Shadowrunning GTA4

One of the things I recently noti­ced is that GTA actually gives you a fair amount of choice on how to do some mis­si­ons, but doesn’t really adver­tise the fact.

Play­ing the game after some time (and only few days after a Shado­wrun ses­sion), I went ahead and got to do the mis­sion “Dining Out”, where Yours Truly (on his ava­tar in this case, Niko Bel­lic) had to run a hit on one Kim Young-Guk. Young-Guk was dining at a place cal­led Mr. Fuk.

Warily, I drove Niko to the encoun­ter, inves­ti­ga­ting the site — a rather acces­si­ble and free-standing restau­rant. Tired of all pre­vious hit mis­si­ons, which mostly ended up in me cha­sing the per­son on bicy­cle or car most of the time, I deci­ded to try to be crea­tive. I went around the back, and indeed, in the par­king lot I found a motor­cy­cle and a PMP 600 (which is a remake of one of those Chrys­ler esta­tes). Fea­ring that this would exactly end up as I pre­dic­ted, I rang up Packie and got mys­elf a nice little car bomb.

Pla­c­ing this under the PMP 600, I went inside and sure enough, the stale air in the restau­rant had an unhe­althy dose of lead after a couple of seconds. So one kills all the goons, goes ups­tairs and talks (while sight­ing down along the sights of the gun) to the mana­ger, who said that Kim just fled out through the kit­chen. Of course.

Cha­sing Kim down, one bad­gers through the kit­chens, only to find that Korean bug­ger alre­ady having jum­ped down the fire escap, dod­ging into his PMP 600. One would then have to jump down after him and swing your­self unto the motorcycle.

Smir­king, I let Niko pull out his mobile phone and call (han­dily pre­selec­ted) the bomb, which promptly blows up the car and Kim with it. $13,250 ear­ned wit­hout having to break your neck on the motor­cy­cle and pro­bably crash into some­thing with a spec­ta­cu­lar slow motion scene.

The thing is that GTA often silently encou­ra­ges such beha­viour. There’s a few mis­si­ons where the city gets mission-specific instan­ces, thus undo­ing some chan­ges to the sce­nery you might have cau­sed. But more often than not, you can just start lay­ing traps if you eit­her sus­pect or know what’s going to hap­pen. Place bombs, blo­ckade exits with a lorry, ram down fen­ces to get other ways of access to a loca­tion, start sni­ping people from some totally dif­fe­rent loca­tion, or just go all Altaïr and shuf­fle to a site via the rooftops.

It’s fun, really.