The best way to play GTA4 these days is with DXVK and several mods to fix things which never worked in the PC version, or have broken since, and to make the graphics less bad. Is that the way I just played through the entire game? Haha, no! I set all this up and then played through it on the Xbox because I wanted to be on the couch.
The most interesting thing about playing GTA4 for me now is how particular it is to 2008.
The phone’s not a smartphone. It was the very last year before they got everywhere and started changing everything. You use the phone to make calls and hold numbers. You can dial 911 to bring cops. You end up with no missions to go to so you flip through your contacts and call people to see if they have work, or (I guess) want to hang out. That’s not even a way people use a phone now. It must seem like such a weird random video game contrivance if you’re a few years younger than me.
Smartphones showed up and became ubiquitous in such an overnight way that the game doesn’t even know about them to make fun of them. Instead it makes fun of expensive ringtones, which weren’t even supported on the first smartphones, so those jokes stopped working almost immediately and now barely feel like jokes at all.
GTA5 still has the phone, but it’s smartphone-era and it’s shit, it doesn’t feel good. Smartphones are too complex and unwieldy for it to work. It’s weird: the phone felt like a stupid cumbersome over-simulation when the game came out, when for about a year it was a depiction of a contemporary phone, but now it feels like a fun, nostalgic little thing you can be fond of. You have to remind yourself that this wasn’t on purpose.
It’s bizarre to think what a different world 2008 was. This game has you going to Internet Cafes and doing online dating that isn’t through apps, because there’s functionally no such thing as an app until next year. I remember leaving a movie ten minutes early in 2008, because I had to catch the last bus home, and I didn’t have money for a taxi, and there was no way to send me money in a way that would arrive the same day, so if I missed it I’d have to call someone for a lift, and they wouldn’t have GPS, because nobody did. Which would never happen now, because it would have been a cheap Uber, and if I didn’t have the money PayPal or something would let me do it anyway, and if it didn’t, someone could instantly send me money, or my phone would tell me where to walk to find a bus that was still running.
I’ve never thought GTA succeeds on any level as a satire, being firmly on the “contributing to that which it intends to criticise” end of that spectrum, although I don’t particularly credit it with even intending to criticise anything, which would require more thoughts than I think you can fit in a Houser. Even in the most generous read of their awkward-preteen-level broken-record “satire”, it’s a satire of a culture the creators aren’t a part of, and is therefore cowardly as shit. But it does at least observe the state of the world and try to depict some version of it, and that makes GTA4 interesting, because smartphones changed everything so drastically and suddenly that this is now an Artifact, accidentally significant, quirky and charming in ways they could never have managed on purpose.
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