Grand Theft Auto IV: Early Review

Ben Fritz reviews the new Grand Theft Auto game. He likes it---a lot. My vidgame experience is strictly throwing things in the cave of the Mountain King, trying to survive the Oregon Trail, noodling around on the island in Myst and Riven, and playing with various iterations of The Sims. In other words, I am a girl.

Boys however are trading in their old games, throwing yard sales and hectoring their parents to get their hands on this bloody game, which actually threatens to deflate this weekend's b.o. talleys.

Here's some of the review:

"Grand Theft Auto IV” marks a huge leap forward for videogames as an immersive experience while making little more than a few tweaks to the ultra-successful franchise's formula. The technological prowess and artistic detail are so phenomenal and the sheer amount of content is so staggeringly deep that players will find themselves drawn into Liberty City like no other fictional place. Such deep immersion sometimes highlights the flaws in “Grand Theft Auto’s” well-worn formula, but that will be little more than an asterisk for the millions of gamers sure to be carjacking their way through “GTA IV” for a long, long time to come.

UPDATE: The NYT put its Grand Theft Auto IV review on the front page of its arts section. So did the LAT. And while LAT op ed columnist Tim Rutten admits the game is a "work of genius," he is dismayed by this media acceptance of "an art form in search of an artist."

Comments

[Jandy]

Hey, I'm a girl and I was in the midnight line for GTA IV (not the only one, either). Don't lump all girls into the casual/adventure gamer category; there are a lot of us willing to give the boys a run for their money.

[Anne thompson]

glad to hear it! it may be that because my own daughter wasn't into this stuff, I am relatively clueless...