The Dark Side of GTA IV

The game’s hyper-realism is its downfall; when something doesn’t work as expected, you’re not only disappointed, you’re screaming at the television. Case in point, the mission called “Final Destination” involves hunting down a dealer, then icing him. Several things get in the way of this being an easy mission, though.

The dealer has a friend when you confront him; this friend opens fire as soon as the cut-scene is done and the game helpfully auto-aims on the other guy, who’s running away from you. Naturally, the other guy (who you have to kill to fulfill the mission) can take an insane amount of damage at this phase in the mission, because you’re not really supposed to be able to kill him so easily. On subsequent runs through the mission, you’ll learn to move the auto-aim reticle to the enemy that’s actually shooting you, then taking care of the other guy.

…who’s gone at this point because he hopped the tracks. Fair enough, you have to follow him, through the station and down some stairs. This is all pretty tricky navigation only because the console controller is as useless as tits on a man for this. Give me a mouse and keyboard back for first-person stuff, then we can dispense with the hilarity of auto-aim as well.

So, the guy invariably gets to the bottom of the stairs and invariably gets into his car. Will auto-aim let you take out his tires? His engine? His smiling face that you can clearly see through the windshield just five feet away? No. Once he’s in the car, he’s pretty much invulnerable. At this point, you’re left to working with manual aiming for the very first time ever in the game or getting into a car and chasing him.

Let’s tackle the chase scene first.[1] He’s a terrible driver, so he’s easy to spin out and push into oncoming traffic, etc., etc. You also have a weapon, which you can fire out the window. You can only fire straight ahead or out the driver’s side window, so you can’t pull up on his left side and ice him that way. In fact, shooting him from the side with innumerable bullets seemed to have no effect. Shooting his vehicle from behind was similarly effective. Pinning his vehicle sideways in between tool booths, seeing his head and shoulders silhouetted in the daylight framed by his window and firing numerous times had no effect on his state of being alive.[2]

Other times, his spectacular driving ability pins him into a secluded area without cops and no escape. He constantly drives into a wall while he’s running through his given lines. You are standing by the driver’s side window and auto-aim ignores you. You take over with manual-aim and shakily move the reticle to his head, squeezing off round after round, to no avail. You are not allowed to kill him this way. He must either die in a car crash or you must take him down outside of a vehicle.

In this particular attempt, he shimmied his vehicle up an embankment and out, but could only repeatedly ram his car head-on into a wall outside in seeming frustration. By the time I jumped a wall and got up there, he was blessedly on foot and could be hunted down. The “mission accomplished” music just seconds later was sweet bliss, but my gunfire had attracted the attention of local law enforcement. There were no vehicles around, so I hightailed it up the street, but was forced to a walk as the game forced me to call my employer at that very moment.

Your character can’t run and talk on the cell phone and your character always phones in immediately after a mission. That means the cops had a pretty easy time picking me up after this mission, as I was incapable of doing anything but moseying up the street and chatting with my boss.

The game is incredibly well-done and usually lots of fun; it’s that much more irritating when you’re thrown out of the illusion and realize that, clever as you are for having thought of shooting the guy’s tires, you can’t do that. You probably can at other points in the game, where the script calls for it. At this point, putting the reticle on Lenny’s tires and pulling the trigger made a bunch of sparks, but no flat tires. Shooting through the windshield and open side windows was not effective. You still have to follow the rules of the game.