Well, whatever. A pretty good game, but kind of can’t compete with the hype. At least now all the fanboys have moved on dry-humping Metal Gear Solid 4.

Also, it’s totally weird how, no matter where you finish a mission, if you turn off the game and start again, you’ll be in the apartment. That’s one way of circumventing driving all the way back across town again, but it’s also kind of out of keeping with the game’s otherwise very realistic setting.

And I second Jason’s comment about the main vs. side missions. I realize the appeal of the game for many is its open-endedness, but this is my first GTA game, and I’m used to a far more linear game progression. Maybe this a problem for me rather than in the game design, but it’s confusing when you’re driving around and trying to figure “Okay, where the hell do I go next?”

But I do think that just tooling around in the city in multiplayer is a hell of a lot of fun, and I look forward to doing some more of that. And agree that they ought to release more co-op missions.

So, in a rare display of numerical ranking, I hereby proclaim this game an 8.5/10. Here are some things that would need to be different for it to be closer to 10:

• Quickly loads into main menu where multiplayer can be selected directly (rather than slowly loading directly into single player)
• Single player mode subtly makes it clearer which missions are part of the central storyline, versus those that are optional
• Quick save option, or at least more frequent checkpoints (not necessarily even autosaves!)
• In the future, downloadable content offering more cooperative multiplayer missions (which they may be doing for all I know, and which would indeed raise my score for it)

It’s a great game! Just not a 10/10. I maintain that any game that has features you would describe as a “pain in the ass” (especially something you do as frequently as “quitting”) is, quite simply, broken in some way.

As for the quick saves, having the girl die sucks. Sometimes it happens. I’m amazed they let her die and I’m curious how that affects the rest of the game. However, I think you’re missing the point on making it difficult to save. They do an auto save after every missions, and there isn’t a lot to be done between missions. What this creates is a situation where you’re discouraged from doing a save/replay strategy. You play the game and the pieces land where they will. If you’re anal about getting a ‘perfect’ game, you’re going to pay for it with lots of wasted time. It wrecks the storytelling when you can go back and do things like that.

It makes quitting a pain in the ass, but if you’ve completed a mission, even a side one, recently, you can just walk away and use the autosave.

Anyway, just my $0.02. I really love the game, but I’ve always loved the GTA games. It’s not a game-changer like GTA 3, but it’s a much better realization of what they’ve been trying to accomplish with the series.

Don’t expect a deep story, but expect a pretty good one. Like a summer popcorn action movie. It’ll be fun and funny and have some really really cynical commentary in there.