I intend to buy it....just as soon as the dust has settled on the stampede of zitty chavs and wannabee gangstas.As a piece of game design it's unsurpassed. As a graphics showcase, it's jaw-dropping. It's a game I want desperately to own, because of the free-form structure of the game, and because it's also a perfect research tool for a book I'm writing set in Brooklyn.
But, I gotta say...watching the Youtube movies of various kiddies playing the game, I'm genuinely chilled by what they're doing. If you can judge by these gameplay movies what it is the feral chavvies and gangsta wannabees want to get out of the GTA4 experience, it seems to be the opportunity to blast at woman's breasts and genitals at close quarters, to shoot at passing cars through the winddshield to get that rewarding blast of a horn as the dead driver's forehead slumps forward onto the steering wheel.
Don't get me wrong, as en ex-game designer and now an author, I absolutely DO NOT WANT TO CENSOR creative mediums....but observing the movies of gameplay thus far, I'm deeply worried about the nascent pyshosis displayed by a generation of hooded sociopaths planning their next virtual bloodbath as they lie in bed, presumably whacking-off as they reminisce over the last business woman they shot a dozen times in the vagina.
If there's any opinion beginning to form in my head now, any call to action....it's not to ban any particular game, or to apply limits on what can and cannot be depicted...but for us grown-ups to take a long hard look at the mental health of the generation growing up beneath us - our kids.
I can't help thinking that the gameplay movies I've been watching this morning, were put together by lads very similar in mindset (and most probably appearence - bullet-headed and dull-eyed) as the feral creatures that beat up Robert Maltby and beat to death Sophie Lancaster.
Bugger...I think I've almost talked myself out of buying the game now.
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