If there is one game I regret buying in the entirety of my life, it is Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV. Very infrequently do I buy a game new, especially not 360 games. However, I gave into the peer pressure of 10/10 after 10/10 after 10/10 after 10/10 given to the game by the media. I plan to never make that mistake again.

At the end of last year, I reviewed the game on my IGN blog, which you may feel free to read here. Note, it is very long, and has no pictures. Nor, sadly, will this article, because I'm not funny, and can't make funny captions. Unless, like my last one, CTZ decides to put in pictures of animals, which would be cute!

If you'd rather skip that, know that I gave the game a 3.0/10. Yeah, I really hated it.

Several months later, while searching up my various usernames on Google, I noticed that the fifth entry for "ANBUKaptain" (one of my three frequently used online handles) was a Gamespot forum thread created about me, and about my review, titled "haha this review".

I had made such an impact that someone on an entirely different gaming website made a thread about me? Holy shit! I was somebody! Well, not really, but it was still kind of cool. I was intrigued by what insightful discussion could come about with regards to my textual lashing of many people's Game of the Year.

Well? Ummm....,

A good number of people called me a liar for imparting my experience with the game. Saying I didn't actually see pop-up when I did, or that I had never driven a car when I bashed the game for having realistic car physics. Some of their points are kind of sort of valid, but my favorite is the very last one, and the one which incited this entire post.

[i]"I agree with some of his points, but for a good part of the review, he is blaming the game when it is apparent that the real problem is that he is absolutely terrible at it.

For example, he blames the driving mechanics for doing a 180 turn when trying to turn a corner. That has *never* happened to me, even when I first played the game. If he is so terrible at driving in the game, then it's unfair to blame the driving mechanics.

Then he blames the auto-aim system for not aiming at the person he wants. That's why you have the ability to cycle through enemies! If Rockstar invent an auto-aiming system that can read a person's mind and aim at the exact place they want, then fine, but until then we have to settle with this."[/i]

I bow humbly to the master of GTA's driving, I truly do. So too do I bow humbly to a man who can take a terrible design flaw like a targeting system that will target a running passerby over someone attempting to put a bullet into my brain and attempt to justify it with irrelevant and backwards logic.

But that's not the point. The point is that (and I'm sorry it took so long to get here), I do suck at GTAIV. I suck at it a lot. Damn near every single complaint I had with the game really boiled down to the fact that I had to do a number of the missions over again (from the beginning due to the lack of checkpoints).

Something about GTAIV's difficulty curve was always off-putting to me. Certain missions early and late into the game would be finished on the first try, while others sprinkled liberally throughout would take me damn near 15 or 20. I would fail a mission, try it again, and fail it again, and try it again, and fail it again, and so on and so forth.

As I did this, the game's basic flaws became more and more apparent, and my ability in the game decreased even further as I focused on those instead of the actual game itself.

Let's take, for example, a mission where you are charged with finding... something in some old abandoned warehouse, I think it was cocaine (the specific details have disappeared over time, as I have refused to touch the game since I finished it. I'm sorry for the vagueness.)

Anyways, you get past some druggies standing on metal beams and other completely nonsensical things, you grab the drugs and the SWAT team appears, insta 3 star rating.

I tried this mission upwards of 30 times. By the end, I started getting pretty creative with my attempts at outwitting the cops. For example, I rode a motorcycle into the warehouse, and attempted to ride it out so I would be on the move from the beginning, making the chase less difficult. Unfortunately, I made a wrong turn and took a shotgun blast to the face.

Eventually, my friend told me that there was a boat at the dock behind it, which would have made everything so much easier. There was not, however, one there, and I spent 20 minutes killing some people in a boat, swimming over, stealing their boat, and bringing it back to the dock. This time, fortunately, I succeeded, but at that point I didn't even care anymore.

I suck at GTAIV. Not at open-world games in general, just at GTAIV. I could never make the auto-aim work for me, and turning it off made it impossible to see any enemies in the dark indoor areas (of which there were too many).

I couldn't make the driving work because I didn't want a driving simulator, I wanted Godfather's driving engine, which is basically tantamout to a Mario Kart game. If I wanted to drive from place to place, I'd hop into my car and fucking do it. At least my town actually has colors to look at. Instead of compromising, I found motorcycles and sports cars as often as possible (which came about as close to Mario Kart-style handling as any of the cars), but those broke due to my inability to keep the cars from crashing within a couple of minutes.

I couldn't make any of my friends like me because I couldn't do any of those irritating minigames.

I couldn't figure out "obvious" solutions, sometimes attempting to do things like stack vehicles on top of each other in order to get onto a roof because I couldn't find the correct door that opened it (although I partly blame that on every door looking the same). I attempted really obscure tricks trying to break the engine to work like I thought it should work because I could never get into the mindset of its creators.

In short, I failed at it. It took me months and months to beat GTAIV. Eventually I did, and I felt no sense of accomplishment at the end, only regret. It was a waste of money and a waste of time, but it taught me a lesson.

Never buy a game that strives for realism.

Because I will suck at it.