Your inner criminal, now surfing the Internet

If you’ve never rattled off a machine-gun blast into a crowd of people, you’ve never really lived. But that’s why God (OK, Rockstar Games) invented Grand Theft Auto.

The newest installment of the video game, Grand Theft Auto IV, returns to Liberty City, where you play as the generically Eastern European Niko Bellic. After a cinematic opening, you are greeted at the docks by your drunk cousin Roman, who naturally makes you, the dude who just arrived two minutes ago, drive his taxi back to his inner-city hovel.

From then on, Rockstar pushes the boundaries of in-game inanity to previously unexplored levels. As in other GTA titles, you can interact with the general populace, feed yourself, go on dates and see exactly how much damage a taxicab can take. But you can also go back to Roman’s pad and watch hours of shitty cable TV. Or go play darts at a bar. Or browse the Internet. In the game.

Yes, that’s right. Whereas once upon a time you had to get up from your GTA session to go browse Craigslist, Rockstar has now thoughtfully created “Craplist,” a fairly decent spoof on the ubiquitous classifieds site.

Personally, I find the fact that you can go a few pages deep into a fake coffee company’s Web site, or that the developers took the time to write you spam e-mails to be a little excessive and unnecessary. This is especially true given the fact that the original concept behind playing GTA was to take oneself away from a mundane life, not imitate it.

But Rockstar’s goal with GTA IV seems to be creating the most realistic world possible for you to rise through the criminal underbelly. You even get a cell phone complete with a text-messaging feature, and if you hit your contacts with a good old-fashioned “bitch button,” they will call you incessantly until you pick up the damn thing. Annoying.

Perhaps in the next GTA installment, we’ll get a “pump your own gas” feature, or a mini-game focused around taking a piss at a public urinal!

Of course, what would any decent addition to the GTA franchise be without a dating simulation? Liberty City girls are apparently pretty jaded toward violence. If you start killing people mid-date, your lady friend for the evening will get pissed and drive herself home, but she’ll still be open to some post-murderfest bowling in a couple nights once she’s had a chance to cool off.

The police, I have to say, are much more realistic in IV than they have been in any other previous GTA titles. Sadly, you can no longer lead a merry trail of cops to the Pay ‘n’ Spray, and confound them with your new green paint job. If the po-po sees you drive in to a spray shop, they won’t be fooled.

Likewise, in-game citizens are more socially aware to your misdeeds. If you say, casually run over a couple of pedestrians on your way to the nearest Burger Shot, don’t expect to be off the hook just because there weren’t cops present. If you stay in the area, the cops will be called, and before you can shout “hit and run” the fuzz will be all over you.

Statistics-tracking has always been a feature of the Grand Theft Auto series, but IV takes it to a completely new level with counters for everything from how many nuts you’ve eaten, to how long you’ve spent browsing the in-game Internet. Keeping a corpse-count and a car-jacking tally is one thing, but seriously: Who the fuck cares how many times you’ve visited the hot dog stand?

While the content of the game has exploded into a time-sink of goliath proportions, very little has changed to the feel of the game–or the graphics. The environments are beautiful, but are nothing fantastically different from say, San Andreas. The character models still look slightly puffy and not quite realistic, and details like hair movement or folds in clothing are almost entirely overlooked.

It is disappointing that such a highly anticipated next-gen system release would skimp on improvements to character design while focusing so much on the trivial aspects. But better graphics don’t make headlines, poorly rendered titties do.