Grand Theft Auto IV: Kikizo Preview 3

Our third GTA IV preview spectacular reveals exclusive new details for the first time anywhere, and takes a much broader look around Liberty City in a fantastic build of the game that's nearing completion.

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Time to call Brucie and tell him the good news. Curiously, we're pretty sure the cell network we're on right now is called Badger, where in our last demo we were using a network called Whiz.

As we touched on last time, friendship is going to play a dynamic part in Grand Theft Auto IV. You're going to be able to build and maintain friendships with people, and these friendships will have benefits that will ease your passage through the game. We take a call from Little Jacob (the gun dealer who we met in the last demo) to illustrate the point. His thick Jamaican accent is a little hard to transcribe accurately but boils down to, "it's been a long time, I'm on my way", to which Niko replies, "Thanks, Jacob, I appreciate that." So Jacob is now coming to meet Niko, and that's a service you'll only get access to once your friendship with him has reached that stage. So you have to keep him sweet. You can take him out, or he'll ring you and invite you out. If you snub him too many times, make arrangements that you don't keep or just ignore him, he might retract his offer of that service.

What we're going to do next is instigate a social meeting with Roman. You've got various options of activities that you can do with all your friends - pool, eating, darts, bowling - but this time we're just going to go for a drink. The menu to select what activity you want to do, like many things throughout the game, appears on the familiar interface of your cellphone screen. Still in his car Niko phones Roman once our activity selection is made and asks if he wants a drink. Roman asks Niko to meet him in an hour. If we take longer than an hour to get there, he'll consider himself blown out, and will be pissed at you, it will have a negative effect - ad he'll be more off with you than if you had not called him at all, so you have to balance these factors and consider your relationships with the people around you. Making our way to the 'R' symbol on the radar, we find Roman and honk our horn for him to come over. "Ah, seeing you puts a smile on my face", he says, "let's go". We head off for a local bar. On the radar, there are now three possible bar locations we can choose from. It's later into the night and the city looks steamy as we listen to a station called IF99 (once again Rockstar won't let us tell you about the music we heard throughout the demo). We find a bar called Perestroika and head inside.

Time fast forwards to later in the night when we're leaving the bar. Rather inevitably, based on personal experience, "a drink" seems to have turned into "hours of drinking", and the next scene sees Niko and Roman leaving the bar a little bit worse for wear. Amusingly, the game HUD advises: "You are drunk. Your vision is blurred." This rather funny scene has both cousins staggering about all over the place with the camera bouncing around - obviously they can't handle a drink as well as Kikizo.

An interesting thing here is that this stumbling around, which the player struggles to control, uses the Euphoria physics engine to do the body physics. You can tell they're both shit-faced. We're still going to have to take Roman home though, despite our drunken condition, and being flagrantly indifferent towards the law, we get right into the car we left outside. The three-metre journey from the bar exit to the car door seems to take ages, as the player struggles to steer their walking towards it. Yes, as if running people over in your car for a laugh wasn't edgy enough, you can now do it while boozed up! Excellent.

This sort of mini mission to drive home is also different to normal driving, as you'd expect. Steering is affected by your alcohol intake, the camera is still blurry and bouncing about all over the place, and steering is a lot more difficult than normal - keeping it in a straight line is an "art form", as Rockstar puts it. We're causing a fair amount of chaos on the road, but fortunately we'll sober up in a matter of moments once we get in the car - it takes about a minute in real world time. On a related topic, it's no longer one real minute equals one game hour, it's now two minutes equals one hour, so days are now longer; you can't really see the sun moving like in San Andreas, and there is now more significance to daytime and nighttime activities. So in this case, sobering up to drive more easily takes half an hour, although I doubt they'd pass a breathalyser test...

Once Niko starts to get more sober, we can take in some awesome nighttime views of the city as we go down the large freeways. Rockstar also changed the weather for this bit using its debug keyboard to be a clear night, allowing us to check out the awesome draw distance that shows off Algonquin's skyline, bridges, smoke billowing out of chimneys, and lots of varied scenery. It's a classic New York picture.

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