Tea Leaves

Here are some things I hate about the Grand Theft Auto games, in no particular order.

• The stupid hip-sway on all the female models makes me embarassed to be seen playing the game. It’s like the graphical assets were created by a 12 year old British public school boy who had never actually seen a female. The most basic grounding in anatomy would tell you that if a hip moves like that, it must have been broken.
• Worst. Aiming. Ever. Even worse than in Metal Gear Stupid.
• Typical braindead broken console save point implementation. Yet more proof that mediocrity is the gold standard in the videogame market.
• In a similar vein, the amount of busywork required when you fail a mission in order to retry it is maddening.
• I think the missions are puerile, sophomoric, and stupid. But that’s OK! Because I can explore this huge virtual world and ignore the missions. Except I can’t, because two-thirds of the game is locked until I do “enough” of the Beavis-and-Butthead type missions.
• Did I mention how idiotic the save point implementation was? I can’t remember, because I just saved my game and the save point system is so hideously awful that it has given me brain damage.
• “We’re going to produce a game where you can pick up a hooker, have sex with her, and then beat her to death with a club to get your money back, but we’ll cave to public pressure and remove mention of Haitians from the game, because we don’t want to be racist against Haitians. However, in the interests of free speech, we will maintain all the racial slurs against Jews, Blacks, Italians, and Cubans.”

Things I like:

• Nice work on the soundtracks, especially the radio DJs, who manage to make me laugh even when they’re offending me.
• In Vice City, I like the motorcycles a lot. The motorcycles might be the only reason I actually try to play the game every so often.

That’s about it, I think.