I've been playing some various GTA 4 multiplayer games on Xbox Live lately. Team Mafia Works is probably my favorite. The concept of the game is simple, but you need to have decent organization with your teammates to pull it off. The 360 is a fairly recent purchase, so I've been trying to get a feel for the community.
GTA 4 may not be an entirely fair representation of the Xbox Live community, because as far as I can tell most of the users think they're straight gangsters and fail to realize that they're playing with a toy in their living room.
Team Mafia works is a great concept for GTA. The idea is that you're on a subset of the overall map (the smaller the better), and you are on a team competing with at least one other team to complete missions that are phoned in to you. Think of it as playing the game against rival gangs and you're on a timer. It's a lot more frantic, random, and generally a lot more fun than GTA 4 single player. The concept, that is.
Execution is different. If you're playing with the right people, it's awesome. Many of my friends have 360s and GTA 4, so I can create or invite them into games for some multiplayer fun. They're coherant, they realize they're playing video games on a toy, and they're very fun to play with. Any time we're together, we dominated the random players because they weren't the least bit organized. To round out my experience, I played games entirely with strangers.
Xbox Live is completely full of posers. They're all trying to impress strangers, talking about how they're smoking weed instead of playing (what, are you sixteen? Is that supposed to be edgy?). They say some slang, then repeat the word "faggot" or an abbreviation thereof about 15 times in a row, then mouth-breathe into their microphone while they play. I think this is secret code behavior for "I never had a girlfriend." Oh, and they all seem to take gaming very, very seriously. Don't (correctly) refer to the Xbox as a toy, or they'll take offense. That's odd, because the Xbox is a toy.
I noticed a lot of people don't even use headsets while playing. And when I talked to my friends about this, they mostly just shrugged and said they didn't talk much or didn't even bother to wear their headsets while using Xbox Live. That's kind of a shame.
