First of all, I am not a Nintendo fanboy, who's been hating on GTA IV,* and this is proof that...

I love the Grand Theft Auto series!

Also this shows that I have PS2 games, and therefore a PS2 (can post a pic of that, if you ask), but the point is that I have ALL FIVE of the PS2 GTA games (couldn't get into the top-down-view ones).

This brings us to why I was sold on Grand Thef Auto 4 a while ago. It's a refinement of a series I already love.

How could I be hating on that?

Then again, some of you may not know what I mean by refined sequel, so I'm going to explain that.

I consider a refined sequel to be the happy medium between a rehash sequel and a revolutionary sequel.

The "medium" part being between developers and gamers. A rehash is of course easiest on developers, but it can make consumers feel as though they are paying for the same game again. A revolutionary sequel is like a whole new experience for consumers, but would take a lot of creative effort, often when it's unnecessary.

The main Final Fantasy series likes to change things a bit with almost every sequel, but it's one of the few series to do this. The fact that, the creative team is constantly switched, helps.

Anyway, the best alternative to trying to shake up a winning formula is of course to prune and polish the formula. And even without playing GTA IV, the knowledge that it's simply a bigger, better version of the PS2 GTA games is fine enough for me.

The only question for me is where on the refinment scale it goes to. I like Twilight Princess, but I admit it's on the low end of refinment, as it's basically a bigger, better Ocarina of Time, although that may also be due to how polished the latter game may have already been.

At the opposite end is what I consider the holy grail of game refinement, Super Metroid. If it wasn't for the fact that Metroid II introduced most of the new power ups, I would call it a revolutionary sequel (as I consider Super Mario Bros 3 to be a revolutionary sequel, due to all that was introduced). As it is, it took everything that was great about the first two metroid games, and made them awesome.

GTA IV could reach that height for me, but from what I seen and read, it still looks to be worth my time.

* I admit my repsonses on that thread, after the first couple posts, were rude and inexcusable, but those only prove I made comments that, well, were rude an inexcusable.

Did I mention I admit those comments were rude and inexcusable?

That's even worse.

You bought the PS2 ports of LCS, and VCS?

Fail

I know you put a lot of work into this thread, so that's why I'm going to have to ask you to put this in the Official GTA4 sticky.