txrattlesnake said:
Reasonable said:
For me, no.
I loved the engine (even with the pop-in,etc) but was underwhelmed by the content and perplexed by the 'it's as good a script as Godfather, Goodfellas, etc. comments' - when it clearly was a D movie to their A movie status in the script and story dept.
It was fun in parts, interesting overall but really was more (or from a certain perspective less) of the same with a better developed city setting - i.e. not GOTY.
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Storywise, GTA IV was much more prescient in its social commentary than either of the GodFather games or even to The Godfather movies nowadays. First off, the social commentary contained in all of the shows on Nico's television were a very accurate deppiction of the Us and the inannity of a large percentage of its media offerings. Secondly, Eastern European gangsters particularly from Russia and or the Ukraine are much more of a threat to the world today than the Italian mobsters depicted in The Godfather or the charcater that Pacino played in Scarface, yet you very seldom hear discussions about the threats posed by these Eastern European figures discussed in much mainstream news programming. They are a shadowy prescence that GTA IV may have been the first work in popular media to take a serious look into.
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I'd actually agree the shows on TV were pretty fun social criticsms of US. But everything I saw in GTA (including those shows) was derivitive of supeior works from TV, books and films. And that's the point. There is nothing original in GTA and its very basic and uneven in its depiction of Eastern European strife and the fallout from it.
Watch Eastern Promises if you want to see something far superior to the content in GTA, or The Lives of Others.
I appreciate that compared to other games GTA IV did try harder with script, etc. but it still trails (as do any games I've played) literature in terms of films and books for its subject matter.
I also wonder what missions it would containt if Rockstar wasn't able to rip off whole sequences from films like Heat.
