It's time to do a walkthrough again

It was December 2008 that I completed my last walk through for Prince of Persia. It was a game that I really wanted to write-up because I was curious about the potential Humphrey Bogart and Kathrine Hepburn or Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn style interaction between the characters. However, after 5 hours and 20 pages of walk through, I realized that the game was just a giant, single-path rat-maze that you run the Prince down. Hardly a game that necessitates a game guide much less a game guide that makes fun of the characters.

However, this Tuesday, Rockstar releases The Ballad of Gay Tony. I have always wanted to do a walk through of a GTA game because of the great characters, interesting stories, and at times, challenging missions. But the games have always been so damn long. After the mind-drain that was Final Fantasy XII I will never do a walk through for a game longer that is long than 20 hours. As I have read, Ballad of Gay Tony is the same length as the other GTA expansion, The Lost and the Damned - a 10 to 15 hour experience. Perfect length for a quick walk through.

From all the preview coverage of BoGT I have read, this game represents the very reason I love Rockstar - they are a company that is completely separate from the rest of the culture of all other video game companies. The scenarios they write are not about colonizing mars, opening portals, or killing any dragons. Instead, in BoGT you are a personal thug (as always) for a club owner and though the game's missions you are interloper for the mega rich of Liberty city. It is a subject that is such a subtle variation from the game before it. In this case it is the same setting as Lost and the Damned except that now you are exploring the city from a different social class. The very fact that this game has a social structure should be news. Just think about that. In most games, the expansion means that you will be battling aliens instead of zombies or you will be under the ocean rather than in a volcano research facility. Granted, many people are excited to play this game because now there is a tank and now there is a parachuting scene. But for the most part the real change is who the game's subject is.

Rockstar has such a sophistication in their characters that the differences between their games are almost like a documentary director who focuses on a different aspect of the city she grew up in. I think it was a pre-LaTD episode of 1UP in which the hosts played arm-chair-game-designer and thought it would be great if the fist expansion would feature an infection that hits Liberty City and you had to fight out a bunch of zombies. That is the last thing Rockstar would do. They are not a typical video game company. If anything they would recreate a Katrina-style natural disaster in which you had to play the lackey to some city boss in the 9th Ward.

But anyway my copy comes Thursday from Amazon. I will keep you posted.