The Lost and The Damned.
Sounds like Rockstar North to me.
Seriously. The crank out the turkey that was GTA IV, give us a game with fantastic graphics, outstanding physics, and a level of detail never before seen in a sandbox style game… Then they strip out everything that made it a great game!
Sure, the whole ‘playing a movie’ thing was fun, but movies that last longer than an hour and a half generally start to wear pretty thin, and GTA IV was no different.
The Lost and The Damned picks up just about in the middle of the original storyline, only you’re now a member of a biker gang. The plot is alright, no fresh ground broken there. A few new cars, a few new bikes, a few new guns, but generally speaking, IT’S THE SAME OLD !@#$. Not to mention, Rockstar decided to remove even more functionality, achievements, etc… and they just give you a few lame mini-games such as arm-wrestling, the same old racing, and ‘gang wars’ which are pretty much rinse and repeat shootouts.
Grand Theft Auto has gotten stale and boring. I highly recommend that everyone who made design decisions for GTA IV as well as the Lost and The Damned pick up a copy of Saints Row. Not the second, I want to keep it simple because these guys apparently haven’t gotten that in order for a game to be fun, and replayable – IT NEEDS TO BE A !@#$ING GAME.
They should play Saints Row, maybe 5 or 6 times straight through, like I have.
Then – they should pick up and play Saints Row 2, play that 2 or 3 times, like I have.
Last but not least, go through their back catalogue and play everything up to Vice City.
If by that point, they haven’t learned why GTA IV sucked so bad, besides any advances it may have brought to the genre, they should just sell the damned company to EA and at least make it so we would expect a steaming pile of the same old crap, and not be wholly disappointed after blowing hours of time playing it, not to mention about 75 bucks on something which simply put – doesn’t deserve to be called Grand Theft Auto.