The Top 7... things Grand Theft Auto IV needs

3. A bunch of dumb shit

Bear in mind that we mean "dumb shit" in the best possible way. We want to ghostride the whip while slowly rolling our cars off a cliff. We want submarines, so we can explore underwater and torpedo police boats without having to come up for air. And then we want to ghostride the submarine while an armada of attack choppers churns the water around us with a salvo of rockets. We want skydiving, base jumping and a whole lot more of this. In short, we want so many opportunities for insane stunts and balls-out mayhem that creative players will never, ever get bored.


Above: Artist's concept of balls-out absurdity

Just Cause got us halfway there, after all, what with giving us the ability to hop on top of cars and hijack choppers in midair, and if GTA tried something similar, we're sure it could make those stunts seem pedestrian and dull. Hell, why not add midair fistfights and gun battles while you're falling at terminal velocity out of an exploding jet? That could be fun.

On that note, we'd also like to see more of the stuff people like to speculate about online - specifically, the stuff that fueled the months-long "Myth Hunt," as players of San Andreas tried to track down Bigfoot, UFOs and other weird phenomena.

Sure, most of those were just internet rumors, but it was fun to look for them. And some even turned out to be real - like the unexplained bodybags in the middle of the desert, and the Back O' Beyond "ghost cars" that drove themselves at night. With that in mind, it's not too unreasonable to think we might see more unsettling stuff hidden in the next GTA. Hell, they could even throw in zombies, if they're not a major plot point - they already did in Vice City Stories, after all. So long as there's plenty of secret stuff to ferret out and weird things to try, we'll be playing this one long after Rockstar stops putting out new downloadable episodes.

Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.