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What does the American Dream mean today? For Niko Bellic, fresh off the boat from Europe, it is the hope he can escape his past. For his cousin, Roman, it is the vision that together they can find fortune in Liberty City, gateway to the land of opportunity. As they slip into debt and are dragged into a criminal underworld by a series of shysters, thieves and sociopaths, they discover that the reality is very different from the dream in a city that worships money and status, and is heaven for those who have them and a living nightmare for those who don’t. Beginning with the 1997 release of the original Grand Theft Auto, the GTA series has been one of the most prolific, controversial and down right entertaining franchises in video games history. This pedigree of success guarantees that the highly anticipated eleventh game in the series, Grand Theft Auto IV, will garner at least as much attention if not more. 
Return to Liberty City. | 
The dream as Niko expected it.
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There's always a catch.
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But some skills are international.
View larger. | The Plot
Grand Theft Auto IV is a brand new adventure in the GTA universe following the experiences of Nikolai "Niko" Bellic, a new immigrant from an undisclosed eastern European country whose troubled pa st and the persuasion of his cousin Roman have brought him to the fictional Liberty City. Unfortunately, Niko’s search for the American Dream and a much needed fresh start, hits an immediate snag when the rags to riches story Roman spun to pique Niko's interest is exposed as not only a complete fabrication, but a ploy to enlist Niko’s well-known skills as a tough guy against the ample list of enemies clamoring for Roman’s debt-ridden blood. Because Roman is the only person Niko knows in Liberty City he begrudgingly accepts his role as Roman’s protector despite the deception. But as time goes on Niko comes into his own, and his experience on the wrong side of the tracks proves more valuable than he could have ever imagined as he fights for survival and later supremacy on the crime ridden streets of Liberty City. Game Environments
Based on several of the boroughs of New York City and parts of New Jersey, Liberty City, familiar to players of previous games in the series, has been entirely redesigned for GTA IV. Players can expect visible detail down to the weeds growing in the cracks in the sidewalk, cars and buildings of visibly different ages and a much greater level if verticality in the buildings and bridges that they are able to explore as Niko moves through the city streets. In addition, pedestrians in GTA IV are much more realistic. No longer simply moving cardboard cutouts, these NPCs are intelligent, modern, human representations that laugh, cry, eat, drink, use cell phones and ATMs, and talking amongst themselves regardless of Niko’s interaction with them. Gameplay
Historically GTA games have focused heavily on mission-based play, requiring successful completion of fixed tasks in order for players to progress through the game, but this has changed to a great extent in GTA IV. Players will experience an entirely new and exciting emphasis centered on the blending of on-mission and off-mission play, resulting not only in an increased sense of realism, but more interesting and unrestricted gameplay. Features
Aside from the car jacking and a detailed city environment here are the new features for GTA IV: - Improved combat system - Now you can use cover and also a target lock system, which allows you to take out targets with greater ease and accuracy. Plus, you can engage in some hand-to-hand combat if you can't get your hands on a piece quick enough.
- Cell phone - Not just for basic phone calls anymore. Use your in-game cell phone to receive missions via SMS, snap photos, and ZiT (tag) songs that can be downloaded exclusively on Amazon.com/mp3.
- Free time - In between missions you can take advantage of "me" time. There are gentleman's clubs, comedy clubs, bowling alleys, and bars, which all house unique activities.
- Take a break from the storyline - A variety of side missions allow you to help run a car service, "borrow" cop cars, assassinate targets, help solve problems for those on the street, or take to the air with stunt jumps that are scattered all over the city.
- Control your own fate - Throughout the game choice moments will arrive causing you to make a decision that will affect relationships and money.
Multiplayer
Give Niko a rest and create your own multiplayer "hero." GTA has added multiplayer modes allowing you to take your creation out to play online in competitive, co-op, and free form modes. Competitive mode has you fighting against the cops, jacking cars, or racing to finish odd jobs. Co-op challenges you and your friends with various tasks including Hangman's NOOSE where you are responsible for escorting a wanted kingpin to a safe extraction point. Freeform lets you and 15 others lose on Liberty City. Use this mode to hit up the bar and play virtual darts versus each other or head out to the streets and set up your own drag races. If you can dream it, you can do it in Freeform mode. ZiT: We'll Spot The Song For You
When playing Grand Theft Auto IV, if you hear a song that you are interested in buying as an MP3, all you have to do is dial ZiT-555-0100 on your in-game mobile phone and a text message will be sent to you with the name of the artist and the title of the track. The next time you log in at the Rockstar Games Social Club, you will find 30-second previews of all the songs you have ZiT'ed while playing the game. You can add them to your basket there and click to purchase at Amazon MP3, or you can find them all at www.amazon.com/gtamusic.
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 One of the worst games that I have ever laid my hands on. |
| Review Date: March 16, 2010 |
| Reviewer: azezal, |
| Horrible performance compared to other games that look even better than this, having to install a bunch of other crapware just to be able to start it, and online access, just to be able to save your game? Things like that ruin what may have been an enjoyable game, but I will never know, because after all the trouble just to get it running, only to find out that it runs like a snail, on even the lowest settings. My computer has a modern intel quad core, 8 GB of ram, and a radeon HD 5830 and is able to run any other game without a problem. This is just a badly ported game that never should have been made in the first place. Period. |
Awsome
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| Review Date: March 15, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Ivan Palikuca, Originally from Belgrade, Serbia; currently Erie, PA USA |
| I've played this game before and it is awesome, most interesting is that main character is from Balkan (didn't understand is id Bosnia or Serbia) where I come from and also it is amazing how they make it sometime he is talking in Serbian. Beside that graphic is amazing, maybe required some better machine, but it is worth that pleasure... |
Console Port
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| Review Date: March 15, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Vishal Kasliwal, Richmond, VA |
| Don't waste your money on this poor excuse for a console port. Since no code-optimizations have been done, the game looks terrible but requires a powerful system to run. Its not worth it. |
Not the disaster everyone says - works great, tons of fun
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| Review Date: March 4, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Jeffrey S. Larocque, |
This game works great on my PC (pentium d 3.4ghz, 512mb 9600gt, 2gb ram) - I got it as part of the Steam sale for a measly $6.75. It's the best deal I've ever gotten for a game - about 30 hours of play time fairly focused on the main quest, which never once got old. The difficulty was just right, as I thought that having to complete a mission perfectly was more realistic and manageable than mid-mission saves.
Addressing the poor PC optimization, it was greatly enhanced by a recent patch, which means if you haven't gotten it yet and you have even a mid-end PC you'll be able to run it fine, though the CPU is still without a doubt the deciding factor for graphics settings. I'd say if you have anything less than my PC, upgrade it first (don't even bother with a single core CPU), but even with my outdated hardware it runs on ~15 view distance, 20 detail view with medium textures, just a bit less than the console settings.
However, it puzzles me as to why Rockstar released this patch several months after the game actually came out, which screwed over everyone who actually paid full price. I can just say if you're a die-hard PC user who hasn't played it yet, you're lucky, so play through it just in time to get Episodes from Liberty City later this month! |
VERY GOOD
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| Review Date: February 23, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Kazbek Yandarov, San Diego,CA |
Just like it states in other comments BEFORE BUY IT, MAKE SURE YOUR COMPUTER CAN HANDLE THIS GAME !!! Everything ELSE!!! VERY NICE Graphics and increbidly realistic. MUST HAVE.
Thank you Amazon as well. |
Annoying installation, but fun game!
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| Review Date: February 23, 2010 |
| Reviewer: T. H. Johnson, |
I held off buying this game because of the bad reviews, however I figured that since I already have Windows Live and did not mind the SecureRom deal the bad reviews shouldn't hinder me. However, I understand the bad reviews when it comes to the installation. Even though I had Windows Live for years I still had a hard time signing in and getting everything straight. I had to register for the social club although I have no intention on using it, I then had to register for Xbox Live for some reason I really don't care about. Then I kept getting asked to do this gamer tag thing. All I want to do is play the game on my own so I wish these programs were optional.
It takes a few minutes to get the game running because I have to log in to Social club, but I guess it's no different than having to sign in on an MMO. However, exiting the game takes forever! I click quit and the screen goes black and takes several minutes before the game finally shuts off completely and I have my computer back. With the installation, never ending registrations to stuff I don't care about, the log in and long log outs aside. Once I actually get in the game to play it's nothing but a fun ride, the graphics are great, everything feels realistic. I'm using an Xbox 360 controller so it's hard for me to make Nico run or walk without him zigzagging all over the place, which is extremely annoying. Maybe I can get in options and do something about that. otherwise it's a really great game, but the installation is a pain in the rear even when you have Windows Live. So get the game and make yourself a cup of coffee or something so you don't end up pulling your hair out when you get prompted to register to yet another program. |
A great game ported horribly
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| Review Date: February 21, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Austin C., Roswell, GA, USA. |
This is a great example of what not to do when porting a game. First off you are REQUIRED to have both live and Rockstar Social installed on your system in order to run this game even the single player requires this.
Secondly the team in charge of the porter should be fired immediately. The port looks horrible even on a great system the textures and the way the game engine handles view distances and rendering just plain sucks. Often far away objects like cars and buildings are blurry and when you get closer the shadows look horrible. Its a giant resource hog, it just doesn't make use of your GPU, CPU or RAM very efficiently. It would appear that when it was time for the team in charge of porting the game to fine tune the port, they simply decided to go out for lunch instead.
The game is a buggy mess. It still crashes, even after all 3 patches! The game will just freeze up and crash to desktop. Their are a series of graphics bugs as well. Often shadows will not be rendered properly. Also the game will occasionally corrupt saved games. This has happened to me twice! Occasionally trigged events wont occur. Such as side mission where you have to get in a cop car and go kill some people at one location. I went to that location and low and behold the game never spawned them. Sometimes texts your supposed to get from other characters just don't come. The only way I found to fix this is to reload the game to a previous save and do what ever action will trigger the text to come, and keep doing this till it comes.
But despite these problems the game is a heck of a lot of fun! Its the gameplay that GTA famous. And this game keeps it going! The writing is funny as anything and you will have you laughing out loud again and again. The soundtrack is excellent! The game was obviously made with a lot of care which makes the PC port so tragic. The city is very detailed. The game just emits so much atmosphere! When the missions work they really are a lot of fun.
The only question is are you willing to fight with this game to play it? My advice would be not to buy this at full MSRP but wait for a sale where the game is dirt cheap then buy it. I can't believe I'm about to say this. But if you own a PS3 or 360 to buy it on one of those platforms. I believe with this begin the only exception I know of that games should be played on a PC but this port is so badly done that you will love it on a console. |
Grand Theft Auto 4
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| Review Date: February 10, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Stephen Freeman, Winston Salem, NC |
| Awesome game. NOT FOR KIDS!! Be a good parent, enjoy the game, but do not be lazy and allow your children to play this game. The mature subject matter is a constant theme in this game. Enjoy! |
Installation HELL
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| Review Date: February 7, 2010 |
| Reviewer: K. Jaros, Akron, OH |
I've played every GTA game out there so far. I bought GTA 4 for XBOX360, but was anxiously waiting for the PC version since I am not a big fan of playing FPS games without a mouse. Anyway, my excitement turned quickly into anger and I stopped short of throwing the installation DVD's in my shredder (it may still happen).
(1) Installation is SLOW. I am not sure what the hell the thing is doing, but I had plenty of time to have dinner and take a bath while this thing was installing.
(2) The game requires you to go through endless hoops. First it installs the mandatory Rockstar Games Social Club DRM bloatware. Then the game. Then Games for Windows Live. But it does not stop there. When you first load it, it will tell you that a patch is available and to download it. I downloaded the patch from the Rockstar website, only to find out it is a .rar compressed file. Windows doesn't support .rar files out of the box. So I need to install WinRAR, just to unpack a patch for this game. Once done with the patching, I though I could finally enjoy the game. WRONG. Now Games for Windows Live needed an update. Then I needed to create a Games for Windows Live account, so I can save the game. Hours after I started installing this game, I was finally ready to play it.
(3) That's when I realized this game is a poorly written console port. Changing the settings is particularly awkward as the menus have been optimized for TV. Due to a huge font, mapping your own keys is a pain. Endless scrolling and the computer responds to commands like a console (i.e. SLOWLY), not instantly like a PC. Performance was acceptable on my computer (quad core CPU, 1GB Radeon 4870, but I noticed some screen distortion and artifacts appearing on the screen from time to time.
Overall, I think I am going to uninstall this game pretty soon. I am sick of being nagged by it every single time I launch it to register for Rockstar Games Social Club (if you don't want the Social Club, you have to click through three screens to skip it). I am sick of having to run Social Club AND run and log in to Games for Windows Live to play the game. I am sick of Rockstar installing the Social Club application on your system that launches on windows startup and is required for the game to work. SecuROM seems like the least of all these evils.
What happened to the time when you could just pop in a CD or DVD, install a game, and be ready to play within minutes? I hardly ever play GTA 4 now because I don't feel like going through multiple log-in procedures just to play the game. I would have a different opinion of the Social Club and Games for Windows Live Application if they added anything to the game, besides nagging for you to log in. But they don't even help you patch the game. They do publish your game stats to everyone, but why would I even want that? |
Greatest GTA title as of yet
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| Review Date: February 3, 2010 |
| Reviewer: A. Geyster, |
| Surpasses all other GTA titles with ease! Your computer may not be able to handle the high quality textures (as mine doesnt) but i am still able to play it on lower graphic settings so no complaints here. ENJOY IT!!!! |
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