Grand Theft Auto IV: The Complete Edition

A few years back, I did a very foolish thing. I bought GTA4 for my Xbox 360 instead of for my PS3. Once I played it, did I realize the game was originally programmed for the PS3 and then later ported to the 360. While it's definitely one of the best looking 360 games because of that (alongside FFXIII), it also suffers from a problem that FFXIII would later suffer: unbelievable lag in high activity areas. Unfortunately for the 360, GTA4 has unbelievably high draw distance and cannot maintain constant, lag-free motion. I still thought the game had a fantastic story, better than GTA3 or Vice City, but not as good as San Andreas, but the lag was just unbearable. Once I made the decision to sell my 360, I made it based on every game I owned I could either get on PS3 or PC, or there were games I never thought I would play again, such as GTA4. If only I had gotten the PS3 version originally...

Some fans were a bit disappointed to see how GTA4 only covered one city, even though the in-game map was actually larger than San Andreas'. To quell some of the nitpicking by fans, such as lack of clothing options and extravagant missions, they planned two episodes of Downloadable Content, Lost & Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. L&D was very well-received, but there a few complaints about the rather high price of $15 for only a few hours of content to a pre-existing game. TBoGT was even better received, but again, the price was far too high given the amount of content at $20. Microsoft was given these two DLC packs months earlier than the PS3 version as a deal made by Rockstar to give the 360 version something the PS3 version did not. Eventually, a stand-alone disc titled Episode From Liberty City was released for 360 and PS3, allowing gamers to play the DLC packs without owning GTA4 or having a hard copy to take to friends' houses. Finally, the definitive version of GTA4 was released, Grand Theft Auto 4: The Complete Edition. Touting both GTA4 and Episode From Liberty City, it was basically packaged as a cash-in for people who had either still not gotten GTA4 or had traded in GTA4 and chose not to buy the DLC packages.

In my case, this was the first time I had ever played the PS3 version and holy hell I am kicking myself for having bought the 360 version instead of the PS3 version. I've only encountered one instance of lag, in the middle of rush hour at The Triangle, the Times Square equivalent, but that was to be expected. Lost & Damned is great from what I've played so far, a pretty cool expansion of the GTA4 universe. The Ballad of Gay Tony is also great, too and it has incentives to re-do missions and aim for the best performance possible with scores given after completing missions. The price for the this whole package was very well worth it.

My only complaints are that in order to switch from either L&D or BoGT to GTA4, you need to quit and restart the entire game and after playing one of the DLC episodes, there is a glitch upon auto-loading a GTA4 save file that requires you to start a new game and then manually load the save file. Other than that, everything is fantastic and the story is actually better once you know what will happen next, something the other GTA games were not able to do.

If for some reason, you don't have GTA4, go get the Complete Edition, you won't regret it.