Free trial GTA IV Live party week!

Don't get me wrong, Grand Theft Auto IV is one hell of game. After the bloated but light-hearted zany comedy of GTA III:San Andreas, GTA IV returned to it's roots - the darker more serious mafia infested New York. Oh, sorry I meant Liberty City. With a new game engine to take advantage of next-gen tech, Liberty City had never looked or felt so gorgeous. The game is a lot darker and grittier, the main character Nico can be more sympathised with and the cars handling is a lot heavier - grounding their existence to the game world more thoroughly.

But once the gloss became less of a novelty, it did feel to me like the same old GTA. Number Four had inherited the series' greatness but also it's flaws, perhaps the biggest of which being returned back to the start of a long chained mission that you had repeatedly failed already four or five times. Added to that my relentless attraction to what my PC can offer (Lord of the rings Online, Trackmania, Blogging, Surfing etc etc), well my 360 started gathering dust a couple of months after GTA IV had been released, uncompleted.

I only came out for some milk!

However, to celebrate the release of The Lost and Damned (The first GTA IV new content chapter exclusive to 360) M$ are letting Live gamers play GTA IV multiplayer for free all this week (17th-22nd Feb). What great timing I thought, as I had planned to have a GTA IV session this week anyway (see previous post) and I had not yet tried GTA IV on Multiplayer. I refuse to pay M$ for the privilege of playing multiplayer on my 360, especially when I have a PC that I can play most of the same games for free.

Hesitantly I chose Deathmatch, the other many game modes did not seem to have any participants at the time (10am!). After getting quickly killed five times while adjusting to this strange new multiplayer environment, I started to recollect the controls and got drawn into Liberty City...

Two hours vanished in a blink of an eye, wow! I have not had this much fun playing, well anything for years. Do you remember how exciting Deathmatch Doom was all those years ago when MP was in it's infancy? Everything was new, exploring new strategies and contemplating all the limitless possibilities. Well GTA IV MP is there. It is just so refreshing being in an open vast living city in a multiplayer game and not having a First-Person-Perspective like most other Deathmatch games.

From stalking parks to building sites strafing your rifle as you go or firing rockets along main street Downtown or maybe grabbing a car to ram your opponent or get involved in a car chase shoot out through the city. The big gunfight in the movie Heat springs to mind. All this action is going on in the same map. Some bugger even found a helicopter from somewhere! The fact GTA IV also introduced 'Hide-behind' to the series a la Gears of War also adds to the action. I thought the play area would be cordoned off for MP for more focused play, but the expansive city works because you can see your enemies location on the on-screen radar so everybody just homes in on each other. It's a blast! Even if you do find yourself a few blocks away from the action, it's not like you have to run in GTA ;). DeathMatch seems to suit Sandbox gaming very well indeed if GTA IV is anything to go by...

My xbox live gamer tag is matty080476