THE BEST OF…SPRING

Having finally sprung in all it’s glory, what better time to coop yourself up in a darkened room in only your underpants than now? Let’s face it, spending time in the sun is only going to kill you anyway, and the more time spent indoors the less likely you are to see half-naked rude boys showing off their freshly Phillishaven chests – what is it in the British psyche that makes wandering around topless the immediate recourse for under-25 Innits when the weather is mere degrees warmer? On the plus side, this does mean the annual season of DivSpot can officially start:

- 5 points awarded for every ‘No admittance without shirt’ sign spotted inside a pub
- 10 points per shirtless div (+5 for every England/George Cross tattoo spotted)
- 20 points per shirtless div…indoors
- 30 points if the shirtless div is quite obviously cold

- An unfortunate –10 point penalty per shirtless div spotted with chest hair
- Similarly –10 per shirtless div in an unfortunate jeans/sandals combo

- 100 points per shirtless div spotted dropping cigarette directly onto prickly-heat spotted chest (+ 50 if they desperately attempt to hide the excruciating, searing pain in a fruitless effort to impress female companions)

- The season ends upon spotting a male student (or ‘fancy div’) wearing a jumper with the sleeves rolled up, and an inexplicable scarf.

Anyway, with the increased popularity of LCD flatscreens and the glare-immune glories they bring, there’s no reason not to grab a few extension cords and get the Wii set-up in the garden, eh? Wii Tennis, vodka melons and burgers in the garden…hmm. Could be enough to drag even the most pasty gamer into the UV. Until then, here’s the first of a series of the reviews helping you find the best ways to waste away the balmy nights of early summer. We start with a real cracker.

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV (XBOX360)

Millions of words have been unnecessarily committed to print and hypertext over this game – to what end? It’s the videogame equivalent of reviewing a Star Wars film. It’s critic-resistant, immune to review scores and pushed by mainstream media as more than a games release. When your game is described variously as a ‘cultural event’, a ‘mass media phenomenon’ or simply as something that ‘changes all the rules’, the matter of percentage points at the bottom of a review becomes somewhat irrelevant. All of which renders the act of sharing my thoughts somewhat moot, but I’ll plug on regardless.

GTAIV is, simply put, a masterpiece. Technologically, it’s probably the best example of a ‘next-gen’ game we’ve seen. We thought we’d been spoiled rotten by Crackdowns urban sprawl, and hoodwinked by Oblivions Radiant AI. Deservedly celebrated, they have turned out to be mere baby steps toward the edge, baby steps that Rockstar has stared down at disdainfully before taking a running leap. Liberty City breathes. It feels real. Things happen.

Take an example – like all GTA games you have your various safehouses dotted around the city. After a few in-game days in one particular hideout, I noticed a familiar voice preaching – loudly – just across the street. After listening to his ranting for a while (enjoying the pretty amusing, barbed pastiche of real-life evangelists), I decided my version of Niko Bellic shared my distaste for such hellfire and brimstone rhetoric and readied my baseball bat as a means to ‘moving on’ Mr Street Preacher.

Locking on and adopting my most menacing slow walk, I unfortunately failed to heed my Green Cross Code, and was promptly run down by a furious old lady in a convertible. As I bounced a few yards down the road (the physics hit that brilliant ‘grounded-but-exaggerated’ middle ground to hilarious effect) ruing the day I ignored advice from singing hedgehogs, the intervening time gave another fellow, hopped up on anti-religious fervour, the opportunity to launch an attack of his own.

Thankfully, it appeared the old dear had done me a favour with her pelvis-smashing shunt, as a team of police officers descended on our hapless mugger within seconds of his boot connecting with his victims stomach, guns drawn. Hands up in apparent surrender, our wily crim started his humiliating frogmarch to the police wagon – until, for whatever reason, he decided to make a break for it, charging down the street with the keystone cops in tow.

Seemingly organic, this kind of unscripted moment can occur at any time, and contributes enormously to the atmosphere. Sure, random crimes have had a place in the series before now (I seem to recall them being far more prevalent in Vice City than they were in San Andreas, though maybe that’s just me), but GTAIV expands this previously one-dimensional NPC interactivity at an exponential rate. Sure, it’s still an illusion, but it’s pulled off with such panache, confidence and, to borrow the games favoured terminology, balls that you can’t help but fall for it, and you can’t stop your imagination extrapolating brief NPC interactions into epic yarns and detailed histories.

Your interactions with the world around you have been blessed with a similar level of improvement. Taxis can now be taken around the city at will (I’ve found strange, wistful pleasure in touring the city via cab); missions can be requested via mobile phone and dates can be set up through the brilliant in-game Internet through TW@ Internet Cafes. After San Andreas’ determination to push you through its storyline and heavy-handed integration of it’s new features (a mission to get a haircut? Really?), the level of control trusted to the player is refreshing. The entire storyline can be halted with a couple of clicks of your trusty mobile phone, leaving you free to enjoy the traditionally hell-raising end game pleasures undisturbed.

The phone itself is a pretty exciting tool, actually, and further evidence of the care and attention paid by Rockstar to making this GTA as believable and user-friendly as possible. Not only can you request and receive missions through calls/text messages, you can dial a number to find out what the mystery song playing on the radio, call the emergency services as a distraction/unwitting backup, or just dial one of the many numbers dotted around on billboards and posters.

There’s layer after layer to peel back in GTAIV – we’ve barely mentioned the storyline, the strongest in the series to date, or Niko himself, cynical, morally conflicted and extremely likeable. Surrounded with a supporting cast by turns hilarious (bodybuilding, shark-hormone injecting Brucie) and menacing (the gangland characters of Niko’s past – the most genuinely threatening villains in the series yet), Niko bounces off them with excellent one-liners and shares some surprisingly emotional (for GTA, anyway) moments.

Multiplayer is a force of nature, as hilarious and anarchic as you would expect. Taking place either in a pre-determined section of Liberty City or over the entire map, straight deathmatch is fun enough, but add teams and objectives to mix and you’ve got multiplayer gifted from on high. Cops and Crooks is the pick of the bunch so far – as you’d expect, one team assumes law-enforcement duties while the others, naturally enough, are the villains. This can be played as one of two variants: ‘All for One’, where one player assumes the role of the ‘Don’ and has to be protected from the blood-lusting Police, and ‘One for All’, where the entire team is under threat as they try to escape.

Simple to explain they may be, in practice the sheer number of war stories these modes alone could generate infinitely entertaining individual tales of heroism, sacrifice and cowardice for years to come. Even races, seemingly straightforward, are given that special GTA twist – cars can be blown up, roadblocks formed and traps laid along the checkpointed route, meaning that sabotage-tastic fun can be had even if you can’t get to grips with the racing proper.

So we come full circle. Grand Theft Auto IV is a masterpiece. Technologically astonishing, yes. Culturally, hugely significant, absolutely. But it is as a game that we can enjoy it, and it succeeds on every level Time spent with GTAIV is a very good time indeed.