monkeyplus1

PLENTY has been said about almost every aspect of GTA IV, though the multiplayer free-mode has only received passing mention that it exists. 16 people online, in a giant city, most of them wearing headsets so they can talk out loud to other players.

Since “fucking around” is my number one past-time in GTA games, I naturally gravitated toward the multiplayer fuck-around that is “free mode”. People either love or hate sandbox style play. I think the haters simply lack imagination, and don’t know how to entertain themselves.

In some of the free mode games I’ve played, everybody does what they want, minding their own business. It gives players a completely stress-free way to take in the entire city. But these games aren’t too exciting.

The next step, a couple people run across each other, and one says, “hey, jump in my car, let’s go cop-killing.” Getting a wanted-level is an easy way to ratchet up the excitement. Then there is the occasional homicidal maniac, who just wants to rampage on all the other players.

The most fun I’ve had is where there is at least one A-type domineering personality in the game, who becomes a self-appointed leader of a gang. These people immediately recruit players into their crew, depending on whether he thinks they’re cool and if they want to roll in a crew.

My role in free-mode is usually flying a helicopter, picking up people that want to go somewhere fast, or join up with other players.

In one game, the A-type person convinced everyone to get on one of two massive tugboats that are floating in the river (one west of Alderney, one in the channel between Algonquin and Broker). I ferried people via helicopter, carrying two or three people at a time, and dropped them off while hovering over the aft deck of the boat. Many were already armed with rocket launchers.

They then slowly sailed toward each other while I watched from high above, and played a hilariously impromptu game of battleship against each other. I would have never thought of it.

In another game, the A-type person recruited me and three other people flying helicopters. Anyone joining the free-mode, or not having previously declared allegiance to our crew, was suspect. The self-declared leader would designate some point on the map for his crew to rendezvous, and then we’d go check in on the other players to see if they were cool.

For example, the leader had everyone meet at the top of a particular building in downtown, where there was ample space for all four of our helicopters to land. We pilots were responsible for giving everyone not flying a lift up there - everyone in our crew that is.

The leader then looked at the map to see where everyone else was, and would tell each of us pilots to go hover over another player. Once there, we’d say, “if you wanna be in our crew, don’t shoot.”

But there has to be villains. I tracked down another player, and as I was approaching him and coming to a hover, he heard my rotors and fired an RPG up at me. I barely missed it, but the concussion smalled my helicopter into a a nearby building, setting off the damage alarm. With thick black smoke and fire spewing out of my turbines, I managed to get myself back to the heliport to get a fresh bird, on the way yelling into my microphone “BillyX is NOT COOL! HE JUST FIRED A ROCKET AT ME!” (or whatever his gamertag was).

On my way back, BillyX managed to shoot down another helicopter in my crew, and took out a car-ful of my homies from a well-concealed position in the pre-dawn darkness of Libery City.

We were all steaming mad, and the leader had us all meet up at the north end of the airport.

It took about 15 minutes, but once assembled, we were ready to go after this guy. We had four choppers, each carrying a non-flying crew person in rear of the helicopter, aiming their machine guns out.

Armed to the tits we were ready just as the sun began to rise in the east and dawn broke over the city. With the sun behind us, all four of us lifted off the tarmac, and nosed-down toward BillyX. We knew what we were going to do, so it was quiet for a minute except for the pounding of the rotors.

I was in a silent reverie of the scene in front of me, the morning sun casting glowing colors on the city, the sparkling water of the ocean, the three other birds in close formation, flown by real people, each bristling with gunners, also real people, hanging out the sides. Ride of the valkyries!

It was our own little Apocalypse Now in Liberty City, genuinely breath-taking, and BillyX was about to have a world of shit rain down on him.

A moment later, someone must have been equally moved and said, “This is the best game. Ever.”

Everyone broke into a laugh. It was a beautiful scene indeed.

We found BillyX. I dropped a sniper off on a high-roof, and a guy with a rocket-launcher in an intersection, careful not to damage my main rotor. BillyX had recruited some friends of his own, so for the next hour or so, we had a full-on battle.  In the course of the battle, one of BillyX’s crewmembers in a chopper used his rotor to cut the tail end off my helicopter.  Without the tail, the torque from the main rotor causes a helicopter to start spinning.  I had minimal control at that point, but managed to make a decent crash-landing in an open  intersection, and emerged wounded -but alive- from my mangled bird. I ducked into an alley for cover, looked at my map for the nearest heavy-weapon, and hunted down the motherfuckers who’d been shooting up at me.

There’s no points or time-limit in free-mode. I don’t know how long we fucked around. The next day, the type-A guy I’d played with before invited me to another free-mode. By the time I joined, the shit was already in full effect.

The leader had picked out the Sprunk factory in Alderney to be our base. And being the Type-A person, had already made a number of enemies in the anti-type-A players, and the shit was going down.

The game we played, as defined by the players, was to defend the base at all costs. Again, I choppered people to and from the base, either because they were killed and re-spawned a few blocks away and wanted a quick ride back to the roof, of because they were out of ammo and needed resupply. The roof of the Sprunk factory doesn’t leave a lot of room to land a chopper, so frequently I’d set the two main wheels down on the roof so my passengers could safely get on and off, but with my tail hanging out in the air over the side of the building.

After successfully repelling a half dozen attacks, the team leader had everyone left alive get to the roof, and I evacuated them out to regroup elsewhere. We let the enemy take the base over, and then the roles were reversed. We would then assault the Sprunk factory to recapture our base.

Occasionally, one enemy would get really lucky and take out a few people in our crew at time. The leader would then declare an all-out war on that one person, who sometimes chooses that point to leave the game.

It’s not always that much fun, it really depends on the players to make their own fun. Some get it, some don’t. And the ones that don’t get fucked up!

in GTA IV, I was taking my friend Little Jacob out for something to eat, and while following behind me, the camera accidentally placed itself inside his skull.

Lookat dem red-eyes, breda.

I’ll spare you most details about what I think of GTA IV, other than to say it’s great, it deserves the 10/10 scores it has received across the board. Game of the Year, easy.

What I was most curious about was what it feels like to fly the helicopters, since that has barely been mentioned in any review or podcast I’ve come across.  The instruction manual doesn’t say much either.

I joined a multiplayer match in “Free Mode”, drove myself to Heli Tours (on the SE tip of Algonquin), and found 4 or 5 Blackhawk-esque helicopters there.

The right-trigger lifts the helicopter up (”pulling pitch” on the collective), the left lowers the helicopter.

The right-bumper pivots the helicopter to the right around it’s center axis, the left goes the other way. In a hover, you can pivot in place.

The left thumbstick tilts the entire helicopter in the direction you’re pushing.

To move forward, for example, you push the left thumbstick up while pulling some pitch on the right trigger to maintain altitude.

As in the past GTA games, the helicopter will level itself out if you don’t touch the controls, though you will still retain some directional inertia of the way you had been traveling.  This is not like the Battlefield mod “Desert Combat”, where if you are rolling the helicopter and take your hands off the controls, it will continue rolling.

Compared to other next-gen games featuring a helicopter, GTA IV’s choppers don’t feel too dumbed-down. It takes some practice to do low-level flying, and especially landing. Kind of like driving in GTA IV, the main rule of thumb is to be gentle on the controls, overdoing them will result in a quick death.

Once I got the hang of the controls in Free Mode, other players would hear, then see me flying overhead and ask for a ride.  I’d tell them to find an open space (a street intersection if nothing else, or a park), and I’d gingerly set down, and give them a lift to wherever they wanted to go.  Other times, someone would get lost, or find themselves too far from where the shit was going down.

“Hey I need a ride over here!”

“Ok, what’s your color?”  (asking them what color icon they have in Free Mode, everyone is different).

“Uh… orange.”  I check the map, find Orange.

“Ok, I’m coming to you, find an open spot.”

They’ll hear me approaching, and wait for me to set down. Then off we go.  Loads of fun.

The blackhawk helos do have a minigun, but it’s very hard to hit with them. That will take a lot more practice, though I did shoot down someone else flailing around in a helicopter, witnessed by several players on the ground who saw the rain of destruction.

I re-joined Xbox Live.   Send me a friend request, I’m “Spacechump”.   And Liberty City is where I’ll be.

I was to take the day off tomorrow, as has been my tradition with every GTA release since GTA3, but a job interview trumps a video game.