written by dawnclover

Side-note by admin: First of all, I’m really sorry about the absence these 2 days, if you read the previous post you know I had internet problems, and I’m the only one who can post in this blog. Yes, the articles are written by dawnclover, but I’m the one posting them. Well, things look stable now and we can continue our special! I’m off, hope you like the articles.

GTA4 is that kind of game that everytime you play you find something new and makes your jaw drop. Today, going around crazy in the city I noticed that everytime I runover a pedestrian, the car gets stained with blood, and the blood stays there. In one of my plays I had my car so filled with blood everywhere it was nasty, really awesome. Also, the city is a lot more destructable now, you can run-through park benches, fences, eletrical posts (this one is not actually new), boxes (ditto), mail posts, etc etc etc! There are times that I’m going so fast and can’t stop and think “oh crap, I’m gonna crash into that fence and the cops will get me” and crash! It’s destructable and I continue my escape. Also, car crashes are awesome and pretty realistic. I love the way the cars get smashed, they look like they are real and if you hit somewhere, the part that hit will be damaged realisticaly.

Another thing to add to the realism is that, if you hit let’s see, a tree for example, with the correct angle and speed, Niko might be thrown out of the front car window! This doesn’t happen always, so don’t think it will be a bother, no, it’s really awesome.

The menu is pretty similar to the other Grand Theft Auto games, you press start and the menu pops up with the city map in dispay, wich you can choose by pressing X and choose your next destiny and the GPS will do the rest of the job. You can toggle the legend on or off if you want too. Then you have the ‘Brief’ menu, as you might know, if you miss some information the game gave you recently, you can come here and read it again. Very useful. Then, the adored (at least by me) Stats. Love those things, sometimes I lose myself for minutes just reading these. This time there are a lot more in different categories. They are:
* General
* Crimes
* Vehicles
* Money
* Player
* Combat
* Score
* Misc.
* Network

I’m not gonna go through the trouble of commenting on each one since it’s not difficult to imagine what these have. Ok, let’s keep going. Next we have ‘Controls’. Here you can, of course, change the controls (you can toggle the SIXAXIS on or off here for each different use). Then we have ‘Audio’. Here you can change the effects / music volume, change your radio station (the chat stations are now in a different category), toggle the GPS audio on/off/on for selected cars and the audio output (mono/stereo) . Next to this we have ‘Display’ where you can configure the brightness, contrast, saturation of the game (I spent a little time on these to get the perfect image, the game was too dark in the default options, and I mean too dark, so I advise you to go through these). Here you can also turn the subtitles, radar, HUD, GPS route, handbrake cam on or off, you can change the weapon target from simple to complex, and you can also change the game language.

The last option in the main menu is ‘Game’, where you can load a saved game, start a new game from scratch and turn autosave on or off. Again, if you’re like me and like to cause mayhem in the city from time to time, before doing that remember to turn the autosave off and save in one of the safehouses before going nuts on the game, or you might lose all your money and weapons. Very useful.

One of the things you’ll notice when playing GTA4 is that the cops are actually easier now (well, depends on the number of the stars – yes the stars are still here, the maximum are six). Imagine you have a 1 or 2 star level, you can easily check the map and get out of the ‘cop area’ (shown in the map) and wait for 10 or 15 seconds until they stop searching for you. Of course if you have 3, 4, 5 or 6 wanted star level you’ll be in big, big trouble.

Don’t forget to keep checking for more GTA4!
Over and out.