Too Realistic - The Games I've Played

Sandbox games like Infamous are up there on games that I can stand and put some serious game time in. They allow you to run around, do whatever you want, and it's exciting from what you can do. It's great fun . . . but then there are some games like this that just try too hard and are too realistic.

This game got a LOT of hype, and part of the reason I got it was because Alicia said it was one of the few games that she had ever played back in the day, and I actually bought it for her in hopes that she would play it. There's a reason that she stopped playing, and at the same time, why I stopped playing.

There's one major reason that I stopped playing - it's a sandbox game where you can't sandbox.

Everything that you want to do, everything that you think would be fun, comes with too much real life consequences. You hardly touch a person, and cops are on you. You try to run away from them, and instead of being wimpy cops that give up fast, you're running for the next half hour.

Then comes the intros to the billions of different mini games and sub things that you have to deal with. The first 20 hours are nothing but, 'oh here's another new thing for you to do'. Fighting bare handed - tutorial. Fighting with weapon - tutorial. Shooting a gun - tutorial. Shooting a gun with a scope - tutorial. Shooting a gun from a car - tutorial. Driving a car - tutorial. Driving a boat - tutorial. Driving a helicopter - tutorial. Driving a motorcycle - tutorial. Racing a car - tutorial. Bowling - tutorial. Answering emails - tutorial. Answering text messages - tutorial.

The list NEVER stops. There's a lot in the game, and EVERY single one of them takes a tutorial to learn, and is a fickle to control. It makes the game not fun to play, it makes it something you want to turn and run away from.

Then there are the things that you'd want to do. Blow up cars, run people over, go on drive bys, do anything that you want. . . and nope, you're faced with about ten minutes of fun with doing any of those, and then cops are on your back, you're sent to jail or the hospital and the fun you were having was ruined. With that out of the way, you try to jump over to the story line of a character you don't care for, that doesn't have much of any motivations, and makes you want to rip your ears out any time he talks for more than a few seconds.

Story line has a problem all in itself. It has starting points for quests. You get into the quest, you fail it, and instead of doing the magic pop back to the start to let you restart it, you are stuck with wherever you are, getting back to the start of the quest. This isn't a problem when you're on one section of one island, but when you start to gain access to multiple parts of the city, this can require you to commute for ten minutes just to the point where you can start the quest over again. Don't do something perfect the first time? Start it all over again. Still trying to learn the controls of one of the dozens of tutorials? Too bad, start over. And then there's the quests that get you in trouble with the cops. . . you'll get stuck with the cops behind you so you have to get rid of the cops first, and THEN make your way across town to restart the entire thing all over again, and you have to pray that your car doesn't take too much damage so you don't have to find a new car and bring those cops back on your tail AGAIN.

The game map has 3 major islands as part of it.

I was a good chunk of time (over 40 hours if I remember) into the game, and I just barely scraped the part of story where you're allowed access into the central island, and I stopped it. The quests were getting to annoying to start, there were too many controls to keep track of, it took too long to get anywhere, and it was too annoying.

GTA 4 is an attempt of trying to make a game real. The problem with that, is that gamers (like myself) don't want something real. We want to have fun, to get away from life, we don't want to have to deal with stupidity and realism, we want to have fun. We want to run around, blow things up, break all of the laws, and make it fast, dirty, and fun, and GTA 4 isn't that. In a game that tells us we can do whatever we want, it sticks too hard to the real world rules and consequences. It's no longer fun, it's just a life simulator that is a bit too realistic and a bit too annoying.

I've put up with some annoying games, and I've played through them, but this is the only one that is on my bookshelf that I have started and have no desire to finish, and no intention to ever finish. It's just not fun.