Did we really put up with GTA when it sucked like this?

HAND-CARVED CHARACTERS

It takes seriously good quality scripting to make you ignore the fact that your character, and their supporting cast, all appear to have been crudely hacked from balsa wood blocks. All the GTA games achieve such an impressive level of characterisation - especially so in the case of GTA III's mute lead - that we were fine with the spectacularly ugly faces andspade hands.

Even San Andreas suffered from characters that looked like wood puppets, with cylindrical arms and faces like photos pasted onto balloons. And still we didn't care - the game was that good. However, if we find street ladies in GTA IV that resemblethese blocky babes, we won't be happy.

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.