Tony Prince a.k.a Gay Tony is Liberty City’s top gay and straight nightclub owner, and is about to get himself involved in a diamond deal, and things aren’t going to go well for him. So it’s your job as Luis Lopez the game’s protagonist to get your boss out of these situations. Unlike previous GTA outing’s where some missions are farfetched it soon dawns on you the situations you end up in could be quite explainable when it comes back to your boss – Gay Tony. While the story is refined and great new additions are added you won’t be able to access old clothing stores for new apparel or visit the comedy clubs to see the digital versions of Frankie Boyle, Kat Williams or Ricky Gervais as you could previously in the lost and the damned. It seems you are given a lot of brand new content at the sacrifice of old content, which is quite a shame as it seems somewhat inconvenient to load up an old save to do a particular mini game you want to play because you are restricted. It’s a shame but its the very first negative thing one will most likely notice. With this out the way the things you are given to replace what is lost are bigger and better with a focus one ‘Extravagance’.

The Ballad of Gay Tony [TBoGT] gives you dancing, dance-offs, drinking games, golf, illegal cage fighting, and that old san Andreas favourite base jumping. While most of these provide a handful of achievements to them, some don’t but add some funny consequences. From drinking too much and finding yourself in the middle of a lake, or half way up a skyscraper, personally how Luis ends up in half the places he does after consuming too much alcohol seems like a mini adventure all of their own. Dancing provides its own non-complex mini game, where if you dance well enough you can turn the entire dance floor into a line dance of modern dance, using QTE’s to pull some nice moves off, and even getting into American Pie style dance off’s with cliché gay men with equally hilarious motives.



Once Tony calls you up because he has finally gotten himself into too much trouble you begin to meet some of Liberty City’s shadier character’s from more Russia mobsters, to a crazy Iranian businessman with literally more money than sense, voiced by the hilarious comedian Omid Jalili, who’s character Yusef Amin has previously been talked about in the GTA storyline but never seen until now, with gold cars, and even taking a new chopper called the buzzard and turning that gold too. Brucie also makes a surprising comeback this time with some sibling rivalry with some missions, along with multiple cameo’s by other GTA IV staple characters.

Luis Lopez unlike some previous GTA characters you play as has a lot of background work attached to him, with his past catching up to him in his old neighbourhood, to his out of town family shown in pictures and email at the local tw@ internet cafes, to old friends who are a card short of a full deck, and using their street knowledge get the card for them and make a tidy sum of money helping them set up a lucrative drug empire.

Rockstar Games have been very well known for pushing boundaries and breaking them in some cases, but if the news got all a flutter about one 2 second nude scene in Mass Effect TBoGT is the videogame equivalent of the Karma Sutra, you can literally end up having a sexual encounter two minutes into the game along with more graphic encounters later in the game. This is one piece of DLC definitely establishing itself to an 18+ market and something that if you let your kids play can be fully laid at the parent’s feet.



With TBoGT being the final piece of DLC and the send off party for Liberty City it is a good one, with more new weapons to get your hands on, and is a access all areas pass to the sex, drugs and Shirley Bassey of the nightlife scene controlled by Tony Prince, this packs in about thirty hours of solid gameplay with story and mini games to play first time around. While this review focuses on the final content of GTA IV if you missed The Lost and The Damned you should consider buying the disc version of GTA: Episodes from Liberty City as not only will you get the other side to the story, you will also get a extra radio station for TBoGT in the shape of Vice City FM.

If you didn’t like GTA IV because it wasn’t San Andreas, you may now need to reconsider GTA IV as a valid update as while it doesn’t have a jet pack, it has everything else and more in what can truly be called the true experience of Liberty City with Niko, Johnny and Luis this is a city just too big with history for one point of view. Rockstar have painted a great picture and no matter where the console GTA game goes next, you can guarantee they will have their finger on the pulse of society and give you a gritty comedic experience the only Rockstar Games can deliver.