Danger Dance

The parade of GTA IV updates on Danger Dance continues unimpeded, like a parade of quadriplegics parading under their own power, dragging themselves along using only their teeth against the pavement; in other words, it’s been a slow parade. Mostly, we’ve been playing GTA IV, which has been distracting us from doing anything particularly productive. For example, my collection of vintage stamps allegedly licked by Marilyn Monroe has gone tragically neglected, as have the ten Cambodian children I’ve adopted for tax purposes.

If you weren’t quite sure that a lot of people were playing the latest GTA, according to Xbox Live’s Major Nelson, presumably named after a devastating wrestling move, two million achievements were unlocked in a 24-hour period. It was also last week’s top game played via Xbox Live, overtaking Halo 3. So, that’s independent verification that GTA IV is really popular. More independent verification can be garnered from a small experiment we performed for junior college credit.

The experiment was simple; we found a group of kids so ravaged by poverty that they could never actually afford GTA IV or a console capable of playing it. Gathering these kids together, we threw an empty GTA IV box in the middle of them. Several pints of blood loss and a few broken bones later, we’ve confirmed it: GTA is very popular. Look for our full report in the next issue of Scientific American.

Having played a decent portion of the game, I can confidently say that it’s much better than Kane and Lynch. I guess the main thing that GTA IV got right that Kane and Lynch didn’t is that after playing GTA IV for a few hours I never felt like someone stole $60 out of my wallet and replaced my currency with an aborted possum fetus. Congratulations to the Rockstar team on that. Our A+, 10-out-of-10, five-star review is on the way.