GTA IV has an unbelievably rich world
May 5th 2008 03:15
Chris Baker on Wired posted an article marveling at the richness of the in-game media. Your character can, if you want, sit there and watch TV all day. Or surf the internet.
Which is a bizarre meta-gaming experience, if you think about it. You spent $60 to buy a game where you can just sit there and use a computer. The next step would be to have a Grand Theft Auto game inside the game itself.
From the article:
"You can also sit down and watch hours of TV in Liberty City. There are commercials, news items, reality shows and stand-up comedy routines featuring Ricky Gervais and Katt Williams. In a brilliant touch that shows how attuned Rockstar is to its core demographic of 18- to 25-year-old men, ass-kicking YouTube superstar Bas Rutten hosts an in-game advice and self-help show."
On the GTA IV in-game internet, you can see a huge array of services, from a faux-Fox News website, to information and dating sites:
"But what blew me away was the in-game internet....You'll also have to delete spam ... lots of it. That's carrying realism too far!
Fake corporate sites abound, including hilarious parodies of Starbucks and Ikea. There's a forum for Tablet PC afficionados where nerds gather to commiserate about why their costly combersome platform hasn't caught on yet. There's even an anti-smoking site sponsored by the cigarette industry....
There's also CrapList, a parody of Craigslist, with scores and scores of postings. I got a chuckle out of the titles of posts, stuff like, "Men of Arab descent with backpacks wanted for cruel practical joke." But each title led to an actual post, and each one was a self-contained mini-drama...
The real meat of the GTA mediaverse comes from the dating sites, which are essential to several in-game missions. You hook up with women (and in one instance a dude) to advance your progress.
I clicked around on the in-game internet for more than an hour, and experienced a growing sense of astonishment as I kept hitting page after page after page after page. "
Fake corporate sites abound, including hilarious parodies of Starbucks and Ikea. There's a forum for Tablet PC afficionados where nerds gather to commiserate about why their costly combersome platform hasn't caught on yet. There's even an anti-smoking site sponsored by the cigarette industry....
There's also CrapList, a parody of Craigslist, with scores and scores of postings. I got a chuckle out of the titles of posts, stuff like, "Men of Arab descent with backpacks wanted for cruel practical joke." But each title led to an actual post, and each one was a self-contained mini-drama...
The real meat of the GTA mediaverse comes from the dating sites, which are essential to several in-game missions. You hook up with women (and in one instance a dude) to advance your progress.
I clicked around on the in-game internet for more than an hour, and experienced a growing sense of astonishment as I kept hitting page after page after page after page. "
That's insane, and it makes me want to get the game, not for the hours of high-speed driving fun, or the senseless violence. Just to sit there and watch TV. I can't decide if that's sad or a testament to progress.
* this image is from the Telegraph
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Comment by Danielle 2
According to Blog
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... although, without a PS3 or a TV, I'm not sure how I'll accomplish that...
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