Features// Pocket Plays GTA IV Multi-Player

In my third game, in Dukes/Broker, David and I leap onto a motorbike to take us to the action, but in failing to fulfil my shortcut I reveal two things: firstly, it ‘feels’ incredible! The bike slides around on the muddy grass and struggles to get up hills, wheel-spinning and slipping under my grasp. Secondly, I cannot drive for toffee or, more importantly than toffee, I can't drive well enough to impress a group of blokes I’ve never met before.

All the different vehicles have nuances and quirks to their physical attributes like you’d expect in the real world as they interact with their environment. This makes every twoc (Taken Without Owners Consent) a whole new adventure.

Pride maimed and bleeding, I offer up the control to David and humbly take the bitch seat, soon forgetting the pain as we nip into sight of the other team. I start taking potshots at them as we nimbly flick around street corners before eventually clipping a tree and being thrown off, landing in crumpled heaps in the gutter after a series of elegant, accidental, mid-air 360-degree rolls.

For the last Deathmatch we go to Happiness Island where we have a classic all-out RPG match, with knives as the only back-up. I thought at one point that we’d chosen too small a map for such weapons and were going to be constantly cartwheeling through the air under the force of a rocket to the face. Then the statue base was conquered, giving the setting a whole new lease of life.

You know when you’re having so much fun you feel drunk?

I had three members of the other team pursuing me, knives swiping at my hair whilst I struggled to retaliate as all I could manage was to stagger around, struggling to breathe for laughing. I remember distinctly taking out two or three on the clock tower, turning around to meet the re-spawning vengeance of the first kill – killing them – and, as I laughed maniacally in my glory, being rocketed from behind. “Didn’t even kill me!” I shout, incredulously, “Cashback!” And then the enemy knifed me. Sadly there’s no theatre mode, or else that’d be my new icebreaker at parties “Hi, I’m Pocket – see me pwn!”

Sadly my buzz was not to last in quite the same way for the next game, as it was back to classic GTA format to perform a few little jobs for Petrovich. I forget, in my smugness, that I cannot drive as well as I can shoot. Anyone who had the joy of seeing my green VW Polo before it was resigned to the scrapheap last week will attest to its pockmarked form; its interior covered in four litres of white paint spilt on the back seat, Nutella stamped and glow-in-the-dark stars stuck roof and the crowbar-split radio hole.

It’s not that I don’t love driving – I do. I adore it. My real life driving is probably about right for GTA. Therefore my GTA driving is more like Burnout driving. And this is not Burnout, as I have to remind myself after being impressed by a particularly devastating takedown.

We’re sent on a mission to take out a gang of crack dealers and, while R Kelly tells us that There Aint Nothing Wrong (With a Little *Insert Paedophile Joke Here*) I reflect that this is a beeyootiful game.

I’m a deeply un-violent person and I’d last precisely two minutes in a gang (to the point when I suggest we should change our colours because red’s terrible on my complexion). But this game gives me a glorious amount of cathartic escapism, which is so much fun I can sort of see why Anne Diamond’s scared of it. Apart from the fact that she’s obviously an idiot.