Last night I was truly affected by something that I did in GTA IV. After walking out of my apartment building, I busted out my cell, dialed ‘9-1-1′ on the keypad and asked for the paramedics to come to my location. Taking cover behind a car, I waited for the ambulance to pull up and the medics to get out, popped out from cover and domed the two of them in the street. I don’t know what made me do it, I guess I just wanted to see what my reaction would be to a truly heinous, premeditated attack on innocent bystanders. Not just innocent bystanders, but two people who had gone out of their way to help me (well, they would’ve charged me for it). Capping the two first-responders was definitely unwarranted, and entirely my own decision.

But even though it’s just a game, it still felt wrong. It reminded me of the end of season 1 of The Shield, where the police force’s reaction to a riot in Farmington results in a rash of fake 911 calls causing the murder of several police officers as retaliation. Niko became one of those low-lifes, sadistically luring helpless paramedics into his path of destruction.

There should be more missions incorporating truly questionable acts like I just mentioned. Rather than the “moral quandary” being “should I let this drug dealer fall to his death, or pull him up and save him,” have me get assigned missions where I’m asked to steal a firetruck by pulling a fire alarm and taking out all the responding firefighters. Or to murder a bunch of debtors who are otherwise innocent mothers or fathers, and maybe the alternative is to help them fake their deaths at risk of it being discovered by your employers…

And a side note: I wish they had done more with the cell phone. Maybe letting you actually dial more numbers instead of only using the speed dial, and letting me program the speed dial myself. Maybe I don’t want Brucie in my phone book if I never want to hang out with his roided-out ass…

Here’s a short list of notable discoveries from the beginnings of my mayhem-filled journey through Broker:

• You can actually drive legally without much trouble — It seems that the weight of the vehicles is enough that driving feels a hell of a lot more realistic. I’ve heard some complaint about the difficulty of driving, but I guess I’ve played enough GTA and arcade-style driving games to get the hang of it pretty quickly.
• The hand-to-hand combat isn’t as fun as it should be — After recently playing Bully, which has amazing hand-to-hand fighting, I thought IV would incorporate similar mechanics. It’s kinda similar, but a little sluggish and not near as fun. Maybe in multiplayer it’ll be more exciting.
• Niko flying through the front window is awesome — Clearly Rockstar’s version of Eastern Europe doesn’t wear seatbelts.
• Liberty City is frakkin’ huge — I’m driving all over the place, then I look at the full map to discover that I’ve only touched a small chunk of one island. I know it’s not the size of the San Andreas map, but that was at least 50% empty anyways.

Check back for some more talking-points about IV. Maybe by then I’ll be out of virtua-Brooklyn.