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A bonus episode to get us through Easter, a retrospective of the Grand Theft Auto franchise through GTA5.
Transcript:
Phil: Oh, hello.
Phil: It's Phil Fogg here.
Phil: I'm gonna tell you a story.
Phil: So buckle up.
Phil: So, about nine years ago, Tom and I sat down to talk about Grand Theft Auto, and basically the history of Grand Theft Auto, up to the point through Grand Theft Auto IV.
Phil: A new trailer was about to come out for Grand Theft Auto V.
Phil: It's been almost nine years since then, and nothing much has happened with Grand Theft Auto V, other than its full conversion to an always online game.
Phil: So, with a new Grand Theft Auto in the offing, I thought it was time to release this fully re-digitized version, and a much better quality episode of episode four of The Game Under Podcast.
Phil: The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters.
Phil: And that's what gave us DMA, which was the DMA, which is the company that has become Rockstar North.
Phil: The DMA stands for doesn't mean anything.
Phil: And they made games like Lemmings, which was probably one of the top games of all time, I'm guessing.
Tom: Yeah, I played the hell out of the shareware version of that.
Phil: That was made by Dave Jones, who went on to make Crackdown, and then APB, the failed online MMO, basically open client.
Phil: It actually isn't that failed.
Phil: I mean, it's still surviving right now.
Phil: It's just his company failed real time or whatever it was called.
Phil: And then they went on and made Grand Theft Auto and
Phil: And of course, this is also a Dave Jones project.
Phil: It was the only GTA not set in the USA with their expansion with the London set for the second game.
Phil: And then they stumbled along and made the Ngame Body Harvest, which is really the prelude before Grand Theft Auto
Phil: This was a game where you could hijack vehicles, get in and out, perform violence.
Phil: So it was basically like a third person isometric type view.
Phil: Not as pronounced, truly isometric, not top down like the early GTAs, but you could run around, hijack cars and basically just do what you want.
Phil: And God said, let there be light.
Phil: And there was light.
Phil: And this brings us in to Grand Theft Auto III.
Phil: This was a game that at Ethat year, most gaming journalists said that they were there and they saw Halo and that's what they were excited about.
Phil: And then Rockstar Take-Two had this little tiny stall up to the side for Grand Theft Auto III that no one paid any attention to.
Phil: Grand Theft Auto III, of course, had the silent protagonist Claude and really just completely revolutionized the gameplay.
Phil: Will Wright famously said that he played it and he was like, oh, wait, so I can basically get into any car I want.
Phil: I can be an ambulance driver.
Phil: I can be a firefighter.
Phil: I can be a taxi driver.
Phil: I can walk around.
Phil: I can do what I want.
Tom: And murder prostitutes, don't forget.
Phil: Murder prostitutes, taking money back.
Phil: And I mean, just probably, I mean, just a great game.
Phil: And then a year later, they released Vice City.
Phil: And of course, San Andres.
Phil: And...
Tom: They're two greatest works.
Phil: Vice City and San Andres, yeah.
Phil: I like San Andres best.
Phil: It does have a game ending bug in the original PlayStation release of it, which is what stopped me from beating that game.
Tom: That's your excuse anyway.
Phil: That is my excuse.
Phil: Have you beaten San Andres?
Tom: Oh yeah.
Phil: Okay, the mission where you were in San Francisco and you have to fly the little planes around and blow up three dudes' vehicles.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: What format did you play that on and how did you go in that mission?
Tom: PSand this was many, many years ago, so I have absolutely no idea.
Tom: I do remember though that I deliberately avoided getting the game ending bug.
Phil: Oh really?
Tom: Yeah.
Tom: I knew about it before playing, so that probably helped.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: Well, the bummer thing is, is that that mission comes early in the game, fairly early in the game.
Phil: I mean, you do have to get up to San Fierro.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: But I tried it and I failed at it.
Phil: I'm like, okay, whatever.
Phil: It's just a pointless little side mission.
Phil: It doesn't matter.
Phil: I went on with the complete rest of the game, you know, going to Vegas, the whole thing.
Phil: I was probably at that point hours into the game.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: And basically, it's like the last icon on your map.
Phil: So you have to beat it before they'll unlock the final San Andreas levels.
Phil: And I tried everything.
Phil: I tried just playing it to death.
Phil: I probably played for like two weeks straight.
Phil: I tried cheats that would, you know, slow down the clock, speed up your playing.
Phil: I couldn't beat it at all.
Phil: Which is the greatest shame because it was up to that point my favorite GTA era.
Phil: Now, of course, in that time, there were also two other lesser played GTA games, Vice City Stories and Liberty City Stories, primarily released on the PSP and then later released on the PS
Phil: Did you play those ones?
Tom: No, I did not.
Phil: Yeah, those were really my favorites.
Phil: My favorite GTA game is Vice City Stories, the one that features Phil Collins.
Tom: So you like it even more than San Andreas?
Phil: Yes, I do.
Phil: It was the last one they released, and it uses the same engine and everything else.
Phil: And it was really the high point of the GTA series.
Phil: Being from Los Angeles, obviously, I like the San Andreas game for many, many reasons, and the soundtrack and all the rest of it.
Phil: But Vice City Stories was really them understanding completely what it was that they were doing.
Phil: And it was the last game they made on that engine and the best game I found in the GTA series.
Tom: They've got a reputation for being a lot more focused than the console games.
Phil: Yeah, very much so.
Phil: And that's because, of course, they were released on the PSP initially.
Phil: So they had the UMD, so they're a lot tighter.
Phil: And a lot less flab, you know.
Phil: God saw the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
Phil: So, then you have GTA
Phil: And, I mean, it's amazing when you go back and play GTA now, like, Nico's using a feature phone, not a smartphone, you know.
Phil: It does seem like an age ago.
Phil: They radically changed the driving in that game.
Tom: Yeah.
Tom: They made it a lot heavier and less arcade-y.
Tom: So, it's still very arcade-y, but yeah.
Phil: Yeah, which initially I chafed at, but eventually grew to love.
Phil: What are your thoughts, capsule summary of GTA ?
Tom: Well, as a GTA game, I think it is a complete and utter % failure.
Tom: Now, the thing is, what they were doing, as far as I can see, is they basically realized, okay, our mechanics in GTA, the shooting, the driving and everything, are all basically a load of crap, right?
Tom: There's nothing particularly good about how our cars feel to drive in the old GTA games, and the shooting was absolutely horrible, right?
Phil: I completely disagree.
Phil: I found the driving, I mean, it wasn't burnout quality.
Tom: Yeah, no, no, no, no.
Tom: I'm saying in the old ones.
Phil: No, I'm talking about the old ones.
Phil: Go on.
Phil: In the old ones, I mean, it wasn't like Sleeping Dogs quality where it is on the standard of burnout, right?
Phil: But it was still enjoyable.
Phil: I mean, they had the great physics.
Phil: That's where I learned how that if a cop car is in front of you, you basically just tap the rear near the trunk and it will spin out.
Tom: I'm not saying it wasn't enjoyable to drive.
Tom: I just mean that there wasn't a great amount of depth to it, right?
Tom: It was a very simple system that was designed around getting the most fun of it from not just the simple joy of driving, but what you were doing, right?
Tom: So you could play around with the physics, etc.
Tom: All the cars sort of felt the same except for some sports cars.
Phil: No, no, no.
Phil: The sports cars felt light, right?
Phil: As a sports car does, and flighty, and if you went too fast around a corner, you'd flip out.
Phil: The heavier cars, the older cars, like the station wagons, had poorer control and felt heavier.
Phil: If you had an armored car, you knew you were driving an armored car, you'd be spitting out exhaust and be slow and heavy.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: I mean, I thought it showed a pretty nuanced demonstration of different automobile.
Tom: But that's the thing.
Tom: It's got like several archetypes in it, right?
Tom: It's got...
Phil: It's got about four archetypes.
Tom: But there's much more than four different cars in there, right?
Phil: Yeah.
Tom: Yeah.
Tom: So once again, take this as a slight exaggeration, what I'm saying, because I don't disagree with what you said there.
Tom: But in GTA IV, they took that to a much higher level where most of the games felt, most of the cars felt very different, even within their own class of cars, right?
Tom: So there were sedans and hashbacks, just normal cars that felt quite different.
Tom: And there was a big difference in most of the sports cars, et cetera, right?
Tom: You don't think so?
Phil: No, I do think so.
Phil: I felt that in GTA IV, I mean, if you were driving a Mercedes Coupe, you really felt like you were driving a Mercedes Coupe, right?
Tom: So that's what I'm saying, is they took the elements of the older GTAs and turned them up to right?
Tom: So they took what we had, four archetypes for all the cars in the entire game, right?
Tom: And they then applied that to making each car feel unique and different.
Tom: And this applied to, so then they changed the shooting, they made it a much more traditional sort of shooting thing, and they also changed the mission design, trying to make the mission sort of play out more as you would expect a normal shooter to, right, as well.
Phil: What do you mean?
Tom: So as opposed to in GTA, the old GTAs, where you basically went somewhere and there was a huge amount of people to shoot, and you just shot them all.
Tom: Here, you have a level to move through, and you have to go from cover to cover and that sort of thing.
Tom: And the missions were also more, the pacing was more nuanced, right?
Phil: That is a great insight, because yeah, in the old GTA s, it was more of an open world type.
Phil: We're going to drop enemies on this open world map, go.
Phil: But in Grand Theft Auto IV, they actually designed the shooting situations, like the famous museum heist, or the scene at the, I think it was like an iron smelting plant or something like that, where you were playing it as you would a proper shooter.
Tom: And the thing is though, the thing I think that they just missed here was, they had all these core elements that were actually pretty good, right?
Tom: And improved from the previous games.
Tom: But I didn't really feel like they brought them together to form the one cohesive experience, which is what the older GTA games were just incredible at.
Tom: They took all these small elements and more limited elements than in GTA and just made this unbelievably engaging and enjoyable experience out of them.
Tom: Here, I thought they didn't really bring them together to form that whole cohesive whole, which was basically my major problem with GTA apart from the story where they basically attempted to move from doing ridiculous parody to satire, where they didn't just want to make fun of a mafia story.
Tom: They wanted to also give you the feeling of experiencing a good mafia story while also making fun of it.
Tom: Maybe after their experience with Red Dead Redemption and the like, at the stage they did this with GTA they just did not have the skills to pull that off whatsoever.
Phil: Yeah, I think you're right.
Phil: I mean, Red Dead Redemption obviously showed a level of maturing that they had not yet reached with Grand Theft Auto
Phil: You almost, from an outsider's perspective, because the Hauser brothers are so silent, you almost think about, well, is it one Hauser who wants to be Scorsese and one Hauser wants to be Mad Magazine?
Phil: And then they're constantly fighting.
Phil: But I think at the same time, that's what makes Grand Theft Auto so appealing.
Phil: And it has from the very beginning.
Phil: I mean, right from the start, Grand Theft Auto it is both a notion of this is a very violent and to some tastes offensive game, but it's also Mad Magazine.
Phil: So I think that may be what makes it special.
Phil: And so when you take a game like Red Dead Redemption, yeah, it's going to appeal to more mature tastes, but you've got to wonder if it's turning off the younger set who might want more of the Mad Magazine type stuff and creating space for franchises like Saints Row.
Phil: In Grand Theft Auto I did not, I mean, I was addicted to the game twice because I played it for great periods of time, like years apart.
Phil: And I mean, I really was addicted to it, which means I must have liked it.
Phil: I mean, I'd sit down in Nico's apartment and watch the TV shows, you know, what Ricky Gervais and all, you know, the animated cartoons and stuff like that.
Phil: But the things that make it my least favorite Grand Theft Auto game is probably the aspects of they played out the missions way too much.
Phil: Like, you were doing missions for that guy in the Italian restaurant for way too long.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: And at a certain point, it's like, okay, I've done like five missions for this guy, and every time he says, if you do this one thing for me, then I'll tell you what you need to know.
Phil: And it's like you, at this point, you're a high level assassin.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: You could basically just grab this guy, take him over to the wood chipper and get the information you want from him, as opposed to going out and killing people and putting yourself in risk of getting arrested.
Phil: And that just happened mission after mission after mission with these small fish telling you, just do this one more thing for me and I'll tell you what you need to know.
Phil: And it's like, no, I mean, it just got tedious.
Phil: So the other thing I really didn't like about it was the whole feature phone stuff with girlfriends calling you up and your cousin calling you up and the rest of it.
Phil: I mean, you could ignore it, but you couldn't ignore it.
Phil: I mean...
Tom: GTA, so you've got to be interested in everything that's going on.
Tom: So you can't just ignore a feature in GTA, especially if it's been shoving your face.
Tom: You're compelled to look into it, right?
Phil: Right.
Phil: And so it was with...
Phil: And that was a failing of more of the characters, right?
Phil: So when you had that FBI, CIA bitch, double agent calling you up, wanting to go bowling or whatever, she wasn't a compelling character.
Phil: She wasn't scully.
Phil: She wasn't something interesting.
Phil: Now, when Brucey came along, it was like, yeah, every time Brucey called, I was up for it.
Phil: I'm like, yeah, man, let's go.
Phil: Let's go steal some helicopters or whatever the fuck it is you want to do, because he was a cool character.
Phil: But that was few and far between.
Phil: So it wasn't for me that my favorite Grand Theft Auto IV era game is Lost in the Damned.
Phil: And I think that if people are going in to play Grand Theft Auto V, they really are doing themselves a disservice if they don't first play Lost in the Damned and Gay Tony.
Phil: These games can be beaten in to hours, and they really will set you up for an evolution that's occurred at Rockstar North that you may not be aware of.
Phil: Because of the shortness, basically what happens in Lost in the Damned and Gay Tony is they interweave the story of a biker and a security guy for a bar.
Phil: It's not called a bumper.
Phil: What are they called?
Phil: Bouncer.
Tom: Bouncer.
Phil: Right.
Phil: In Gay Tony, you play the role of a bouncer for a guy who owns nightclubs.
Phil: Gay Tony.
Phil: You don't play as Gay Tony.
Phil: And in Lost in the Damned, you're basically playing a guy who is in a Hell's Angel type motorcycle gang whose leader has recently come back from jail.
Phil: You've been in charge.
Phil: The leader has come back from jail, and he's trying to relinquish control over the group.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: In subtle ways.
Phil: So you're trying to play deference to this guy because you love and respect him, but at the same time, the leader is kind of a fuck up, and he's trying to basically undoing all the progress that you've done.
Phil: At first, when I played Lost in the Damned, I was repulsed by the content.
Phil: Because you're a member of the gang?
Phil: No, no, no.
Phil: Lost in the Damned.
Phil: Because I'm not a member of a biker gang, and I find them typically...
Phil: I know this is a shock to most of our listeners, but I'm not a member of a biker gang, like the Thinks or the Hells Angels.
Phil: And I find what those groups do to be mostly repulsive.
Tom: You know, I'm offended by this as a member of a biker gang.
Phil: You would probably like Lost in the Damned right off the bat, but for me, these were the truest characters that have ever been portrayed in video gaming, other than some of the characters that you see in games like Enslaved.
Phil: I mean, these were real people.
Phil: You were living in a real setting.
Phil: It doesn't glamorize violence.
Phil: And it was just a real evolution for Rockstar.
Phil: Gay Tony went back basically in response to the Saints Row franchise and embraced all of the craziness that was missing from Grand Theft Auto IV but present in Grand Theft Auto III, San Andreas and...
Tom: By City.
Phil: By City.
Phil: But they also include some amazing shooter sequences.
Phil: There are some first person or third person shooting sequences in Gay Tony that rival Call of Duty at its highest level, where you're going through shooting up office buildings or retail locations, taking cover.
Phil: It's just a really amazing thing.
Phil: And then another thing that Gay Tony added...
Tom: We really like saying things are as good as or better than Call of Duty on this podcast.
Phil: We are.
Phil: I mean, basically, I think on our website where we post our reviews, we should just change our scoring mechanism.
Tom: Worse than, as good as or better than Call of Duty.
Phil: Exactly.
Phil: And then at the end of each level in Gay Tony, they do like a Ninja Gaiden thing where they will rank your performance, like how many secrets you found and the time you beat it in or like the end of a Doom level.
Phil: And I can see that coming back.
Phil: So how does all of this inform Grand Theft Auto V?
Phil: Basically, in Grand Theft Auto IV, they had the three different stories.
Phil: They show them intertwining, and it was brilliant.
Phil: I mean, you go back to that museum heist and you play it in the first game as Niko, you play it in the second game as the biker, you play it in the third game as the Gay Tony bouncer dude.
Phil: And they have all of the same scenes, but from a different angle, in a Tarantino kind of way.
Phil: And it's brilliant, and they know it's brilliant.
Phil: Grand Theft Auto IV would have been a much better game if they had had hours of Niko, hours of Lost in the Damned and hours of Gay Tony.
Phil: And that's what it looks like what we're getting with Grand Theft Auto V.
Phil: You did not play either of those expansions, right?
Tom: No, I did not.
Tom: GTA IV put me off playing any other GTA IV games.
Phil: Well, what if I were to tell you that there were games available that were like GTA IV, but a third of the length, way more intense, contained better gameplay, better characters and better story and dialogue?
Tom: Well, what if I tell you that I bought the complete GTA pack on Steam for $for this very purpose?
Phil: And what if I were to tell you that you should probably play them sooner rather than later?
Tom: I would say if they're about hours each, that's probably not going to happen anytime soon.
Phil: So, God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it.
Phil: And so it was.
Phil: Which brings us to GTA Chinatown Wars, a game that stands out by itself as an island.
Phil: Released initially for the DS, eventually it came out for the PSP and then the iPhone.
Phil: My two favorite GTA games are Lost in the Damned and Chinatown Wars.
Phil: It has an Asian-American protagonist.
Phil: And it's really a great game.
Phil: It's basically like an Asian drug dealer.
Phil: I love that game.
Phil: I think it's amazing.
Phil: In fact, just thinking about it right now wants me to go back and play it.
Tom: And this didn't do too well though.
Tom: You've got this theory that Asian protagonists don't sell well, right?
Phil: Well, non-white protagonists don't sell.
Tom: Okay, so black ones are fine, and Latinos are not fine.
Tom: I mean, black and Latinos are not fine either, is what you say.
Phil: I think in the Rockstar world, they understand that if they set a game outside of the United States of America, it will not sell.
Phil: And if they have a protagonist that is not European, that it will not sell.
Tom: So, explain San Andreas to me.
Phil: Yeah, I mean, that's the exception, obviously.
Phil: I mean, San Andreas came at a point where the PlayStation had the maximal install base and off the back of two incredibly successful video games.
Phil: I mean, people were not going to buy San Andreas just because it had a black protagonist.
Phil: And also, in Western culture, he was playing a hip hop type character.
Phil: You know what I'm saying?
Phil: Which is widely accepted by the greater community.
Phil: If he were a black college professor, I'm not quite sure that it would have sold as well.
Phil: In fact, in Vice City Story...
Tom: I'm not sure if Grand Theft Auto with a white college professor as the main character would have sold as well either though.
Phil: Vice City Story is you play the part of an African American also, but he's a member of the military.
Phil: I don't know.
Phil: People say all the time, why don't they do a GTA in London?
Phil: Why don't they do a GTA in Paris?
Phil: Why don't they do a GTA in Budapest or whatever?
Phil: It's just not going to happen.
Phil: Which brings us up to Malachi.
Phil: Behold, I will corrupt your seed and spread dung on your face.
Tom: Faces.
Phil: Faces, sorry.
Phil: I got that wrong.
Tom: I don't mean to correct you on knowledge of the Bible, as you are the preacher.
Phil: And so, the question is, will Grand Theft Auto V corrupt your seed?
Tom: Yes.
Phil: And will it spread dung on your face?
Tom: Undoubtedly.
Phil: Actually, it was Saints Row that spread dung on your face.
Phil: They had the sewage trucks.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: So, do you want to watch the GTAtrailer?
Phil: You haven't seen it before, right?
Phil: So, are you ready to watch it?
Tom: I'm ready to watch it.
Tom: I don't want to watch it, but I'm going to watch it for the sake of the podcast.
Tom: So, do I need to click on one of these people?
Phil: I'm just going to click back early on the timeline.
Phil: There you go.
Phil: And then we'll watch them in order.
Phil: First one is Michael.
Tom: Some topless guy jogging.
Tom: Pilates.
Phil: Basically, we see a Tony Soprano type character living in Los Angeles.
Phil: And he's got an upper middle class lifestyle.
Phil: He's miserable, even though he's rich and has everything.
Phil: You see cash trucks exploding.
Phil: He's talking to his therapist here.
Tom: And he's got a very small mouth and some sort of speech impediment.
Tom: And it looks like he's having a stroke when he speaks.
Phil: Oh my god, there's a shotgun and a bank heist, helicopters.
Phil: This is fucking awesome.
Phil: Oh, someone just got shot.
Phil: A jet and a plane and cops.
Tom: Cars exploding.
Phil: And the guy says, I think you need a therapist.
Tom: That guy looked rather unhealthy to me.
Phil: We're going to pause here.
Phil: So we just watched the Michael trailer.
Phil: That was damn impressive.
Phil: How are you not impressed by that?
Tom: Not impressed by it.
Tom: I never said I wasn't impressed by it.
Tom: That was impressive.
Phil: Don't you want to pre-order the game right now?
Tom: No.
Phil: Holy shit, did you see the jet?
Tom: No.
Phil: And the helicopters and the guy, the Tony Soprano and the therapist and I think you have a violence problem.
Phil: Come on!
Tom: It looks good.
Phil: I want to take this game, put it in a syringe and inject it into my arm.
Phil: This looks amazing!
Tom: The thing that I take from this is the bizarre mouth of Michael.
Tom: That's the thing that stood out to me.
Phil: It's too small?
Tom: The man and the guy in the G-string.
Phil: I missed the guy in the G-string.
Tom: He jumped out of a window over a pop-plant.
Phil: That was the best part.
Tom: You go on about the cars exploding and shit like that.
Tom: If there was anything that would make you want to pre-order, it was that scene.
Phil: It's important to note, people at home, that Tom Towers' problem with Grand Theft Auto V is that Michael's mouth is too small, and that he was distracted by the guy in the G-string.
Tom: No, that was the good part.
Tom: And you had a reasonable bulge, you see.
Tom: My problem is, I'm just thinking that there might be an issue with the small mouth compared to the size of that bulge, by the way.
Phil: Okay, so on to the Franklin part of the trailer.
Phil: You ready?
Phil: One, two, three, click.
Phil: Here we go.
Phil: Franklin, African American.
Tom: This one known as Token.
Phil: Okay, we got some sirens here.
Phil: We see some Grove Street hoodies.
Phil: Guy gets shot with a, like a, looks like an AK.
Tom: Yep.
Tom: I'm just waiting for someone to say, oh no, you didn't.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: Oh, a Ferrari.
Phil: And cops, helicopters, strippers, butts.
Phil: And a lot of talking.
Phil: A lot of...
Tom: Well, black people talk a lot.
Tom: We all know that.
Phil: That's why Oprah was so successful.
Phil: Okay, now they're driving down an LA reservoir, Terminator style.
Phil: Guy gets shot in the head with a shotgun.
Phil: Shooting at a helicopter with a shotgun, that's not going to work.
Phil: It's clearly Grove Street.
Phil: They're in green.
Phil: Got an SUV going down the freeway, shooting at LAPD.
Phil: Guy in a white singlet, like CJ?
Tom: Yep.
Tom: That was less impressive than the first one.
Phil: Okay, so we'll pause there.
Phil: That was Franklin's trailer.
Phil: So, your impressions?
Tom: Disappointing.
Tom: I mean, that one was after the Franklin trailer.
Tom: That's pretty damn boring.
Tom: It's a bunch of black people talking, then a strip club and a couple of police.
Tom: Right?
Tom: I mean, that's a major let down after the first one.
Phil: It is.
Phil: I was hoping for like a Will.i.am type music video.
Phil: You know, the one where he's running and then he's like, you know, in a car and he's on a bike and a helicopter and a jet plane.
Tom: I mean, you can't have Michael as the first one and then follow it up with something like that.
Phil: That's pretty poor.
Phil: I mean, how, you know, the other thing is, how do you compete with Queen?
Phil: That should have been the end, you know?
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: Okay, so overall...
Tom: Pacing wise, that shortly would have been better at the end.
Tom: Just build up to that as the climax.
Phil: Yeah, I think so, but I think they're probably concerned about people leaving before the end.
Phil: So, now we're going to go into Trevor.
Phil: Now, do you know anything about this trailer at all?
Tom: I know, before watching this, I knew nothing about any of the trailers.
Phil: Okay, so you're pumped about Michael.
Phil: A little bit let down about Franklin.
Tom: Yeah.
Tom: I think they could have put it off if they had a much better rap soundtrack.
Tom: If you stick in some good rap there to set the scene better.
Tom: I mean, the music was just sort of like a continuation from the first trailer.
Phil: No, the music in the Franklin section was just basically generic background music.
Phil: Whereas with the Radio Gaga, it basically made you want to...
Tom: It fitted what was happening.
Tom: It fitted the class.
Tom: I mean, you've got to have something to go with the environment.
Phil: OK, so now we're going to go on to the third part of the trailer.
Phil: This is for someone called Trevor.
Phil: Trevor.
Phil: Looks like a baseball player.
Phil: He's got a baseball bat.
Tom: Playing baseball Yakuza style, I think.
Phil: OK, so we're seeing a trailer park in Southern California.
Phil: And it seems like he's interacting with Michael.
Tom: Yup.
Phil: OK, a biplane.
Tom: Strangling old people.
Phil: He's got lots of punching and I'm liking the level of male partial nudity so far that I'm seeing.
Phil: OK, we're back in LA now.
Phil: And he's using a shotgun to blow up a large truck.
Tom: Playing country music.
Phil: A little crazy guy.
Phil: A little guy, looks like the guy from Sling Blade.
Tom: You know, I think the reason they've put both these trailers last is that they're crap.
Phil: Yeah, that last one was poor.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: I don't know why they did that.
Phil: That was poor.
Phil: OK, so the first one...
Tom: Maybe I could have put it off.
Tom: Once again, the music choice is horrible.
Tom: They needed to go with something much more country and western than that.
Tom: That was like easy listening country and western, right?
Tom: You're gonna hear that in a lift or something.
Tom: You're not gonna hear that in a trailer park being blasted.
Tom: Right?
Phil: That was terrible.
Phil: And that is obviously the part that they're putting in to appeal to people who like GTA right?
Phil: I mean, that's gonna be the crazy, wacky guy who's driving the biplanes and all the rest of it.
Phil: I would have much...
Phil: Like the Michael character, the Tony Soprano-Mafiosa guy, that's like Rockstar's wheelhouse.
Phil: They own that, they understand that.
Phil: They're basically that.
Phil: They're white people.
Phil: They get that.
Phil: The next character, that's fine.
Phil: They did a good job in San Andreas with that.
Phil: That's fine.
Phil: They really didn't embarrass themselves there other than with the music selection.
Phil: But with the third one, why wouldn't you go back to like the Lost in the Damned character, or something like that, or the gay Tony bouncer guy, the Hispanic guy?
Tom: Wouldn't that be somewhat redundant following Michael going by what you've said about these characters, given that they're more realistic, with more depth to them?
Tom: I mean, that's Michael, basically, as far as we can tell from this trailer, right?
Phil: I see what you're saying.
Phil: You're saying that because I don't want an arcadey character in my Grand Theft Auto, then if we just continue having prototypes of Michael, but different races, that doesn't really advance the game much, right?
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: No, I see your point.
Tom: I think the main problem is they failed to sell it so badly.
Phil: That was pathetic.
Phil: So we'll jump basically straight into the news that has come up about Grand Theft Auto
Phil: What do you got on that front, Tom?
Tom: Basically just one absolutely terrible and completely pointless and meaningless article by nintendoenthusiast.com.
Tom: So this is posted by Manashi.
Tom: And this is apparently a feature.
Tom: And this feature consists of him saying he asked his retailer source, which could well have simply been some guy that works at EB Games or GameStop, whatever it's called, in most of the world.
Tom: And this guy said GTAwas being tested on the Wii U kits for some time.
Tom: And that's what the story consists of.
Phil: So this guy goes into a GameStop and says, hey, what if you heard about Grand Theft Auto and the Wii U?
Phil: And the clerk says...
Tom: That he knows it's being tested on Wii U dev kits.
Phil: Then let's write up a story in the net, god damn it.
Phil: That's a retailer's source.
Tom: Exactly.
Tom: They didn't want to be named, so it's an unnamed source.
Tom: So you don't need to say that it was just some random guy in a GameStop.
Phil: My serious question surrounding this is, and this is a serious question, I know this only comes up once every nine shows, but my serious question is, why isn't this game being released for the Wii U?
Tom: Now, I would say GTA China could well have simply scared them off from Nintendo completely.
Tom: That did not do well, did it?
Tom: Or am I misremembering?
Phil: No, you're right.
Phil: It flopped.
Phil: I mean, they made possibly the greatest non-RPG DS game ever.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: Right?
Phil: They put real thought into how to use the stylus, the touch screen, the dual screens.
Phil: I mean, it was a perfect execution of a DS game.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: Which is, it just blows my mind, because you think about like all the developers out there who are amazing, who don't release games for certain platforms, and you're like, guys, if you only did this, it's great for us, the people that buy the game.
Phil: It's just terrible for them commercially.
Phil: So, you think Chinatown Wars has scared them off.
Tom: Because I wouldn't, I really don't see Rockstar in general as being shy about releasing their things on everything right.
Tom: I mean...
Tom: They go for as much as they can.
Tom: And so, to me, Chinatown, the only area where they were slightly sceptical was Nintendo.
Tom: And so, Chinatown Wars seems to me a test.
Tom: So, they're not going to go and make a full console, GTA for a Nintendo console, or even port one over.
Tom: They're going to make a slightly more niche one in a market where they think, maybe we can tap into a different market than we're currently serving, right?
Tom: And so, they did this, and it just didn't hit the mark for the market that they were going after whatsoever.
Phil: Yeah, and what supports your argument is that, you know, that ping pong game they made, that was a natural to bring over to the Wii, and they never did.
Phil: They did?
Tom: Yeah, they did.
Tom: They brought that to Wii, don't you remember?
Phil: No, I don't.
Tom: Yeah, they did.
Phil: Sorry, listeners.
Phil: So, yeah, okay, well, that was my question.
Phil: I just look at the Wii U, though, and I go, okay, it's got better tech than the current gen systems.
Phil: They have the money to develop it.
Phil: They have the time to develop it in terms of porting it over.
Phil: Why don't you do it?
Phil: Even if you don't use the game pad, which would have tremendous opportunities for them, I just don't understand it.
Phil: I mean, I really don't understand it.
Phil: I think this game should be coming out on the Wii U, and it wouldn't hurt them unless they think that the install base is so low or they think that Nintendo console owners are not in their demographic.
Tom: Well, that's the only plausible explanation that I can come up with with the DSbecause as I said, contrary to popular opinion around here, they did in fact port the ping pong game to the Wii, right?
Tom: They basically released their games on everything they possibly can.
Phil: Yeah, they do.
Phil: I mean, even iPhones.
Phil: I mean, even though they're terrible, terrible ports, so they obviously don't have any respect for their games.
Phil: Otherwise, they wouldn't be porting these over to iPads and iPhones and things like that, where the games just are broken.
Phil: I mean, completely inoperable.
Phil: So, yeah, I mean, that's interesting.
Phil: But at this point, we do want to welcome everyone to episode four of The Game Under Podcast.
Tom: Yep, that was our introduction.
Phil: Little did we know that nine years later, Rockstar would release a very, very mediocre version of the, or re-release rather, of the first games in the Grand Theft Auto franchise they obviously didn't care.
Phil: As much as you did for listening to this retrospective of the Grand Theft Auto series up until Grand Theft Auto V.