The Besties - Still Picking the Best GTA Game Ever

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

We've narrowed it down to the final four, and now special guest Evan Narcisse (@EvNarc) has joined the club to decide the best GTA game of all time, between Vice City, San Andreas, GTA 4, and GTA 5. Four may enter but only one will leave. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

uh chris i need to i need you to tell me why you have put a virtual uh fake boring room behind you it's not a whimsical destination you've put yourself in in skype it's just it kind of looks like other bedroom yeah it's like a uh holiday inn express basically yeah it's i think it looks like like your first solo apartment in new york like you know you finally made enough to get a studio it has a window and you put one very large mirror in it to make it feel bigger than it actually is i don't have that point of reference i don't know why you it's oh i'm sorry it's like that first five bedroom you get in west virginia yeah you're you're you're country mousing me right here on my on my own video game podcast i don't appreciate it what was the rationale plant

what were you going for i i i wanted it to like not be a thing you know the edges of your face are blurred as you move it is the most a thing it could be yeah yeah before when you're staying very still i was like oh wait he's he's somewhere else he put down a new addition onto his house but you're but now now you're clipping you've entered no clip and you are that's a video game joke first of many i hope video game joke. First of many, I hope. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best Grand Theft Auto game of the franchise in totality. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best GTA of the Grand Theft Auto. My name is Ross Frosch, and I know the best game of the week.

And I am thrilled to welcome our guests filling in for my, mean at this point lazy brother i mean we could say that i was gonna say erstwhile but lazy's a way to erstwhile that's powerful that makes it sound like he won't be your brother at some point exactly yeah that's that's well that's skullduggery is afoot that's what that's what i say to that if he if he keeps not showing up for our podcast i don't know how much longer our family is really built on podcasting. It's Evan Narcisse. He's a consulting design consultant, narrative design consultant. That's correct.

Is that your preferred title? Yeah. On Spider-Man Miles Morales. He's the author of a New Day comic that's coming this summer. And now he's here to help us pick the best Grand Theft Auto game of all time. Certainly the high point of all that. Welcome. Yes.

Being on the besties is the high point of my career thus far. Thanks. Maybe it's the high point of your career this morning. Yes. Definitely today. Yeah. Well, I actually got a haircut earlier today, so you guys are going to have to compete against my barber.

You've already lost. Evan, you probably already know this actually you definitely do because i told you uh obviously we did a part one to this episode with jordan moore's last week uh where we narrowed down the list of eight to now four i wanted to ask you before we started are you upset about anything that we cut out and i'll quickly recap we cut out gta1 we cut out gta2 we cut out gta3 uh what else it was one other one we cut out oh chinatown wars was the other one we cut out um you know three was like a watershed moment, you know? Um, like it, it kind of birthed the franchise as we know it now, you know? Um,

uh, but I think, you know, as a like legacy gaming experience, I, I, I guess I understand your guys's rationale, you know,

like it would probably be a hard game to play here in 2021, but like, uh, it's, it's foundational. It was like the thing that, you know like it would probably be a hard game to play here in 2021 but like uh it's it's foundational it's like the thing that you know that became a phenomenon and and and launched this franchise you know as we know it it's an interesting balance you have to strike when we've done one of these before with zelda it's, you have to balance the, like when you're talking about pure importance, like Legend of Zelda original is, I mean like, beyond foundational. Like it is adventure and that sort of entire

genre writ large like is traced back to Zelda. But it's like also if you just do that, then it makes these little one-sided. But you also can't just do like iteration, right? Because then it's always just the newest one is the best one.

It's tough finding a balance. I think we did make a mistake. After going back and playing the games this week, I think Chinatown Wars should have made the cut. Because it turns out there are only, any of them except for five, it turns out there are only two fun of them, except for five, it turns out there are only two fun GTA games.

Oh, gosh. Okay. This should be a good episode. And they're GTA 5 and Chinatown Wars. Okay, we should get into it then. We can get into it. We can get into it.

First matchup of the final four is GTA 5 versus GTA 4. I probably should have swapped those from just a timeline standpoint. I'm ready. Russ, walk us in.

What's the challenge? I'm going to talk about GTA 4 really quick because I know the room and myself, honestly, is going to be very pro GTA 5. GTA 4 was the first time that they tried to make, and I'm going to put this in heavy, heavy quotes, a realistic GTA game, which is to say like

you know we've talked about san andreas before which was the game that came before this san andreas amazing game tells very interesting stories but also fucking you get a jetpack halfway through like yeah just worth acknowledging whereas gta 4 is through throughout its run relatively grounded in the world of like GTA games. Like it is mostly chill. Things get a little wild, but generally speaking, it didn't get like really outlandish

until like the Ballad of Gay Tony DLC. Even before that, it was just like motorcycle folks riding around. So this was kind of a- And why did they call that DLC motorcycle folks riding around? Because I feel like they could have come up with a better title

that's a little more, you know, exciting. But this was a departure for them. I think you see a lot of GTA 4 in Red Dead, which is to say, like, not a actively fun game in a lot of moments, but definitely aiming for like more realism whether that's a good or bad thing red dead 2 is the gta4 of the red dead series it is it's like what if we took the thing you like and took out all of the fun but made it very serious and impressive like both these games very impressive they're doing a lot of interesting things. Did you know that you can go bowling? You can. You can also get drunk and fall down with ragdoll physics. I'm being dismissive. GTA 4

is an astonishing achievement. It is not a game I enjoy. And I think those are like two separate things. Evan, where's your head out with all this you know i mean i have such fond memories of gta4 because it was one of the first times where like a semi-accurate new york was delivered to me in a video game experience and you know i'm a native new yorker lived there for the bulk of my life and that game coming out um when i was still in new york and literally like you i remember driving the approach to brooklyn bridge from like downtown and like you know going back to brooklyn in real life and then doing it in the game you know whatever the analog

to brooklyn was i forget the name now but like be like oh wait that feeling of coming on the on-ramp and going on the bridge and seeing the city kind of like unfold like around you like they nailed that you know like I also felt like they felt like you know they they really captured the on the ground like cross talk overheard street vibe of new york city um and that was really compelling to me for all the like charged word dissonance inside nico as a character i really liked him because that that semi-mournful immigrant experience felt like okay you know one of the ways in which gta4 felt serious was that like uh it wasn't super gleeful at least the character wasn't super gleeful about the things he had to do

right like right right but again the dissonance comes about when like yeah you're told to like you know beat up as many people as you can fuck this shit up and you know basically be as reprehensible as possible um in order to satisfy like the the mechanics of the gameplay and the things that open up the story for you but like he was trying to leave a bad old life behind and i and i felt like that was different than other gta games up until this point where like it didn't feel like this gleeful glorification of like the cd underworld that that they they sketched out evan were you full-time game journalism when this came out yeah yeah yeah so gta4 damn where was i what year was that well would you been crispy gay i guess that had not opened yet that was 2008 oh 2008 so i was

damn freelancing i think i was freelancing 2008 holy shit um that's a long time ago y'all yeah to answer your question justin yes i was i was full time i mean if i was full-time freelancing probably i don't think i was on staff anywhere yet it was wild for a bit that this game like aside from and and i feel like we are probably past the point where gaming like feels like a monoculture in the way that it did at this point but like 2008 when this game came out like the groundswell of people discovering stuff like emulating things in the game like recreating things in real life or like digging into little bits of the the world was like a constant stream of stuff um that everybody was talking about it was like that that was pretty

early in my i'd been at joystick for a year i think when this came out um but but it was that was all anyone was talking about i don't feel like we'll we'll return to that again it was certainly like that uh for gta 5 uh certainly but like uh things are so much more fragmented now than they they were i i do want to mention one thing about GTA 4 in particular, and Evan, you talked about it a little bit, just in terms of recreating the city, and it's actually very fitting that you're here because I think, and we've sort of talked about this previously,

like Miles Morales, this is a very coincidental thing because Miles Morales also, I think, this is a very coincidental thing because miles morales also, I think really strives to, um, recreate, I think very specific parts of New York with like incredible accuracy, which obviously is comes very naturally to you. Haven't grown up there.

I've obviously spent most of my life here as well. What do you think this game does right versus wrong in terms of like doing that stuff? And I don't know, what was sort of the process of doing that with Miles to like make sure that that vibe was also pretty consistent? I remember GTA 4 feeling like, okay, fashion, you know, like you walk past somebody down the street and be like, he's clearly a hype beast, right?

This is a dude who stands in line for new sneakers to drop, you know, like, and you hear him talking on the phone with his friend, like, and you know, that's like a, what a second at best interaction.

But like, right. You repeat that, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of times in the course of the campaign, you're like, Oh,

okay. The people who made this game know this kind of person. Right. And rockstar studios all over the place, but they're the place, but they have a core headquarters in New York, and it felt like they were really drawing on that, right? In a way that didn't feel quite the same to me in San Andreas, right? Like, to me, San Andreas was like, and I know we're going to get there, but to me, San Andreas was, like, largely like largely informed by like 1990s hood flicks.

Right. And it felt like, like it was made at a remove. Right. Um, and part of that, you know, is technological,

you know, but there did feel like a little bit of exotic sensation of what that experience is like for people actually live in those places and live lives and mental that GTA four didn't feel like that, you know, like, yeah, even though Nico's an immigrant from like a named Eastern European country, or maybe they did name it. I can't remember, but like, it felt like the immigrant experience part, you know,

like him driving people around and yapping your ear off like that, that felt like the specific, there's a specificity right that allows you to like render certain textures i'm not talking like graphically i'm talking about like narratively and it felt like sure like the people at rockstar behind that game paid great attention to that i actually know somebody who worked on that game and did photo reference and he would travel all around the city and take pictures of people's apartments and you know interiors not just exteriors and like so they were dedicated to that and you know i can't speak to an entirety of process for miles because i obviously only worked on one part of it but like for my part as consultant i did stress like okay

this is how this part of the city feels i used to live in harlem you know like this is the kind of things you would see on the street you know like there's there's one scene in in the in the early part of the game where miles and ganky are walking to um real morale it's his political rally and that i remember an early version that scene had two musicians playing with each other i'm like yeah like a street drummer and a bucket drummer and a guitarist wouldn't be playing with each other because the bucket drummers are too loud and guitar will drown at the guitarist and if i remember correctly they changed to somebody playing a conga drum and you know like to me that fits better right so you know those

kind of details like the way miles and ganky dressed like i had a lot of say to say about that all these different things about like what it's like to experience new york city like from the ground up as somebody who grew up there and and and putting my experiences back into a character who's growing up there like that's that's that's what i tried to contribute i think the team as a whole strove for that and and you know where it succeeded i think we can we can definitely point at trying to capture a certain kind of like cultural specificity as part of that process and i think gta4 did the same thing you know yeah i i think gta4 is like the first modern gta game i don't know if san andreas was supposed to be set in

modern but like like you said it's clearly riffing on the 90s vice city is clearly the 80s i think gta3 is meant to be a modern i mean it's it's modern but i mean it's it's of its sensibility yeah yeah it's like it's not and it's not pursuing that realism i i will say i think the thing that gta4 gets most wrong about new york is the box art uh the box art you look at it and they're like okay we've got a face of these characters we got a cool car we got a cool gun we got a helicopter and like we need one iconic new york landmark something that people are going to see right in the middle of the box and they're going to say new york city that's

where the game is set the roosevelt Tramway, right in the middle. Everybody's going to know New York. You know it from movies and TV shows. Oh, wait, you don't, actually. Who can forget the Roosevelt Island Tramway? I think GTA 4 is going to get, I mean, as we are right now, because I think we're gonna have an extensive gta5 conversation at some point very soon but is anyone thinking that gta4 wins this

battle against gta5 yeah no way now no i just don't think it does evan personally yeah i think we've given gta4 a very nice nice send-off and a nice discussion. Yeah, it's funny because I'm sitting here like, what am I going to say in favor of GTA 5? You know, not to get ahead of myself. And I'm thinking my pure gut emotional reaction to GTA 5 was different than it was to GTA 4. GTA 4, I was amazed and wowed at what they did,

what they were able to deliver. Like in 5, I wasn't. I mean, you know, we can use that as a segue if you all want, but like the nature of my response was different. And that's probably

because I had different shit going on in my life. But do we cuss on this podcast, by the way? I'm sorry. Yeah, go for it. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to suggest this in the interest of time. I'm going to say we're going to move GTA 5 along just because I think it also should get moved along, but we are going to match it up in the finals against the next two matchups, and then we'll have a very deep conversation about GTA 5. I think that's the best way to do it. I think that sounds good.

One very quick thing about GTA 4, one of the best video game trailers, if not the best video game trailer of all time. The Philip Glass song over just like shots of the world. It's that tired thing of like, the city is a character. But that was like the first time where there was enough going on in the video game city

that you just didn't need to show the game. Yeah. You could just show the city and it was like great i i need to get that immediately totally mind-blowing okay we're gonna move gta 5 along to the next round and uh our next matchup before we get to the finals is gta san andreas versus gta vice city who wants to start i mean look like i said before they're both cartoons right yeah like yeah um they're very broad they're very loud for lack of a better word and and kind of like disproportionate and outlandish in terms of like uh the characters you meet the world building like the details and stuff there's a lot of spoofing and satire right

and i think in both games i give san andreas the edge because there was a bit more like meaningful character dynamics with cj and other characters, it felt like there's, for lack of a better word, like an earnestness in there that wasn't there in Vice City. Like, you know, I can't say I cared about any of the characters in Vice City. Yeah. I mean, you know, you mentioned the Hood movie references that were in San Andreas.

And I think that applies as well to Vice City, but obviously not that genre, but rather like the Scarface genre. Like it's a very clear like redux of Scarface. It's interesting though, because San Andreas, and like a lot of those movies to a certain extent, like had some reality groundedness,

whereas Scarface does, really does not. Like that is not a grounded or like relatable movie in any way whereas San Andreas not only like tells these like the story of like a family and friends and like you know the people you actually care about but also like delves into our real world with the riots towards the end of the game like actually bringing up real world historical context in a gta game is like very weird and very removed from i think anything they've ever done in a game which i don't know how that contrasts with like you were talking about like cartoons and uh you know the cartoon nature of it but like that contrast between the outlandishness of it versus

the like very true real world shit yeah they're just how they're gesturing at some kind of like real world commentary right you know yeah like i think you know for me guys the one kind of guiding principle in in understanding rock stars output for me has been like i tend i tended to think of the Hauser brothers, Damien St. Hauser, who are kind of the creative nucleus of the, the rockstar creative team, um, narratively, at least to me, I've always thought of them as people who basically want to be making movies. Right. But they're not in the movie making business during the game making business. Right.

So I feel like you see these really strong vectors of influence for movies like, you know, boys in the hood men's society on, um, San Andreas. Right. And you see Miami vice,

like Michael Mann's whole Irv, like, um, in vice city, you know, like you, you scar face, like you said,

Russ, like, so I, I feel like you, you understand their output once you realize how strongly they've imprinted off like filmmaking as a creative enterprise, right? You know, and I think we can say fairly that it'd be nice if they edited their games like movies sometimes, you know, in terms of like the sprawl. But I think that that's always helped me understand like what Rockstar is trying to do narratively with their games. And, you know, you can look at like Red Dead Redemption 2 and basically be like, oh,

Deadwood, right? I don't want to be overly reductive, but I feel like, you know, we, we can't ignore the fact that those influences are so strong. Yeah. Justin, where's your head out with it yeah speaking specifically to that it's fast like even in gta 5 which i i know we just talked about but like specific to this franchise and like its relationship to cinema there it will make sacrifices as a game if it serves as a narrative or as like a cinema, a cinematic experience. Like for example, today I was playing GTA five before he hopped on and I did like a stunt jump,

you know what I mean? Off a roof and a info box came up. It's like, here's how you control during a stunt jump and here's how you get like bonuses or whatever. But the camera had switched to like a wild cinematic angle to make it look cool. And I couldn't do any of the things it was telling me to do to control a stunt jump because they wanted it to look cool more than there's like an unusable

camera angle that you can switch to at will to just to make it look like a cool movie. It's like, I'm still playing it. You all know this, you know, I'm playing, you know, I can't control it backwards and then a 30 degree angle, but that's what it expects of you um vice city for me i just think it was a i think a lot of people hold vice city in high regard because it turned it into something that was like really leaned into some of the more gleefully anarchic aspects of gta3 that a lot of people were doing like when we were playing this when i was in college we're playing gta3 when i was in college like we weren't doing the story we would like go into a busy intersection and get a rocket launcher and see how much trouble we could get in with the

cops before they they you know stopped us so like that that was the aspect of GTA 3 that I feel like that anarchy they really leaned into with Vice City. And I also hope that there's a lot of color in it, which, enjoy that whenever it pops up in this franchise, because it's not as frequent as you would hope. They really backpedaled on that for

4. I don't know. I mean, between these two, like, okay, Evan, help me with this. And,

and, and you, I was obviously somebody who has, has worked on in video games. You can, you can speak to this better, but like to me as a white guy and I'm watching in San Andreas, like I feel,

I don't know how much the Hauser brothers are able to refer to like lived experience for this. So like, especially now in the year of our Lord 2021 going back and playing San Andreas, there's like part of me that's like, wow, are you guys just guessing or is this what you've seen in movies or like what? Cause it feels, it feels weird. Yeah. I mean, I mean, again, you've seen in movies or like what because it feels it feels weird yeah i mean i mean look again i'm not a dude who grew up in south central la in compton or whatever the analogs are supposed

to be in san andreas right so like i'm at a remove to that kind of experience too sure but you know i can tell you this as somebody who went to see a lot of the movies that clearly were influential on on san andreas like i could feel the distance right like i could feel like you know okay i don't know if they actually talked to gangbangers but like it feels like they watched a bunch of movies like yeah you know maybe they did talk to gangbangers i don't know you know um i feel like they did the disney thing you know for all the disney animated movies in the 90s where they're like for a week we traveled to china right and saw learned everything there is and i can i i just picture the houses being like for a week we went to la and left

santa barbara yeah no shut up yeah and like the thing of it is, even if they did do their due diligence and research and whatever, the end result still feels so broad, right? Like, you know, these characters feel like caricatures. And it feels like, all right, well, did I at any moment sit down, like san andreas and feel like this is authentic you know no um i didn't have that expectation necessarily mostly because again i knew all right well this is a video game studio that's mostly white dudes probably right i feel confident in saying that sure yeah and you know they were trying to make something cool that probably did not approximate their own lives at all you know yes i mean in the same way honestly not quite one-to-one but like you know vice city obviously not an approximation of any sure but i think i think the notional distance is far greater from yes i completely agree with that i think what like was surprising to me going back and playing these games and i joked about it at the top of these games like just not being fun is holy moly this

series really is like a sports series yeah and that like it's a it is this iterative thing and it just gets better like the actual feel of the game. And I guess in my head I was like, well, yeah, but then there's like the meat of the game. You know, like so many games have like the meat that is like the story or the ideas that makes them interesting and you can go back and have a conversation about it. And I was shocked by how little I actually had to say about either of these games.

Because the meat is like whatever go here and do a thing because this person doesn't want you to or does want you to it's so funny because like the meat is what they think they're best at yeah it really is this bizarre thing of like it's so often they are not playing to their strengths and this entire series of like you created a genre that everybody is trying to rip off, and you can do it, the open world, better than anybody. But you keep playing to the story, and I do think

GTA 5 finally, it's by no means perfect, but at least feels slightly better. It moves quickly, you get to the action fast, and I think, just very quick, I know we're going to talk more about GTA V.

I think that's because narrative TV had come into place and they finally stopped trying to make a two hour movie stretch into like a 30 hour game. And they realized like, oh, really this needs to just be episodic. It needs to be TV episodes. That's a great, I want to return to that when we talk about GTA V because it's really interesting.

I want to shout out san andreas also has um i think you know as iterative as the series is and as much as like each entry just sort of like does not i mean you think you try to compare it to other like long-running action franchises even like um assassin's creed is exponentially more varied uh game to game than, than Grand Theft Auto is. I mean, it is, it is very much a building on a formula. But I think San Andreas did have some more like a higher preponderance of

like weird one-off mechanics that do not make it any further than this. Like the idea of like eating a bunch of hamburgers to put on weight. But that's, that's in Red Dead. Exercise. That's in Red Dead 2 now. So it came back in a way. isn't this like the idea of like eating a bunch of hamburgers to put on weight and exercise that's in Red Dead 2 now so it came back in a way I guess

you know what that's I guess yeah we didn't see it again in 4 and 5 but I guess they moved all the boring stuff to Red Dead I think

this is where we keep our boring ideas in this one this is for books people I think the big differentiator here is

just scale and and it has a lot to do with like the ideas that didn't really go anywhere but like san andreas is obviously a much bigger game i think we can all agree the strengths of these games are the world and if you look at the world of vice city even though i think it's extremely good in recreating that like vibe of like michael mann era miami um it's a it's i mean it's fucking florida it is flat as hell like and you drive down those streets and generally speaking like they are there's not a lot of variety there and then you look at the scope of san andreas which is as i talked about in the last episode it's three full cities plus a shitload of desert. And like the range that you find in San Andreas is the same range that you find in like GTA five.

And I do think that really sets it apart. If the star of these games is the world, unquestionably, San Andreas has a much more interesting, varied world. I think San Andreas edges Vice City out. i think the other thing you know we got to talk about hot coffee right and like not just oh yeah not to mention it just mention it but like you know for those listeners who don't know the hot coffee scandal with grand uh theft auto san andreas was um a hidden gameplay mechanic that was locked away in the code that um basically involves the player character simulating sex with um a female npc it's kind of raunchy and when that's when the

code was discovered rockstar fumbled and said this was a player mod right they said it was they said it was they said it was some something uh that they didn't create and it turned out of course it was and they tried to hide it in the code it was a big scandal a mild scandal by by 2021 terms but like i think to me another kind of fingerprint of how they're conceiving that game right because it's like what is that what was the point of that you know like to get you kind of you know mildly aroused at watching polygonal video game characters you know bump uglies like it's but yeah basically a bunch of cardboard boxes just like slamming right right so like but again when i talk about like it being broad and cartoonish you know like in satirical it's like you know it's almost like a gameplay feature like maybe you could do wheelies

in the game right it's like how long can you hold the wheelie it's like how long can you hump in in in hot coffee it's like you know and then you know like to be less forgiving it's like, you know, and then, you know, like to be less forgiving, it's like, well, again, you saw these kinds of characters being kind of like gross and degrading in the movies, you know, that you were riffing off of reference material. So like, well, we need to have we need to have some hood rats in this game because they're in these movies. And it's just like, like nah you actually don't but right you know the fact that it was conceived and executed and then locked away to me like again shows both the strength of this game in terms of the breadth of experiences they were trying to deliver and also the weaknesses in terms of like it's really shallow ultimately um yeah yeah yeah i mean i think that's a good transition to

gta5 i think this is going to be somewhat anticlimactic in that i think gta5 effectively won and i think we do need to pick a wait we need to advance one of those two and andreas i think it's san andreas yeah um yeah uh but i think gta5 is going to win here i think we're going to spend most of this talking about gta5 but to transition off of um what evan said i i think like that remains the kind of narrative problem and to some degree i think red dead redemption 2 starts to get away from this but it's that they they like chase not lead that they're they're constantly looking at other source material and i think gta 5 works better than the rest because at least they have three protagonists yeah so with that they can say okay well we don't have

to make a 60 hour movie based off of just michael man um you know 50 year old white guy who is depressed he did crime um stories you know, we can do a variety of things. Though, at the same time, still to a fault, I think with, who's the deranged one of the bunch? Trevor.

Trevor. I think, like, that was, again, good intention of splitting up the gameplay where it's like, okay, here is, you know, the true chaos gameplay. Unfortunately, case they're like what do we do for the story there we don't have like a lot of clear examples of just a bad person being the hero so like i don't know like torture

like torture i guess we should just have multiple torture scenes like killing animals it's like oh okay i guess i thought this was supposed to be the fun character but every time you make me do a story mission with him it's heinous um but anyway i i want to talk about why i think this game is great and uh evan you mentioned up top that you you know didn't click with you in the same way that gta 4 did i think i had a little bit of that weirdly it's clicked with me now more than it did then um because we were saying this before we started the show this game came out in 2000 what what year is it fresh it's not 2008. GTA V was 2013. 2013, yeah. So that's eight years ago.

The gap between GTA IV and GTA V was five years. So we're at eight years. We'll probably end up being twice as long of a gap between GTA V and GTA VI at best. It is bonkers how much a Xbox 360 game today, when played on a high-end PC, feels more modern than any other open world games still um it's incredible i mean the design of this game in the world and how alive it feels it's just incomparable is that good because the developers had to crunch and i imagine that the game cost a trillion

dollars and there were probably people whose entire job was just animating like cats um i don't know like i i i don't know about that part of it but it again like is the technological achievement this is the game that like really stands out to me. It's the apotheosis of everything they've tried to do, right? Like, you know, like you could argue that things that are more technically complex or narratively ambitious, like Red Dead Redemption 2, only happen because Five managed to exist, right? You know, like, but you know, part part of going back to what i said before part of why my

response was different to this versus four where gta5 kind of feels like a retread you know like a lot of narratively right like you know franklin is clearly riffing off the stuff they got they did in in san andreas right like and and trevor feels like a protagonist from gta3 right yeah um he's he's a chaos agent you know he's he's basically the character who fucks shit up like narratively and mechanically right in the middle age dude i can't remember his name michael right you know michael yeah yeah he just he just feels like, again, like you said, Plant, a stand-in. Tony Soprano. Exactly.

Exactly. So it feels like, okay, y'all, this is just, in that way, like notionally, if you trace back the ideas where these characters came from, it feels like greatest hits you know i remember there was one rumor that before the game came out that it was like it was actually gonna be assembling the protagonists of prior gta games like as like a dream team and they didn't do that like narratively and in the details of characters but they did do it in terms of like the archetypes right? Yeah, it's pretty close. The best rumor I ever heard about this game, and almost certainly not true, was that at the end of the game, you do your final heist, everything has gone well,

and then you switch to the POV of a fourth character who is a woman cop, and you effectively are hunting down the three protagonists. To this day, I'm bummed that that was like... It's one of those things I had heard and I was like, oh my gosh, this game's going to rule. And then when I played the game and it's like,

they do a version of that that's kind of what the ending is, but with the characters who you've already been with. Yeah. But again, it's like, I want to pull us a little bit away from the story because it's just so obviously still a mess. Right. I think in the terms of what these games are

and what they do well, which are these worlds, the GTA V world is similar to what San Andreas was to Vice City. Yeah. The sheer scope of it and scale of it. The sheer scope of it and the variety that is in play. I mean, it's nuts. Again, replaying it this week, I just forgot how big it is.

I thought in my head it would be one of those things like when you go back to your elementary school as an adult and you're like, wow, the ceilings are so low. It would be like, oh, you you know at the time it must have been you know a big open world but now whatever and i got in and i was just driving and driving and driving and just forgetting entire chunks of the game exist between you know when you leave the city and you start going up state um and and a lot of that isn't even used in the campaign like it was later used in online right most of that map there's like you know casinos and side towns that you just never

ever go to in the campaign and i remember i was thinking like why spend all this time and energy to create this thing and obviously it's paying off now because they have this incredibly profitable online system that's using it but pretty wild uh i actually think it was funny going back and watching the michael stuff um and and talking about lived experience earlier i feel like this idea of a middle-aged dude wrestling with his crime-ridden past and then wondering if it's worth it to like try it one more time like feels very that feels like a lived experience that the housers were probably connecting with pretty deeply yeah like his sort of like what does it all mean midlife crisis vibe i bet was drawn i mean not to project uh but like was drawn from a good amount of life experience there like uh is there enough in the tank to do this again like is you know is

it worth it what have i wrought yeah um because i feel like they this franchise is always sort of at odds with itself in the sense of like wanting to shame every facet of popular culture. And even in a sense, like shame, what itself is doing in the sense of like desensitization and, and what have you, but having its cake and eating it too, like still like,

no, it's still hyper-violent and, and, and stuff. It's just like other stuff is too. Have you ever thought about that? Yeah. Twist. We're aware. We get it. Yeah.

I do think the story going back, it is more enjoyable on a scene by scene basis. The jokes still don't work. I just wish it didn't try to have a sense of humor because it's bonkers how much it's still like the punchline is like still don't work i just wish it didn't have a sense of try to have a sense of humor because it's like it's it's bonkers how much it's still like the punchline is like people aren't like me

like yeah just so hateful at times um and and that is the thing that as the kind of like senior leadership of this company starts to leave which has started to happen i i'm curious what a grand theft auto looks like next um and like honestly hopeful because i think it's that kind of like weird neoliberal thing of like i think the housers have good intentions they just don't put them in their art effectively. Right. Yeah. And they don't realize that other people could speak to things better than them. Yeah. It's just an incredible sense of control. Yeah, I mean, I agree with all that you said.

I also think, most importantly, of all of the things, the Housers were chasing one dream through this entire series, and it was to recreate heat. And finally having a lifelike version of Los Angeles means they get to do their dream. It's amazing that they didn't just finish that level and then walk off into the sunset.

It is so core to their idea. I think we should pick a winner here, as lame as that sounds, after a very interesting discussion. But it seems like we're leaning... It's San Andreas versus GTA 5. Okay, can I say one more thing about San Andreas? Sure, yes.

I was replaying San Andreas, and there's an exchange. I looked it up so I could quote it exactly. Sweet says to CJ, if you don't respect your body, ain't nobody gonna respect you. Looking too skinny, CJ, you need to pack on some muscle. To which CJ responds, if I wanted nagging, I'd buy a clockwork wife. Wow.

What? A what? What is that? Excuse me, what? That was the line everybody decided on? If I wanted nagging, I'd buy a clockwork wife? I mean, these scripts are like 900 pages long, so I'm not surprised that something snuck in there.

It had to be like, that's one step above Lipsom or Amaya. That's hilarious. A clockwork wife. I couldn't believe it. Like when I heard it, like, really? That's what we, huh? Okay. i heard like really that's what we huh okay i mean is uh is anyone uh torn over the no i have to get it's you know it if nothing i mean we have not talked about mechanics hardly at all but i do

have to say that like going back and playing five uh now it still feels pretty good i mean it's still there's some weirdness especially with checkpointing which is an absolute disaster um still to this day like has not been i had one where i was like had to climb up this entire building and take a picture and then they were like uh you know get okay come on back down i'm like i'm just gonna jump off and it'll checkpoint me back here i'm pretty sure that won't work i'd jump off and it checkpoint me back at the beginning of the climb like 15 minutes ago um but control wise and driving the cars is really fun uh in five i i think i think five has to take it which is like seems like the most boring possible outcome it does i mean you know talking about that just, I think one of the things that Five,

again, I said it's like the apotheosis of everything they tried to do. Like, I mean, we've all been around video games and specifically Rockstar games long enough to remember things like Midnight Club, like table tennis, you know? Like the other things they did. And it feels like every little bit of learning they got from anything they made before this,

they put into Five, you know know so as like a mechanical achievement you're like right okay they also did those things and somehow some way like the fact that they made table tennis like informs you know some of the games you can play in the bar you know like like that kind of stuff where like and the character creator too you know like it just feels like it's all part of um everything that they ever made going into one experience and not not leaving a lot of the things that they have learned out i mean just like literally everything we've learned good and the bad here's all of it that we've got um well congratulations to grand theft auto 5 a video game that has not been topped because they haven't tried to do it um i feel like speaking real quickly to that because we kind of joked about grand theft auto 6 i feel like um

the speed at which culture is moving now at grand theft auto 6 would be impossible like the people that would be the bag especially the relationship between like people and police is so so different than it was in 2013 i don't know how you return to it like unless they want to go like full third rail and try to tell you know now we're getting both the criminal like you were talking about like both the criminal and try to tell you know now we're getting both the criminal like you were talking about like both the criminal and the the the cop perspectives but like woof i don't know y'all i don't know how they how they go back well i think it has to be like set in the 60s or something yeah exactly right something like that is yeah yeah i mean obviously it's funny just

because like that relationship hasn't changed is just yeah way perspective uh better like more accurately presented in pop culture so like it's funny how they would like be a better portrayal it would be a more authentic portrayal of that yeah i don't know i mean they'd have to it has to be in mars speaking of gta6 i feel like one of the reasons we saw such a rabid hunger for cyberpunk 2077 is because like it seemed like a familial successor right to the ambition of of of of gta games you know obviously it's an open world game we're just all driving and shooting and whatnot, but it feels like, okay, we want big,

broad satire, social commentary, incisive insights into power dynamics insofar as Rockstar ever tried to deliver that stuff. And they did try. I think people were hoping CD Projekt Red would do the same thing in Cyberpunk. And probably the people at cd project red were hoping they would deliver the same thing in cyberpunk you know but i feel like the reason people were so

anxious for that game to come out and be like a polished experience that it wasn't at launch was because they you know it's been so long since rockstar has put out something new yeah i also feel like we need to talk about the soundtracks we haven't talked about the soundtracks oh my god so i i want to go too deep into the soundtracks uh because i know that we have uh like no time and an out but the one thing that i do think we should go through is what is your favorite song plus moment like for me favorite needle drop yeah yeah like needle drop flashing lights going over the brooklyn bridge for the first time in gta4 is like that just rules yeah finally are getting into manhattan it's like unforgettable for me of uh of a moment

news games i mean you you stole mine chris nice i did i had i feel like i remember a mission with two minutes to midnight blaring yeah in vice city is is the best like that was actually gonna be mine russ that's so strange yeah that uh that soundtrack i mean i talked about it last episode too just like beat for beat stellar you can listen to the whole thing covering a ton of different genres from like cuban jazz fusion to uh you know hip-hop to um you know a pop michael jackson and you, it just runs the gamut. I don't think there's ever been a soundtrack that matches that in my personal taste, but yeah. I guess we have real briefly,

anything else anybody's been playing that they want to plug? They want to mention? I finished Nier Automata. I'm not going to talk about it now because I have a lot of thoughts on it, but I did finish it. Let's do another episode on Nier Automata. I'm not going to talk about it now because I have a lot of thoughts on it, but I did finish it. Let's do another episode on Nier Automata for sure.

Did you finish it, finish it, finish it, Russ? I finished it, finished it, finished it, yes. I better have because I don't have a save file anymore. Every minute. He kept texting me. I love this game. Can I have more? And I was like, don't worry, there's more.

Many thoughts, but we'll say that i i finished uh near replicant which uh you can by this point read about that on polygon.com and i will i'll save talking more about that game for maybe next week or the week after oh god near all near episode all near um yeah i played uh i've been playing this adventure game called Darkside Detective. The sequel came out this week, but I've been playing the original. And if you like old-style point-and-click adventure games that are episodic, where it doesn't get too bogged down uh very light and breezy and pleasant it's a great series i'll talk more about it after i played the second one next week let's

see i've been so busy with work that i've been in my habit of twice daily hades runs um you gotta keep you gotta keep yeah i know i was it's funny because it's funny you say that justin because hades is the first game in a long time where i'm like, I don't, I can't afford to lose the muscle memory here. I can't afford to like, yeah, I got to remember how to play this game because there's apparently still so much I need to do. I need to get, you still need to reconcile Olympus with, uh, the chthonic gods of the underworld. So, you know, I gotta just, you know, keep getting good at that.

Um, uh, fuck the heat meter though. And if not you, who will, you know what I mean? If um oh fuck the heat meter though and if not you who will exactly you know what i mean if that's a responsibility evan you're taking it seriously so i've been playing that and i've also been playing you know every so often like maybe once or a week or so i'll get a ghost of shusima legends run in um and i man i love that that multiplayer that game like you know it's very you know standard issue but i think the atmosphere and it gives me like uh yes do i want to be a samurai um um archer who like can shoot people five people at once yes i absolutely do i'll take that as long as often as you can

give it to me so that's what i've been playing uh well evan thank you so much for joining us where can people find more of of you if they if they are in the market for that um you know my twitter is is at evnark at evnark um go uh read rise of the black panther uh the new day comic when it comes out this summer play spider-man miles morales uh and there's other stuff i can't talk about but um you know maybe when i can't talk about it you guys can have you back yeah we'd love to sounds good all right thanks y'all for listening uh be sure to you know rate and review and all that stuff uh the people are prone to do next week uh i don't want to say what we're going to do next week because i think it's far from a sure thing i'm tired of having to backpedal on this show.

So you'll find out. It might just be me talking about Nier for like two hours. It might just be a whole show about Nier. It's going to motivate us to figure out how to get the other thing to happen. Yeah, get your ad spots purchased now, Coca-Cola, because it is going to be a massive, massive episode. Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to join us again next time for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends get the world's best games? Besties!