The City as Fast Track, Full of Explosive Cars and Characters (original) (raw)

Video Game Review | Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony

The City as Fast Track, Crammed With Explosive Vehicles and Characters

Just another way to while away the day in Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony, which is to be released on Thursday.Credit...Rockstar Games

Oct. 28, 2009

As I drove over the Manhattan Bridge in a gold Rolls-Royce on my way to help steal a moving subway car, Yusuf Amir, my friendly neighborhood billionaire playboy, was trying to buck up my courage.

After all, as part of Yusuf’s continuing quest to please his father back in the Persian Gulf, I had already stolen a military helicopter off a yacht in the harbor (before blowing up the ship with the chopper’s rockets) and commandeered a small tank from the Department of Homeland Security (before reducing a squad of police cars and tactical vans to charred husks along the East River Drive).

So why should the prospect of detaching the lead car from an elevated subway and then airlifting it straight off the tracks with a cargo helicopter faze us now? As Yusuf so aptly put it: “The city is our playground, homey!”

No entertainment experience has conveyed the feeling that New York really is your personal playground more convincingly than the Grand Theft Auto IV suite, which opened about 18 months ago with the story of Niko Bellic, a tough Balkan war veteran. (New York is called Liberty City in the game and all landmarks, brands and locations have fictitious but recognizable names.) This spring came the first downloadable G.T.A. 4 expansion, The Lost and Damned, about a New Jersey biker gang. And now the saga comes to a rollicking conclusion with the introduction on Thursday of The Ballad of Gay Tony, which is being released both as a downloadable expansion on the Xbox Live network and as a stand-alone disc packaged with The Lost and Damned. (In other words, it is not yet available for the PlayStation 3.)

With Gay Tony, Rockstar Games has gleefully ripped the final vestiges of plausible realism away from Liberty City in favor of over-the-top action including skydiving off the Empire State Building and engaging in helicopter dogfights over the city.

Video

This new episode of Grand Theft Auto IV is available for download only for the Xbox 360 via Microsoft's Xbox Live Internet service.

And you’ll be conducting your escapades in style. The original G.T.A. 4 and Lost and Damned spent most of their time in the gutter of the criminal world with street trash, drug peddlers in the projects and filthy packs of coked-out bikers. Now you get to hang out with coked-out kingpins in their penthouses. Exotic cars and weapons are easy to come by. Instead of the thrash metal of Lost and Damned, the soundtrack in Gay Tony is mostly cool lounge tunes and disco dance numbers. Lost and Damned was gritty; Gay Tony is flashy and not afraid to flaunt its assets.

And that’s just Gay Tony the game. Gay Tony the character is a homosexual Manhattan nightclub owner who is trying to hold his small entertainment empire together as he becomes enmeshed with the typical G.T.A. mélange of smugglers, drug dealers and other gangsters. You, the character, are Luis Lopez, a Dominican hood from uptown who is Tony’s best friend and business partner.

An equal-opportunity offender, the Grand Theft Auto series has never shied away from epithets of any kind, and Gay Tony is no exception. In Liberty City degenerates and dirtbags come in all sizes, shapes, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations. Like many Grand Theft Auto protagonists, Luis is a voice of reason (relatively speaking) who is forced to rescue a series of lowlifes, including Tony, from problems of their own making. Though Gay Tony and the other recent G.T.A. installments are chock-full of wanton violence against police and criminals, the games are careful to cast you not as a psychopathic maniac bent on simple destruction but as a somewhat reluctant criminal journeyman just doing what he has to do to survive in his world.

Gay Tony is certainly a high-velocity action ride, but what has made the Grand Theft Auto IV games so special has been not the shooting and driving but the glistening writing and acting and the sheer depth of detail Rockstar has devoted to capturing the diversity of New York. I have not seen a recent film or television show with snappier New York patois than Gay Tony. Most Grand Theft Auto technical production is in Britain, but Dan Houser, the main G.T.A. writer, is based in New York and his penchant for simultaneously glamorizing and satirizing bad guys is unrivaled.

Gay Tony is one of those great, rare games in which you can lose yourself for hours just exploring and discovering new things to do. Race some boats or cars. Shoot a game of pool. Watch some high-quality satirical television. Skydive off a tower in Midtown. Dance with the ladies at the club. Or just drive around listening to the radio.

I have no idea where the Grand Theft Auto series will go next, but here’s my vote for London. The Rockstar team has done New York, Los Angeles (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) and Miami (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City). I hope they can now turn their deliciously insightful creative eye to their home turf.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section

, Page

of the New York edition

with the headline:

The City as Fast Track, Crammed With Explosive Vehicles and Characters. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT