TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

No-One Drove In New York, There Was Too Much Traffic

This one goes out to anyone who ‘cannot wait’. I will help you wait.

Everything that bothers me in GTA IV is a case of the game trying to guess what a I want to do, and failing bizarrely in some really easy cases.

Please look in the direction I am travelling. For a game about cars, you’d think this would have come up. But no, every time I turn a corner, reverse, or stop reversing and drive forwards, I’m left barreling forth blindfold into heavy, cop-ridden traffic. Is it hard to detect which direction I’m travelling? Is it hard to move the camera? Is it unimportant to see what you’re about to drive into? Are cornering, stopping and changing directions quirky edge-cases you hadn’t considered? What is unusual about the way I’m playing that makes this a problem for me?

Please get in the car I am closest to and facing when I press the ‘get in car’ button. This is my cause of death around sixty percent of the time. I’m knocked from my vehicle, I run back to it under a hail of gunfire, and standing in front the door, physically touching the car and facing the drivers seat into which I wish to get, pressing the ‘get in car’ button causes Niko Bellic to turn around 180 degrees, run ten meters across a busy highway, open the door of an ice-cream van, punch the refreshment vendor inside, drag him from his lofty perch and then fall on top of him as the thirtieth bullet he’s taken during this procedure strikes his last functioning organ.

Please target the enemy I am looking directly at when I press the ‘target enemy’ button. Here’s how you can tell which one I mean: if I fired without targeting, which would require me to hold a trigger in some kind of elusive quantum state between off and on, my bullets would hit this guy. That guy. That is the guy that I mean, the guy I am facing and pointing my gun at. And who, by the way, is pointing a gun at me and about to fire, so let’s hustle a little here.

But just to be absolutely clear, I’ll detail some examples of who I do not mean. I do not mean the civilian driving a van in the opposite direction three lanes over. I don’t mean the other gunman fifty feet away and forty degrees to my left, who is completely invisible to me as he has fully concealed himself behind a concrete pillar. I definitely don’t mean the cop, who currently only wants me for a mild traffic misdemeanour and has no intention of firing at me or calling for backup unless I do something utterly, inexcusably, surreally moronic like turn around and shoot him six times in the pancreas instead of defending myself against the armed drug dealer who’s about to murder me.

Please leave cover when I press the ‘leave cover’ button, the ‘jump’ button or attempt to run, as fast as I can, away from cover. This is where I’m stuck right now. A mission where I get to walk freely around a venue before choosing my moment to attack three people within it. Once attacked, they flee.

The first time I got that far, I’d taken cover behind a wall, and urgently needed to abandon my hole-up-and-let-them-come approach for a run-after-them-and-kill-them ploy. My instinct was to move in the direction I wanted to run away from this wall, hammering the sprint button. This caused me to tango stylishly up and down the wall with my back to it, three times.

Thinking remarkably logically for the circumstances, I tried pressing the ‘take cover’ button, which I hoped might have become a ‘leave cover’ button. Niko span round to face a locked door on an adjacent wall and hurled himself at it, rolling impressively and then gluing himself to it with the same adhesive I was already wrestling with.

By this stage three different men were firing on me not two metres away, but I couldn’t fire back because every attempt to leave cover reset my aim to be parallel to the wall I was stuck to. Clearly the Machiavellian club owner had taken the precaution of coating his walls with a sort of fly paper for gangsters; once touched, forever ensared.

After trying the imagined ‘leave cover’ button two more times, thrashing Niko wildly around in his sticky prison, I resorted to the ‘jump’ button. He left cover, faced the wall, and took a giant leap directly into it, sliding nonsensically down its surface and taking a full second to recover to normal stature. I should say ‘at least a full second’, since at that point, yet again, the last healthy centimeter of me was shot off.

Seriously, I’m asking: is there a button to leave cover? Everything I try works when I’ve glued myself to a plain wall in a sleepy street, but in a tight backroom full of gangsters, every button initiates equally unhelpful, time-consuming actions that leave me facing the wrong way or adhered to the wrong thing. Until I find one that doesn’t, I’m never touching the cover system again.

There are other failures, the usual GTA stuff: your moron friend ran out into enemy gunfire and died, mission failed. The cutscene ended with you standing dumbly in the open with four armed drug dealers firing at you, mission failed. You fell slightly behind a fleeing criminal on a straight road with no exits, mission failed. You failed the mission, mission failed and you have to return to your contact, then come back here, then do the three other stages of the mission you’ve already completed successfully three times, then when you complete this part of it using the foreknowledge you gained last time, we’ll suddenly introduce a new arbitrary failure state you couldn’t have prepared for and you’ll have to start again.

But that stuff I can forgive – it’s all about the missions, each of which is finite and most of which are optional. And all could be fixed with a simple ‘skip mission’ option after two failures (or even a cheat – are there any?). The improvements GTA IV makes to the formula more than compensate for the series’ traditional failings, it’s only the infinitely recurring control problems that can’t be ignored. Talking about those improvements would probably help dispel the impression that I loathe the game, but unfortunately I’m out of terrible out-of-focus photos of a low-res screen to punctuate this text, so that’ll have to be another post.

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