My complaints with past GTA games

As you may have heard, at every minute of every day, in every available media outlet, repeatedly, Grand Theft Auto IV is on store shelves and in the Xboxes and Playstations of this fine, fear-mongering country.  If you're looking for some sensatioinalized "report" about how this franchise is ruining the youth of America, you're in the wrong place.  If you want to know why I haven't picked up GTA IV yet, but probably will, read on, comrade.

I've played the Grand Theft Auto games.  I've played a vast majority of the pervious iterations, but never to completion.  I guess I never cared for any of them.  But my dislike doesn't stem from the storyline of hyper-violence like most peoples'.  No, my dislike is in the execution of the game.  The gameplay in previous GTA games was mind-numbingly awful.  There was, in my opinion, no fun to be had other than watching the cinematics and listening to the voice acting.  The story was good (not great, but good) and that's where GTA stopped for me.

And before you ask, no, I'm not a purely first-person-shooter player.  Crackdown was a solid GTA-ish sandbox game.  It had decent controls.  The shooting still sucked and the driving was broken and the story was a joke, but I played through that game.  So what has kept me from playing through a Grand Theft game and what about GTA IV makes me want to try again?

Combat: This was my primary complaint with Grand Theft Auto.  The combat was terrible.  If you were using a melee attack, you would miss.  If you were using a gun, you would either miss or be uber-accurate.  But the worst part was that the combat just wasn't fun.  I found it more of a chore than anything else.  Fail.

Graphics: I'm definitely not one of those graphics people, so this point may seem contradictory.  The graphics in the previous games just wasn't there.  They had fantastic voice acting but the lack of decent graphics really soured the deal for me. 

Characters: Stereotypes suck, especially when you take them right from movies.  I was never compelled to play as any of the characters in previous GTAs.  And when the game is asking you to play as someone you don't want to, and play for 50 hours, that's where I draw the line.

Setting: What made the GTA games so likeable to so many people was Rockstar's attention to detail on the settings.  In general, I think they have always done a great job.  The problem I have is that I was never into any of the settings they wanted to replicate.

These are most certainly nitpicky gripes, I know.  I'm in no way saying that the Grand Theft Auto games are bad.  All I'm saying is that as of the writing of this article, they've never been my cup of tea.  But, like many of you, I've been inundated with GTA IV without having ever played it or even seen it played.  And from what I can tell, most of the complaints I've had with it's ancestors are fixed.  So, I'll once again be traveling down the road of Grand Theft Auto, trying to like it and see what everybody is always yammering about.  I'll let you know how that turns out.