Yay Maturity!!!

Don't ask me why, but even though I've owned GTA IV for almost a year, I only tried the multiplayer game for the first time last night.

I particularly enjoyed the 'Cops 'n' Crooks' gametype. The entire city is open and if you're playing as the crooks, you have to get to a getaway vehicle (usually a helicopter or boat) and the cops have to stop you.

So you can imagine the possibilities. You can have up to four players in a car and sixteen total players. The first game was some of the most fun I've ever had playing online. It couldn't have been cooler if it had been choreographed.

I'm riding shotgun in one of the crook cars, blasting away at the pursuing cops, one of our tires gets blown out and the car rolls over. Just as I crawl out and get into cover, the car explodes, taking a police car that had just come around the corner with it. Then there was a chase through some alleyways on foot and just when I got cornered and thought it was all over, another crook in a car powerslides around the corner taking out the cops that had cornered me.

Then, things went downhill.

I joined another game, only to have all the crooks jump out of the car, run into an alley and take cover.

Turns out that GTA IV has gone the way of Halo. You see, the crooks can also win by killing all the cops. The easiest way to kill the cops is to get everyone down an easily defendable alley where the cops have to turn a blind corner to get to you. So, for the best chance of winning, you go down an alley, hide behind a dumpster and keep your gun trained on the entrance so any cop who so much as peeks around the corner gets shot in the face.

Why get involved in pulse-pounding car chases and actually have fun when you can stay perfectly still for ten or twenty minutes? It's another example of what I talked about in a previous gaming post. Winning is the most important thing. Fun isn' even a close third.

Then, the inevitable happened. A squeaky-voiced pre-teen racist joined the game and started screaming 'nigger' before we were even out of the lobby. All he did was scream into his headset for the entire game.

I quit in disgust. I seriously considered cancelling my Xbox Live account because playing online just wasn't fun anymore.

Then I found the Mature Gamer's Club. It's a group of people who, shock horror! Play games for fun. No racial epithets, no hyper-competitive idiots, just a bunch of people of all ages having fun.

I can say this because one of the people I'd sent a friend request to was playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance and I joined his game along with another couple of players from MGC, and the difference really was night and day.

I can't say how nice it was to play online with, well, nice people. Hell, forget that, it's just nice to play with people who don't consider the game secondary to screaming down their headsets.