The Lost and Damned

When I was a kid, I never wanted video games to end. After spending hours and days and weeks just plugging along, going level through level, there comes a point where you know it's about to end. It might be a story sequence where the characters say that they're going to get the final boss, or it might be as simple as a screen that says Final Boss, a sequence when you realize that this is it, in a few moments, the game is over. And that would make me sad. I actually remember getting very wistful when I approached the last castle in Super Mario World. I would think of all the memories I had while playing the game, all the turtles I had jumped on, all the goombas that Yoshi had eaten. I realized that once I had entered the final dungeon, things would never be the same again. Once I had stomped on Bowser's head for the last time, I would never experience this Mario game as I did before. With tears cascading down my face, I bravely walked towards Bower's castle...and I pressed A.

Okay, that might be an exaggeration. I didn't really cry, and I didn't really get sad, but I did wish that games would somehow be able to add onto the experience once I had beaten the game. I would say that Final Fantasy II (or IV, as it's known today) was the best example of a game where I wished I could stay in the world long after I had beaten it. I had powered up all my characters to ridiculous levels to the point where the last boss was the easiest fight I had to go through, I went through all the little side quests, and explored every corner of every town and cave in the game. And it still wasn't enough. After the ending played, it was actually a bittersweet moment. Or at least as bittersweet a moment as it gets for an 7 or 8 year old kid. I'm 99.9% sure I was sad for about half a second and happy for ten minutes, at which point I forgot about the game and ran downstairs to asked my mom to give me candy. Still, that didn't change the fact that I wanted to experience more of them. It took 17 or so years before I got that additional experience, when Nintendo and Square Enix re-released Final Fantasy IV on the Nintendo DS with updated graphics and new mini-games that added to the experience.

Today, it's a different landscape. It's become standard to give gamers more reasons to keep playing after the game is beaten, and it usually happens months after the game is released, not 17 years. Many games allow you to continue to keep playing after the last boss or stage has been beaten, to finish side quests you hadn't gotten to or to just run around in this gigantic world that the developers had created. And because of the rise in online gaming and downloadable content, most of the popular titles have at least a few new things to try out once the main storyline is over. Fable 2 has a new downloadable island, Fallout 3 has new mission packs that are actually a different gaming experience than the original game, and Grand Theft Auto IV has a downloadable episode that features a completely new storyline.

Playing the GTA IV: The Lost and Damned is, at face value, not that big a leap. Most games have an expansion pack nowadays, and it's essentially the same game as the disc version that came out last year, only shorter. Some gameplay aspects have improved, the handling on motorcycles are much better and there are mission checkpoints, but it's still a GTA game at its core. It's still consists mostly of "pick up this package" or "kill these guys" type of missions. And you still can forget all about missions and just shoot a bunch of people in the face, and then run from the cops. Or you can just stick around and keep shooting people until you're dead, only to be brought back to life by the magic hospital that heals you of all gunshot wounds and burns within hours and allows you to keep the semi-automatic and shotgun that lead you to getting shot up in the first place.

The real revelation, to me, was the storyline. The game features Johnny Klebitz, the Vice President of a motorcycle gang called The Lost and the power struggle he has with the President of the gang, Billy. It's the classic GTA storyline of friendship, brotherhood, and betrayal, but the revolutionary aspect of the game is how it intersects with the previous GTA IV storyline. Niko Bellic, the original GTA IV main character, appears briefly in the opening credits as a guy walking down the street, and he remains a big presence throughout the game even though he's just a minor character in this one. Johnny's story takes place during the same timeframe as Niko's story, so there are numerous callbacks, characters that are fleshed out more, and missions that intertwine with the original game.

I don't remember that being done before with any other game. Even the previous GTA games that took place in the same city, like GTA Vice City and GTA: Vice City Stories, didn't occur during the same time period. I can't even compare what Rockstar is doing with GTA IV with a video game. GTA IV reminds me of Pulp Fiction, only you get to control the characters and everything takes somewhere around 50 hours to unfold. In Pulp Fiction, Jules is a boxer, Vincent is a gangster. Their stories only intersect briefly, but they live with and run with similar groups, and the paths they take and the choices they make affect each other. It's the same thing with Johnny and Niko. The defining moment to me wasn't one of the missions where they interact, it's one where they don't. It's the moment when of Johnny's "brothers" is murdered off-screen, and they mention that a "European" was the killer, only Billy turns it around and blames it on one of the rival gangs. It's an awesome story moment, and it even adds replay value to the original game. I want to go back and replay it, just to see how all the story points intersect both off and on screen.

As I was playing The Lost and Damned, it felt familiar, yet it also felt like I was treading new ground. With at least one more downloadable episode still to come, the entirety of GTA IV will go down with the Wii Motion Controls and online co-operative or competitive gaming as defining moments of this generation of gaming. What Rockstar has done is a lot better than a game that never ends.