GTAIV

Thanks to Rob braving a queue of chavs outside GameStation at midnight, we were able to commence GTAIV at about 7:45am this morning. We played it single player until about midday when Will's copy arrived in the post and we tried out the mutiplayer with my Xbox setup, before carrying on with various missions and things. Other than a brief trip to pick up snacks and drop Vicky off at work, we played until about 6:00pm.

And how is it? In a word, stunning. It looks great, the cars handle and drive far more realistically (which was initially VERY weird), the characters look good and act well, and the whole thing is just insanely polished. The much lauded animation system which uses no predesigned animation routines seems to work quite well although it glitches every now and again. The city is amazing too, it's huge and insanely detailed. Will and I played multiplayer this evening and attempted to land a helicopter on the top of the Empire State Building. We failed, but the view was great as we plummeted to our deaths.

Nico as a character has more depth and personality than any of the others, Claude in GTAIII was a mute nobody, Tommy Vercetti from Vice City was an arsehole and CJ from San Andreas was pretty much everybody's bitch despite his big mouth.

So far, I'm really impressed. And I'm not the only one.

Kittens are great.