with a bazooka.

So there you have it. Not really a review at all, more of a series of barely connected and idiotic opinions. I’m going to bring things bang up to date next week with my COD3 feature.

And listen, not that you care but I have actually moved house now. I’m putting the cunt back into country. As I type this, from my window I can literally see a man with webbed feet and an ear in the middle of his forehead gutting a badger with his bare hands, as a crowd of braying Daily Mail readers cheers and applauds. It’s rural bliss.

But now that things are moderately less manic, hopefully there will be a bit more activity here. Just about to start playing Assassin’s Creed 2, where apparently all the characters look like they’ve got Down’s Syndrome. So that should be interesting. Also stuff to come on Plain Sight, Greed Corp and Joe Danger. And if I ever get round to it, there’s a third installment of Crap Movie Club that I’ve been meaning to finish for about a month.

I should probably stop talking about what I’m going to write, because I almost always end up not doing it. And you all think I’m a dirty liar. And I am.

I’ll leave you with the words of the great Martin Luther King: “Twenty fucking quid? You can stuff it up your bollocks mate, I’m not paying that.”

See ya.