Grand Theft Auto IV multi-player: sniping from the Empire State Building

Lots of other great sites have detailed "Grand Theft Auto IV's" multi-player, so I'm not going to go too in-depth. But I did get an opportunity to play for about an hour during my visit to Rockstar last week (which will be turning into what I hope will be an in-depth package for Variety in a week or two) and I have a few thoughts I wanted to be sure and note here:

-I counted at least 14 different multi-player modes, though I only got to play 4 of them. I think I agreed not to list all the titles, but suffice to say they appear to range from standard deathmatches to car races to cops vs. crooks to ones that involve controlling territory and ones that actually focus on Hillary Clinton's favorite "GTA" activity: carjacking.

-The coolest moment by far: Starting a team deathmatch on "GTA IV's" equivalent of Liberty island, hopping into a helicopter with my teammates (far more experienced Rockstar employees) and taking the action all the way up to the top of a skyscraper near the Empire State Building. One person actually hopped off the chopper onto the Empire State Building and was sniping from there.

The point: the fact that "GTA IV" doesn't limit multi-player to small maps from the overall game, but uses all of Liberty City, allows for crazy variations. Of course, if you're playing with fewer than 16 people, the ability to run all the way around that relatively large map could be frustrating. You have to be careful about how you design your games. Luckily, "GTA IV" seems to allow lots of customization in designing the multi-player matches.

-Also awesome: Jumping in a boat and being chased by somebody else who's in a helicopter.

-I fell behind in a race and once I realized I wasn't going to win, I decided to have fun f*cking with everyone else. So I piled up a few cars at a bottleneck in the course, climbed up to a point over the the bottleneck, and started shooting at my opponents as they got stuck and tried to work their way around. Maybe not the most gentlemanly way to play, but great fun.

-There's only a few character customization options, but I played as a woman, just to shake things up (no surprise, the match with Rockstar employees and another journalist was a total sausage fest). There's something very unusual and cool about seeing a woman in "GTA." One who's not a hooker, that is.

-The ranking system is based on collecting money, which you get for achieving various goals in the games.  But you don't just get money for killing somebody. After you kill them, they leave money on the ground and you have to go collect it. And obviously other people can collect it too. I'm not too sure how I feel about that. It fits the "GTA" aesthetic, but picking up items to get rewards feels a little old-fashioned compared to all the detailed and various rewards -- sometimes to the point of absurdity -- in "Call of Duty 4" or "Rainbow Six Vegas 2."

-Conclusion: There's a lot I still don't know, but based on my hour of playing, I was comfortable enough to e-mail my list of friends I play Xbox Live with (which lately has been all "CoD 4") and let them know: "'GTA IV' is going to be our game from April 29 until at least the fall."

(thanks to Kotaku for the image)