The Ballad of Quiet Lumps...

It's hard to pinpoint when exactly I stopped caring about GTA. It could have been when San Andreas went "Gangsta", it could have been when the PSP versions came out on PS2 after being told they were PSP exclusive.

Or it could have been when GTA IV was average at best, yet all the reviewers were giving it perfect scores. Not to say that Nico's escapades in Liberty City were necessarily bad (well, bad as in not enjoyable, murder is never a "good" thing per se), just that it felt like more of the same. They added some decent new things to do, but took away the ability to purchase properties, and no casino, basically meaning your money is for guns and that's pretty much it. It had a lot of potential, not to mention the hype machine, but didn't deliver.

However, when the DLC came out on 360, I picked them up right away. I didn't play them until last month, but I bought them right away. Like the main game, the missions themselves were decent, but nothing we hadn't already done in earlier iterations of the series. What set the DLC apart from the game itself was the stories.

Not to say that GTA has ever had Oscar Wilde epic prose here, but the main game seriously lacked in the story department. You get info on who Nico is and what he's doing in the LC at the beginning of the game, and near the end. That's it. His cousin pisses people off, you clean up, it's that simple. Once the story starts to get interesting, it's over. It didn't even have much closure.

The DLC has actual story arcs. There is a beginning, middle, end, and reason for you to want to know what's going to happen next. I can honestly say that I enjoyed the DLC more than the main game... mostly.

I'm nearing the end of The Ballad of Gay Tony, and the last couple of missions are a little bit of a let down: You are alone against hordes of enemies, and almost no health packs. Kill everything that moves. That's it, that's all. To an extent, it works, but it's still frustrating to see that that's how the game is ending. Still, the story for this and The Lost and The Damned has more than made up for the underwhelming story of Nico Bellic.

To top it all off, there are instances where the characters from the DLC stories intersect with each other. It makes for interesting shifts of missions, seeing the same missions through different characters perspectives, and if there's another GTA on the horizon (and with the way these things sell, you can bet your ass there will be more of them), I hope they explore that aspect in the future.

My second play through this year of Silent Hill 2 is coming up, and Jeff has decided he needs more SH in his life. (He's more a Resident Evil guy... what a sucker XD), so tomorrow he's coming over to my place to watch me play. Hopefully, I will have infected another poor soul into the aura of SH. Until next time folks, Adieu!