I can finally say I have played/completed 3 GTA games: GTA1, San Andreas, and now Grand Theft Auto 4. Not only that, I have played it to 100% completion! It only took 82 hours of my life away but it was fun. I started playing it on a whim at the start of April and was quickly hooked. There was an achievement for beating the main story in less than 30 hours and I cleared that by a mile so that’s kind of what set me off and doing the rest of the (more often than not) tedious Rockstar achievements. I’ve done it before with many games including Rockstar games like LA Noire, but here we go again.
The actual plot/setting
Former Yugoslav War veteran Niko Bellic arrives in Liberty City. He helps his hapless cousin Roman with his taxi business. Hilarity ensues as Roman has an off-screen gambling problem so Niko must protect his cousin from the Russian mob. After being chased across the island at one point Niko meets an extended cast of characters and becomes embroiled in a diamond heist gone wrong. He must put this right as well as reconcile with his past, as some of his former war buddies appear in Liberty City and one of them had betrayed and left a bunch of his friends and neighbours to die.
Liberty City Blues - it’s fucking grey the whole time. You will wake up in one of your various apartments/safehouses and it will seem like it’s bright outside and as soon as you hit the streets it goes grey/brown. Yes this reflects Niko’s depression and it’s brilliant and all that good stuff but it made it hard to see sometimes. I’m not sure if it was easier to see at day or at night in-game.
It’s GTA so everything is a little fucked up (or a lot) and there’s lots of probably somewhat dated and cheesy edgy humour, you know what I mean all the naming conventions for places/people/things being dirty jokes and puns.
Liberty City itself feels quite small - maybe it’s just because I’m used to bombing across it from one side to another in cars but I missed the range of terrain (deserts, hillbilly countrysides) that San Andreas and even GTA5 had when I played that briefly. It all looks the same - concrete jungle. There are slight subtle differences, the middle island is more downtown Manhattan-esque, the last island is a bit more like New Jersey apparently but you’d be forgiven for not really noticing much difference.
Music
Honestly I was not in love with the radio tracks in this game! I very quickly figured out you could upload your own mp3 files and listen to them on Independence FM. I did that first with Fleetwood Mac and later with Florence + The Machine and that got me through for a good while. For the latter 50 hours of achievement hunting I largely muted the game music and listened to podcasts, which was nice too. I enjoyed the few South-Eastern/Eastern European musical leitmotifs or whatever that would play whenever Niko completed a mission and whatnot.
Characters
Niko is one of the best protagonists ever. CJ was fun as he would react in horror to the various insane things going on but would also participate in the insanity. Niko was a former soldier so would take a lot of things in his stride and he was just so chill with everyone, like he would instantly befriend and get on with every mission-giver you’d come across. Some people never liked him but most would be won over by his easy-going charm and impeccable track record of getting shit done. He’s also probably the most capable character right out of the gate, openly stating he hasn’t flown helicopters since the war and so on.
The various friends calling/phone mechanic is OKAY like people who often criticise Niko’s cousin Roman for constantly begging to go bowling in the middle of you exploring the map. This happened to me and I will detail in a later section. I just kept all the various friends sweet by doing missions for them and in quick time. They didn’t have enough time to be mad at me because I would have already started another mission for someone else and they can’t call you in the middle of a mission. It happens once or twice as a joke (“I’m busy driving a truck full of explosives, Roman - I can’t go to a strip club!” but it was not a problem for me in the first 30 hours or less of main game playing.
So there are a bunch of people who become Niko’s friends - his cousin Roman obviously, Patrick McReary, Dwayne (if you let him live, I did), Brucie, Lil’ Jacob (such a cool guy). All are colourful enough and interesting and actually feel more like friends as opposed to CJ’s motley crew in San Andreas. They will occasionally call or text to meet up and get upset with you if you decline and even more so if you ignore them completely. More on all this below.
The enemies… a lot of them start out as clear enemies or otherwise allies who give you missions and inevitably betray you. Nothing particularly memorable here, they have nothing on Tenpenny and the final mission is somewhat anticlimactic (I chose Revenge). Compared to raiding Big Smoke’s Crack Palace, burning it down and then chasing Tenpenny in a fire truck as far as where it all began in the hood… it was bleh. I moved onto achievement hunting mode pretty damn quickly.
Oh and there is a girlfriend/dating system too but it was just not worth unlocking the 5 different girlfriends or whatever. I had two from the main plot, both of which ended tragically and the internet stalker girl who I routinely ignored the texts of but she seemed to love that. They each have special abilities you can get but I never had that much trouble evading the cops or staying healthy so I didn’t bother. Plus it didn’t count for 100%.
Gameplay
Driving cars was so painful initially. Like I remember it being turgid and infamously so but my gods it took some getting used to. In fairness I got used to it pretty fast, enough for government work but by the end of my 80+ hours, month-long playthrough I was a pretty damn good driver with WASD. I initially changed the keyboard layout so the handbrake was also right mouse button but that clashed with the aiming of guns so it had to go back to the space bar, which is fine. Bikes were fairly untenable however, the slightest bump and you would go flying often fatally so, which I guess is realistic but I missed how in San Andreas you could have really high driving skills to mitigate all of this reality.
Cover system/shooting - there is an auto-aim mechanic but I’m not sure how useful it was - it was often just easier to tweak the mouse slightly up, get one good pistol shot to the head and now they’re dead. There is a Gears of War style cover system being pushed in this game but I more often than not charged into every situation and walked around behind my iron sights gunning down baddies. It was a lot quicker and usually paid off. I was helplessly gunned down a few times but nothing too bad. I have it on record I failed missions 6 times, most of which were me dying to bullets. Once or twice a chase ended badly and in the final mission annoyingly my helicopter going down landed in the water not on the Statue of Liberty Island.
Guns - I would have to check my in-game stats again but I think my favourite gun overall were the SMGs. The pistol handled well and as above you could headshot any enemy once and win. The AK/M4 assault rifles were also excellent. The sniper rifles were good but provoked enemies if you pointed it in their direction on missions, even if they were a mile away they would run for cover which kind of defeated the point. RPGs behave ‘realistically’ and bounce around and whatnot so weren’t always reliable but every now and then a gang would spawn in a tight alleyway and you could one-shot them by making sure to shoot a wall behind them. Grenades… I wanted to love them but more often than not they were useless. Also a total aside but the helicopter machine guns were completely useless. The wobbly-ass numpad controls combined with the actual guns being on LMB just…. Didn’t work for me, brother.
Helicopters/boats - as above just a word on them, the boats are slow and not super fun to pilot much like many of the cars. Thankfully they were serviceable enough for the couple of missions they were essential in. Helicopters weren’t bad, I used them to get around Liberty City a lot more in the postgame achievement hunting. I certainly missed being able to hop in a plane like in San Andreas but it was fine.
Computers/phone/2008 - much like the pagers/phone boxes in GTA1 there is a lot of charm to having to go to internet cafes sometimes and use a ‘dumb phone’ constantly. It was fun having to go to an internet cafe and check emails for certain missions:
Achievement Hunting 50+ hours
This is the meat of the essay here. As I said above, I unlocked the ‘beat the game in less than 30 hours’ achievement so I figured that was the main missable achievement. But I was committed so I just kept going. At time of writing, I have every single GTA4 achievement bar one, 39/40, 39/55 overall (with DLCs). I have not managed to get 3 strikes in a row in bowling but I have to draw the line somewhere. I will go back and do the Episodes from Liberty City and The Ballad of Gay Tony (two GTA4 DLCs which have the remaining 15 achievements). I will also go back at some point and do a load more bowling and somehow wrangle the 3 strikes. Best I have gotten is 2 in a row, I’m just sick of GTA4!
Me keeping track. So I will have to look at the screenshots to figure out an order to this chaos. 387 of them to sift through, oh joy!
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Sidenote while I'm looking at it, you get 250,000 for the Diamond Heist mission, then 250,000 dollars for beating the 'final' mission (500,000 if you don't pick Revenge like I did). I was sitting pretty around 600,000 but after various deaths and buying weapons for manhunts/assassinations etc I was back down to about 300,000, then I did all 30 of the car thefts which brought me back up to over 500,000. Then after dying various times to stunt jumps and bullshit at the end I was back down to 300,000 or so. I'd love to have a quarter of a million in my current account but was interesting.
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According to my diary I started it on April 9th, reached the Diamond Heist missions by the 11th. Bit of a break there and was almost finished it on the 15th. Beat it on the night of the 16th so maybe 5 sessions to complete the game in less than 30 hours. Credits rolled:
Then I completed all 30 of the manhunts:
I got a 180 in darts:
I flew a helicopter under every bridge:
I did every helicopter tour:
All 9 assassination missions:
I countered 10 melees in 4 minutes (pic semi-unrelated, this is the exact location I got it, the helitour pad):
I cleared the high score of QUB3D in like 5 attempts:
And got 10/30 cars stolen for Brucie's friend Stevie in one night the 16th of April:
Oh somewhere along the line you have to blow up 10 vehicles in 10 seconds, I just used a car bomb and the bike shop:
On the 17th I delivered all 10 of Lil Jacob's packages:
I maxed out the relationships with Packie and Brucie for their special abilities (this will come up later) and then all of the friends maxed for the Liberty City (5) friends achievements.
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On the 19th I found all of the Strangers and killed 20 more criminals. Missed out on 6 star survival for 5 minutes (One Man Army) when a cop managed to shotgun me behind a dumpster. Oh well!
I got it another time by going to the banned website, killed some people and then flying around in a helicopter - this ain't San Andreas, the cops can't handle that:
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On the 21st I found the remaining 20 cars for Stevie (took forever):
I managed to roll a car 5 times at the airport (pic unrelated):
And beat a random guy at pool:
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On the 22nd I won all 20 of Brucie's races in a row, never lost a race. Also did half of the 50 stunt jumps. Annoying in some places to stick the landing properly.
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On the 23rd of April I took stock - 4 stunt jumps left to do, 200 pigeons, win a (full) game of bowling, some friend activites (you have to take 3 different friends out for various different activities once each). Did the remaining stunt jumps here and I had missed one somehow - I started doing them backwards from 50, turns out I had missed #33. This would become a theme.
I killed the first 20/200 pigeons. Or so I thought.
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I should say the whole month of April I also cleared 2 coderunner assignments worth 20% of one module, a database project worth 50% of another and various friend, exercise and family commitments in April. Not all that time was spent playing GTA4!
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On the 24th of April I cleared pigeons #21 to #144 done. It said 56 left so I believed that... I kept notes the whole time and used a helicopter to go back and get awkward ones around here.
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On the 25th I killed a few more pigeons and didn't play again until the 27th - I was missing a couple of pigeons by the time I got to #200. I went back in a helicopter and checked the very first one, #1, at the pier in 'Firefly Island' - I had it noted as 'already got?' because I didn't see it first time. Turns out it was on the beach below the pier! The other I could not figure out so managed to find an application that you upload your save file to and it shows you exactly on the map where it's missing. It was #179, on some shipping crates. I had bypassed it as awkward the first time but very happily blew it up with an RPG sight unseen second time around. I was preparing to go back do them all again! Achievement popped a moment later.
I was on 96.66% completion... I went back to doing friend activities on the 28th. I spent several hours on that, annoyingly enough, I kept good notes but maybe I was fucking up somewhere. After a few more activites with Patrick, Brucie and Lil Jacob it jumped up to 98.33% completion. What was possibly left? I scoured the net a bit and someone very helpfully posted that is indicative of the friend activity being the last thing. It's worth 10% completion and it's divided 6 ways, so the remaining 1.6666% or whatever was due to the actual standing with the friends. I had been blowing off my various friends while doing various stunt jumps and pigeon hunting so I went from being the best friend ever (90-100% friendship) on the 17th of April to the worst by the 27th of April. If they called me I would instantly hit RMB and end the call for a relationship hit. Babies. So anyway I had to get Patrick BACK to 75% relationship and the Key to the City 100% completion achievement popped. I was close after all of the bowling and darts etc but yeah. I went back to one of my houses and saved the game for the last time in a while. No more GTA4 for me for a while!
