P&B Ranks: The Top 42 Video Games of All-Time

[Stellaboz]

Tifa was perfect in it, no idea what the fuss is.

[NotThePars]

38 minutes ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

You missed my comments about your number 1 

I did see them I just don't think I'm the best person to ask as I've only played 12 hours of VII. Tbh, I think you could go either way depending on how much you know about the original. Some people were really precious about the way they f**k with the established lore but also some of the musical cues and character moments might hit more if you play the previous game. I feel the game is enough of a touchstone in most gamer's lives that all the main beats will be familiar.

 

[Miguel Sanchez]

15 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

 I feel the game is enough of a touchstone in most gamer's lives that all the main beats will be familiar.

the sort of shade that can only be thrown at someone who knows the guy on the box is called Cloud and literally nothing else about the game

[NotThePars]

58 minutes ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

the sort of shade that can only be thrown at someone who knows the guy on the box is called Cloud and literally nothing else about the game

Aw come on you must know who dies. That's not a major facet of the game although a lot of people do die.

[Miguel Sanchez]

4 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

Aw come on you must know who dies. That's not a major facet of the game although a lot of people do die.

I think when I was watching a Jimquisition about the remake I found out someone dies. No idea who it is or what else happens in the game though.

[Miguel Sanchez]

ALSO TIED IN 40TH WITH 11 POINTS FROM 2 VOTES

 

Game: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Platform: Nintendo 64
Release date: 1998
Gameplay: 

 

User comments: "My first Zelda game and what a start! Genuinely jaw dropping stuff both in the look and scale. Challenging and innovative."

Poll-maker comments: The wikipedia article for this is actually quite interesting, or at least detailed: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Wikipedia I've never played a Zelda game, but people who like Nintendo games really like them.

There are also a number of documentaries on youtube you can watch if you want to know more. I'm currently watching this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyUcwsjyd8Q

 

[Homer Thompson]

ALSO TIED IN 40TH WITH 11 POINTS FROM 2 VOTES

 

Game: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Platform: Nintendo 64
Release date: 1998
Gameplay: 
 
[/url] User comments: "My first Zelda game and what a start! Genuinely jaw dropping stuff both in the look and scale. Challenging and innovative."
Poll-maker comments: The wikipedia article for this is actually quite interesting, or at least detailed: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Wikipedia I've never played a Zelda game, but people who like Nintendo games really like them.
There are also a number of documentaries on youtube you can watch if you want to know more. I'm currently watching this one: 

 

Step forward my ocarina brother *opens arms *

[Ira Gaines]

Absolutely wonderful game.

[madwullie]

Never really been a console player outwith the PS1, 2, 3 and 4 for the leading football game of the moment and GTA, but I could tell I'd enjoy the Zelda games from the first time I saw footage of them.

Ma two weans are both kitted out with Switches, so I got them the most recent one for my eldest's birthday last year. Must admit I've had more than a few shoats of it once he's been out to bed. 

Edited March 27, 2021 by madwullie

[Gaz]

Aye Ocarina of Time is fantastic. It was remastered for the 3DS and it really is the best way to play it these days.

Wind Waker is still better though

I reckon there will be at least one more Zelda game in the list, probably two.

[Gaz]

9 hours ago, Baptiste Bourgeois said:

OOT is great. Kind of surprised it only got 2 votes. 

Hopefully Majora's Mask isn't higher, as that would be silly. 

I reckon Breath of the Wild and A Link To The Past will be higher.

[Miguel Sanchez]

STILL IN JOINT 44TH WITH 11 POINTS FROM 2 VOTES

Game: Grand Theft Auto IV
Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Release date: 29 April 2008
Gameplay:

 

Zero Punctuation review:

 

User comments: "played this franchise from the original. Sunk most time into this version - first that really came close to realising the potential of what GTA could be."
Poll-maker comments: As mentioned before, this was one of the games I got along with my PS3 in 2008. The day after Rangers lost the UEFA Cup final. I found out Tommy Burns had died by seeing an Evening Times booth from the bus as I went into town to get it. 

Anyway, I've mentioned before that it was also my first Grand Theft Auto game. Of all the open world games I've ever played I'm pretty sure there are three whose worlds I could enter right now and instantly remember every part of - this, Jak II and Red Dead Redemption. I've completed it more times over the years than I'd probably care to remember, and the amount of time spent with it is directly proportionate to how much I think of it. While it has its faults, its place in my own personal gaming history means I'm never going to forget or underplay it, so I think it's worthy of its place. 

To add one final detail about why it's important to me before I hit you with the review you're not going to read - I had always joked about finishing this game's online trophies with an online friend from another forum who I play games with. Doing this in the 2010s was basically a horrible experience. You'd have to put in loads of time for a start, trying to reach 5 million dollars earned. Then you had to win every game mode on offer, which included every race layout. Standard and GTA races. Then you had to beat the actual multi-player missions in under a certain time, which weren't exactly easy. Oh and the whole online platform is a broken, buggy mess, with your progress often not being recorded.

In 2018 I ended up with two and a half straight weeks off work so I stopped joking - we were doing this, now. One of those two and a half weeks happened to see some lovely weather here in the UK. Remember the Beast from the East? I spent that playing IV, with the heating up full blast, on the internet laughing at everyone as the country ground to a halt. It wasn't until later that year when I finally finished the rest of the trophies I needed, earning my 100th platinum trophy and formally ending my focus on PS3 games and allowing me to switch to PS4 full-time. 

Here is the review I wrote of it at the time:

Spoiler

Knowing that I wrote about Grand Theft Auto IV semi-recently (three years ago) and attempted a retrospective review of it then, I'm not sure where to start having played it again. I can't really bring up the fact it was my first Grand Theft Auto. I can't really bring up how much of a nostalgia trip it was because it still felt familiar enough that it didn't feel... well, old. So, here goes nothing.

GTA IV is the story of Niko Bellic, a Serbian who flees some sort of civil war to go and live with his cousin, Roman, in Liberty City. Liberty City is an almost completely accurate replica of New York City, and as Niko's story progresses the development of his character as an immigrant to late 2000's America is played off against his surroundings in a way which is distinctly of its time yet, as I discovered, worryingly prescient a decade later.

Hey! Ten year retrospective! There's my angle.

Anyway, Niko arrives in Liberty City having been promised every possible aspect of the American Dream by Roman. Endless women, sports cars, luxury apartments, exclusive nightclubs, you name it, Roman said he had it. Niko gets off the boat to be greeted by an angular sedan which is also one of the taxi cabs in Roman's business, which operates out of a small warehouse next to the docks. He has a fold-down bed in Roman's cockroach-ridden apartment. And, as he learns about his business, Niko finds that Roman is besotted with his receptionist, who is in turn taken at will by a Russian guy called Vlad in his fifties, in between threatening Roman for money.

So, the American Dream isn't off to a good start. It doesn't get any better in the short-term as Niko does an assortment of oddjobs for Roman and the few friends he's managed to cultivate – a Jamaican pothead who speaks in illegible patois and a manic steroid abuser – for a few hundred dollars at a time. Eventually though after a combination of good fortune and a complete lack of any moral substance Niko has it all – fancy apartments in the rich part of town, hundreds of thousands of dollars and all the clothes he can buy. The system works.

It took me around thirty hours to complete the story on this occasion and while that includes some messing around, the story is extensive and detailed enough to still account for at least twenty-five hours of gameplay for most. The list of characters is long, varied and mostly engaging, as various aspects of modern American life in a metropolitan city like New York are explored. This helps impart a sense of progression as you play through the game, as characters come and go you get a greater sense of Niko is actually achieving something.

For the most part, IV does well to centre this around a small group of central antagonists. Niko struggles against an assortment of people from his homeland who try to blackmail him and sell him out. The only real problem with such a vast range of characters is that it can get lost at times with a sandbox game, never mind one as deep and with as many things to do as IV. You could go hours and multiple missions between one part of the storyline and the next. Then by the time you reach the closing stages of the game and the story is concluded it feels sudden, even though you've been building towards it for a relatively long time.

When IV was first released and reviewed and played by millions, one of the common complaints was the repetitiveness of the missions. Lots of them amount to little more than 'drive to location, shoot people in location,' with the most variation in that being the layout of the location you're shooting in. I realised on this play that this wasn't the complaint I had, however. Rather it's the way these missions don't change, but the motivation for them does. You can turn up at a building early on in the game and have to kill a bunch of people for some local two-bit hard man, and get 500 dollars for it. But later on in the story you're doing the same thing for the Mafia, with no or little material difference in actual gameplay, and you're getting thousands for it. The money itself isn't the problem, it's the implied significance of it. There is some mild variation in some of the later missions – my favourite being the one where you chase a car to a dealership and launch an RPG at it, as hilarity ensues – and the apparent consequences of them are much higher, but what you, the player, do doesn't change. I think this is probably my biggest complaint after playing IV again. There's little sense of achievement when you do the same thing all the time and progress anyway.

Of all the aspects of the game, gameplay is probably the one which has aged the most poorly. Cover-based shooting works best when the controls and the controlled character are responsive. This is rarely the case in IV. In one of the first missions you get an introduction to the shooting mechanics. The game tells you to move the right stick to switch targets when locked on and in cover. This does not work. Or rather, it works one time out of every ten, and only if you pull the stick as sharply as you can. So maybe you stop locking on and move to target a different enemy manually, but this also doesn't work some of the time. This is just about something you can live with if you're in an open arena with a reasonable distance between you and the people shooting you. If you get rushed from different directions by guys with automatic weapons, though? You've no chance.

The weapons are somewhat limited too. They're quite basic, there's two different models of each type – two pistols, two SMG's, two shotguns, etc – with no real difference aside from magazine size. Any automatic weapon is useless if you use it as an automatic weapon. You can get around this most of the time by staying in cover and aiming for headshots, but the level of precision required to do it effectively seems at odds with the pace of the game. You can also use grenades or molotov cocktails, but trying to aim these without blowing yourself up is a complete nightmare.

The vehicle physics are long criticised but honestly, after about ten minutes it feels normal to me. Cars are heavy, but they're easy to control. Sportier cars are more agile, boxes and vans aren't. Nothing unusual. Every motorbike is a disaster, the slightest touch of a kerb or car or lamppost or pedestrian or misplaced pixel will launch you twenty feet in the air, but they're not very common.

In past playthroughs of this I've felt as if the different neighbourhoods and islands of Liberty City are rich and distinctive, serving to make the map feel like a sprawling metropolis with genuinely unique areas. On this occasion, sadly, this isn't the case. Broker and Dukes are great to start with, a more obviously working class area where most of the immigration goes to. As Niko works his way up the crime ladder you see the glitz of Algonquin and then the more industrialised Alderney, so at least the setting mirrors the story's progress even if the gameplay doesn't. The problem is that after you get to Algonquin there's not really much to interact with to make it feel like a dynamic, engaging map. Once you reach Alderney there's barely anything, even the story hardly bothers using this final third of the map. A sandbox is generally as much of a location as the player makes it but with very little incentive to explore a large part of the map it feels hollow.

This isn't to say that Liberty City is boring or forgettable. I'm not sure but I think I've completed it at least five times. If I didn't enjoy driving around, I wouldn't. If you spend time just driving or travelling around you get a real sense of both how deep the city is but also how limited it is by the time of release. If you try and drive to the rules of the road, the NPC cars try and drive through you. I'm not talking about when you're trying to blast over a bridge and they start veering wildly, try stopping at a red light. Cars behind will try to mount you. I realise GTA games aren't really judged by people who drive legally, but I think some of the complaints about driving physics are exacerbated by the roads being an obstacle course. On the other hand, the train/subway actually works and makes the game feel both like a real, immersive environment and a true to life simulation of the world it's trying to replicate. I know the public transport in GTA V wasn't really a thing but here, with trains and taxi cabs, it feels like a living city.

Speaking of V, comparing the graphics of two games released ~five years apart is quite the eye opener. IV's graphics aren't bad, but playing it ten years later the best way I can describe the visual experience is restrained. Like the graphics are the bare minimum to look passable on an HD console while still being functional. Seeing the progress that technology was able to make over that time is really quite breathtaking, and shows you that progress is genuine in a world with increasingly high costs and warped graphical focuses. I suppose if you wait ten years to play everything you won't resent the cost, but that's another argument. One thing the game really gets right is the lighting. I was playing it a few days ago and there was a great sunset as I was looking across the Algonquin bridge at the city. The sky was a deep pink giving way to infinite shades of orange and yellow and for a second I thought of all the enjoyment I'd got over the years travelling around, and it all made sense.

In terms of things the game gets completely wrong, everyone knows what's coming. Random phonecalls – NEEKO EET EEZ YOUR CUZZAN! LET US GO BOWLING! - no. The various characters you end up befriending are pretty much all insufferable. Why it was ever considered a good idea to have them phone you, bug you and make you feel guilty for rejecting them is beyond me. This doesn't increase the immersion, it makes you resent the game. Big problem. It's not really helped by the lack of stuff to do either. You can go bowling, which can be fun. You can play pool, which is impossible and will glitch. You can play darts, which is easy. You can go for food, which is an extension of the 'drive somewhere' mission format. You can go to a strip club or a show, which you can do once and then becomes pointless. The stuff with friends calling you to do stuff is something that feels like it was a great idea when someone came up with it early on in development, only for it to become less and less practical as more stuff went into the game. Sandbox games are what the player makes of them, trying to effectively incite them to do some crap activities isn't a good idea.

An extension of the sense of IV's story progressing despite repetitive missions is found in the characters themselves. There are some occasions where you can make a choice in missions. In fact off the top of my head it's usually giving you a choice to kill one person or someone else. Having played through it a few times I know that there's very little material difference in the outcomes. Like a few areas of the game these aspects feel like a good idea which wasn't, or couldn't, be implemented properly.

The thing about IV which stood out most to me on this occasion was the social commentary. The radio stations play a key role in world building, whether you listen to music or talk stations. By the way, 1979, Goodbye Horses, Cry, Dominion, Edge of Seventeen, they never get old. Listening to talk radio stations however I was amazed at how relevant the aspects of American media being parodied still are today. Although in 2008 the main focus surrounding the US and New York was terrorism, exhibited mainly in the bridges initially being closed and through various references to immigration, a lot of the hysteria and intra-ethnic discrimination holds up. There's a lot of content in this game, and when I say this I mean everything – the missions themselves, the radio stations, the TV shows, the cutscenes, the incidental dialogue you hear from people passing you on the street. If there's one thing Rockstar seem to have been good at in the 7th generation it was creating an entirely immersive world which is a comprehensive facsimile of the time it's attempting to replicate.

Although it doesn't have any direct effect on the game or the story there's also an ongoing election for Governor of the state and hearing references to that on the news is especially pertinent. I suppose it's just sad that what was an exaggeration of contemporary society doesn't feel like it's an exaggeration now. But I feel it's a true testament to the game's main strength that it was actually accurate. Of course, it's always hilarious.

The last time I played this game it was the oldest GTA I'd played. I've since played San Andreas on the PS3 and from what I remember there were a lot of similarities to IV in terms of the world the game took place in. Distinctive from area to area, a story centred around a genuine issue of social sensitivity, lots of things to do officially and in terms of exploration and finding your own fun. Considering IV now, I think I can just about separate my nostalgia-ridden memories and an objective, serious analysis of the things going on. The game is a supreme technical achievement of its time, with a near unparalleled sense of environmental immersion owing to a whole host of reasons. While you can find some shallowness in areas, it would take upwards of fifty hours to truly get sick of the game, which is again well beyond near enough anything else you could play. Playing it in 2018, it makes me excited about what open world games now and in the future can bring, mainly because I haven't really explored my PS4 yet. Either way, I'm confident in saying it still holds up.

I hope Rockstar can tear themselves away from GTA Online long enough to remake this for current consoles and tidy everything up a bit. I feel as if critical and public judgement of this game has come, gone and come back again in the time since it was released, but it's absolutely worth remembering. 

[Miguel Sanchez]

Incidentally, it was a good thing I finished the online when I did. When it reached its ten year anniversary, a patch was released which removed a bunch of songs that the licensing had run out for. It's not IV if I'm not crossing the Algonquin bridge as Edge of Seventeen finishes and Iggy's getting ready to link to Weazel News. Let this be a warning to people who think always online is a good idea.

[NotThePars]

I had two aborted attempts at finishing GTA IV back in the day and I think it was about 2013-14 that I finally sat down and battered through it and it's probably the most impressive story Rockstar managed to tell before Red Dead Redemption 2. The first one that didn't feel totally cartoonish anyway. Nico was a lot funnier than people give him credit for as well cause he comes across as human as well. It's also the start of Rockstar games being more playable or at least hellish with bad controls.

 

I'm determined to go back through it again but I'm worried I'll feel the same about it that I did Red Dead Redemption which aged horribly.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Also relevant:

 

[DA Baracus]

IV is alright. 

Did you kill Nico's old foe at the airport or let him live?

Also Roman can f**k off, although there is a cheat that doesn't lose you reputation with him (or any other friends). You accept their invitation but then simply call back and cancel. That doesn't gain you favour with them mind, but the only you really want to gain favour with is the guy who can deliver you weapons once you max out his favour (is that the Jamaican guy?).

[Busta Nut]

On 26/03/2021 at 20:49, GAD said:

I didn't know what the meltdown over Tifa was so I googled it. Gamers really are pathetic.

what's this?

 

[GAD]

10 hours ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

STILL IN JOINT 44TH WITH 11 POINTS FROM 2 VOTES

Game: Grand Theft Auto IV
Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Release date: 29 April 2008
Gameplay:

 

Zero Punctuation review:

 

User comments: "played this franchise from the original. Sunk most time into this version - first that really came close to realising the potential of what GTA could be."
Poll-maker comments: As mentioned before, this was one of the games I got along with my PS3 in 2008. The day after Rangers lost the UEFA Cup final. I found out Tommy Burns had died by seeing an Evening Times booth from the bus as I went into town to get it. 

Anyway, I've mentioned before that it was also my first Grand Theft Auto game. Of all the open world games I've ever played I'm pretty sure there are three whose worlds I could enter right now and instantly remember every part of - this, Jak II and Red Dead Redemption. I've completed it more times over the years than I'd probably care to remember, and the amount of time spent with it is directly proportionate to how much I think of it. While it has its faults, its place in my own personal gaming history means I'm never going to forget or underplay it, so I think it's worthy of its place. 

To add one final detail about why it's important to me before I hit you with the review you're not going to read - I had always joked about finishing this game's online trophies with an online friend from another forum who I play games with. Doing this in the 2010s was basically a horrible experience. You'd have to put in loads of time for a start, trying to reach 5 million dollars earned. Then you had to win every game mode on offer, which included every race layout. Standard and GTA races. Then you had to beat the actual multi-player missions in under a certain time, which weren't exactly easy. Oh and the whole online platform is a broken, buggy mess, with your progress often not being recorded.

In 2018 I ended up with two and a half straight weeks off work so I stopped joking - we were doing this, now. One of those two and a half weeks happened to see some lovely weather here in the UK. Remember the Beast from the East? I spent that playing IV, with the heating up full blast, on the internet laughing at everyone as the country ground to a halt. It wasn't until later that year when I finally finished the rest of the trophies I needed, earning my 100th platinum trophy and formally ending my focus on PS3 games and allowing me to switch to PS4 full-time. 

Here is the review I wrote of it at the time:

  Reveal hidden contents

Knowing that I wrote about Grand Theft Auto IV semi-recently (three years ago) and attempted a retrospective review of it then, I'm not sure where to start having played it again. I can't really bring up the fact it was my first Grand Theft Auto. I can't really bring up how much of a nostalgia trip it was because it still felt familiar enough that it didn't feel... well, old. So, here goes nothing.

GTA IV is the story of Niko Bellic, a Serbian who flees some sort of civil war to go and live with his cousin, Roman, in Liberty City. Liberty City is an almost completely accurate replica of New York City, and as Niko's story progresses the development of his character as an immigrant to late 2000's America is played off against his surroundings in a way which is distinctly of its time yet, as I discovered, worryingly prescient a decade later.

Hey! Ten year retrospective! There's my angle.

Anyway, Niko arrives in Liberty City having been promised every possible aspect of the American Dream by Roman. Endless women, sports cars, luxury apartments, exclusive nightclubs, you name it, Roman said he had it. Niko gets off the boat to be greeted by an angular sedan which is also one of the taxi cabs in Roman's business, which operates out of a small warehouse next to the docks. He has a fold-down bed in Roman's cockroach-ridden apartment. And, as he learns about his business, Niko finds that Roman is besotted with his receptionist, who is in turn taken at will by a Russian guy called Vlad in his fifties, in between threatening Roman for money.

So, the American Dream isn't off to a good start. It doesn't get any better in the short-term as Niko does an assortment of oddjobs for Roman and the few friends he's managed to cultivate – a Jamaican pothead who speaks in illegible patois and a manic steroid abuser – for a few hundred dollars at a time. Eventually though after a combination of good fortune and a complete lack of any moral substance Niko has it all – fancy apartments in the rich part of town, hundreds of thousands of dollars and all the clothes he can buy. The system works.

It took me around thirty hours to complete the story on this occasion and while that includes some messing around, the story is extensive and detailed enough to still account for at least twenty-five hours of gameplay for most. The list of characters is long, varied and mostly engaging, as various aspects of modern American life in a metropolitan city like New York are explored. This helps impart a sense of progression as you play through the game, as characters come and go you get a greater sense of Niko is actually achieving something.

For the most part, IV does well to centre this around a small group of central antagonists. Niko struggles against an assortment of people from his homeland who try to blackmail him and sell him out. The only real problem with such a vast range of characters is that it can get lost at times with a sandbox game, never mind one as deep and with as many things to do as IV. You could go hours and multiple missions between one part of the storyline and the next. Then by the time you reach the closing stages of the game and the story is concluded it feels sudden, even though you've been building towards it for a relatively long time.

When IV was first released and reviewed and played by millions, one of the common complaints was the repetitiveness of the missions. Lots of them amount to little more than 'drive to location, shoot people in location,' with the most variation in that being the layout of the location you're shooting in. I realised on this play that this wasn't the complaint I had, however. Rather it's the way these missions don't change, but the motivation for them does. You can turn up at a building early on in the game and have to kill a bunch of people for some local two-bit hard man, and get 500 dollars for it. But later on in the story you're doing the same thing for the Mafia, with no or little material difference in actual gameplay, and you're getting thousands for it. The money itself isn't the problem, it's the implied significance of it. There is some mild variation in some of the later missions – my favourite being the one where you chase a car to a dealership and launch an RPG at it, as hilarity ensues – and the apparent consequences of them are much higher, but what you, the player, do doesn't change. I think this is probably my biggest complaint after playing IV again. There's little sense of achievement when you do the same thing all the time and progress anyway.

Of all the aspects of the game, gameplay is probably the one which has aged the most poorly. Cover-based shooting works best when the controls and the controlled character are responsive. This is rarely the case in IV. In one of the first missions you get an introduction to the shooting mechanics. The game tells you to move the right stick to switch targets when locked on and in cover. This does not work. Or rather, it works one time out of every ten, and only if you pull the stick as sharply as you can. So maybe you stop locking on and move to target a different enemy manually, but this also doesn't work some of the time. This is just about something you can live with if you're in an open arena with a reasonable distance between you and the people shooting you. If you get rushed from different directions by guys with automatic weapons, though? You've no chance.

The weapons are somewhat limited too. They're quite basic, there's two different models of each type – two pistols, two SMG's, two shotguns, etc – with no real difference aside from magazine size. Any automatic weapon is useless if you use it as an automatic weapon. You can get around this most of the time by staying in cover and aiming for headshots, but the level of precision required to do it effectively seems at odds with the pace of the game. You can also use grenades or molotov cocktails, but trying to aim these without blowing yourself up is a complete nightmare.

The vehicle physics are long criticised but honestly, after about ten minutes it feels normal to me. Cars are heavy, but they're easy to control. Sportier cars are more agile, boxes and vans aren't. Nothing unusual. Every motorbike is a disaster, the slightest touch of a kerb or car or lamppost or pedestrian or misplaced pixel will launch you twenty feet in the air, but they're not very common.

In past playthroughs of this I've felt as if the different neighbourhoods and islands of Liberty City are rich and distinctive, serving to make the map feel like a sprawling metropolis with genuinely unique areas. On this occasion, sadly, this isn't the case. Broker and Dukes are great to start with, a more obviously working class area where most of the immigration goes to. As Niko works his way up the crime ladder you see the glitz of Algonquin and then the more industrialised Alderney, so at least the setting mirrors the story's progress even if the gameplay doesn't. The problem is that after you get to Algonquin there's not really much to interact with to make it feel like a dynamic, engaging map. Once you reach Alderney there's barely anything, even the story hardly bothers using this final third of the map. A sandbox is generally as much of a location as the player makes it but with very little incentive to explore a large part of the map it feels hollow.

This isn't to say that Liberty City is boring or forgettable. I'm not sure but I think I've completed it at least five times. If I didn't enjoy driving around, I wouldn't. If you spend time just driving or travelling around you get a real sense of both how deep the city is but also how limited it is by the time of release. If you try and drive to the rules of the road, the NPC cars try and drive through you. I'm not talking about when you're trying to blast over a bridge and they start veering wildly, try stopping at a red light. Cars behind will try to mount you. I realise GTA games aren't really judged by people who drive legally, but I think some of the complaints about driving physics are exacerbated by the roads being an obstacle course. On the other hand, the train/subway actually works and makes the game feel both like a real, immersive environment and a true to life simulation of the world it's trying to replicate. I know the public transport in GTA V wasn't really a thing but here, with trains and taxi cabs, it feels like a living city.

Speaking of V, comparing the graphics of two games released ~five years apart is quite the eye opener. IV's graphics aren't bad, but playing it ten years later the best way I can describe the visual experience is restrained. Like the graphics are the bare minimum to look passable on an HD console while still being functional. Seeing the progress that technology was able to make over that time is really quite breathtaking, and shows you that progress is genuine in a world with increasingly high costs and warped graphical focuses. I suppose if you wait ten years to play everything you won't resent the cost, but that's another argument. One thing the game really gets right is the lighting. I was playing it a few days ago and there was a great sunset as I was looking across the Algonquin bridge at the city. The sky was a deep pink giving way to infinite shades of orange and yellow and for a second I thought of all the enjoyment I'd got over the years travelling around, and it all made sense.

In terms of things the game gets completely wrong, everyone knows what's coming. Random phonecalls – NEEKO EET EEZ YOUR CUZZAN! LET US GO BOWLING! - no. The various characters you end up befriending are pretty much all insufferable. Why it was ever considered a good idea to have them phone you, bug you and make you feel guilty for rejecting them is beyond me. This doesn't increase the immersion, it makes you resent the game. Big problem. It's not really helped by the lack of stuff to do either. You can go bowling, which can be fun. You can play pool, which is impossible and will glitch. You can play darts, which is easy. You can go for food, which is an extension of the 'drive somewhere' mission format. You can go to a strip club or a show, which you can do once and then becomes pointless. The stuff with friends calling you to do stuff is something that feels like it was a great idea when someone came up with it early on in development, only for it to become less and less practical as more stuff went into the game. Sandbox games are what the player makes of them, trying to effectively incite them to do some crap activities isn't a good idea.

An extension of the sense of IV's story progressing despite repetitive missions is found in the characters themselves. There are some occasions where you can make a choice in missions. In fact off the top of my head it's usually giving you a choice to kill one person or someone else. Having played through it a few times I know that there's very little material difference in the outcomes. Like a few areas of the game these aspects feel like a good idea which wasn't, or couldn't, be implemented properly.

The thing about IV which stood out most to me on this occasion was the social commentary. The radio stations play a key role in world building, whether you listen to music or talk stations. By the way, 1979, Goodbye Horses, Cry, Dominion, Edge of Seventeen, they never get old. Listening to talk radio stations however I was amazed at how relevant the aspects of American media being parodied still are today. Although in 2008 the main focus surrounding the US and New York was terrorism, exhibited mainly in the bridges initially being closed and through various references to immigration, a lot of the hysteria and intra-ethnic discrimination holds up. There's a lot of content in this game, and when I say this I mean everything – the missions themselves, the radio stations, the TV shows, the cutscenes, the incidental dialogue you hear from people passing you on the street. If there's one thing Rockstar seem to have been good at in the 7th generation it was creating an entirely immersive world which is a comprehensive facsimile of the time it's attempting to replicate.

Although it doesn't have any direct effect on the game or the story there's also an ongoing election for Governor of the state and hearing references to that on the news is especially pertinent. I suppose it's just sad that what was an exaggeration of contemporary society doesn't feel like it's an exaggeration now. But I feel it's a true testament to the game's main strength that it was actually accurate. Of course, it's always hilarious.

The last time I played this game it was the oldest GTA I'd played. I've since played San Andreas on the PS3 and from what I remember there were a lot of similarities to IV in terms of the world the game took place in. Distinctive from area to area, a story centred around a genuine issue of social sensitivity, lots of things to do officially and in terms of exploration and finding your own fun. Considering IV now, I think I can just about separate my nostalgia-ridden memories and an objective, serious analysis of the things going on. The game is a supreme technical achievement of its time, with a near unparalleled sense of environmental immersion owing to a whole host of reasons. While you can find some shallowness in areas, it would take upwards of fifty hours to truly get sick of the game, which is again well beyond near enough anything else you could play. Playing it in 2018, it makes me excited about what open world games now and in the future can bring, mainly because I haven't really explored my PS4 yet. Either way, I'm confident in saying it still holds up.

I hope Rockstar can tear themselves away from GTA Online long enough to remake this for current consoles and tidy everything up a bit. I feel as if critical and public judgement of this game has come, gone and come back again in the time since it was released, but it's absolutely worth remembering. 

I might be wrong, but I'm sure I read somewhere that the code for this has been lost or something, hence why it's never been re-released on the new consoles. Might have imagined it...

[SANTAN]

I never got into that GTA as much, I always thought there was nothing to do compared to SA for free roam considering you were confined to a small island. 

The online was an exciting idea but was practically broken, I remember waiting ages and ages just for it to crash game after game. 

I liked Niko but the game didn't do much for me, a let down after the highs of SA, the only thing I can think of which was impressive was the ragdoll  physics and it was very fun to get sent through your windscreen or go flying off a bike. 

[Miguel Sanchez]

1 hour ago, Stormzy said:

I never got into that GTA as much, I always thought there was nothing to do compared to SA for free roam considering you were confined to a small island. 

The online was an exciting idea but was practically broken, I remember waiting ages and ages just for it to crash game after game. 

I liked Niko but the game didn't do much for me, a let down after the highs of SA, the only thing I can think of which was impressive was the ragdoll  physics and it was very fun to get sent through your windscreen or go flying off a bike. 

Forget about releasing the rest of the game, just let me do this.