Things I've Noticed: Sometimes 100% Just isn't worth it

For Christmas I got the game Grand Theft Auto IV from some good friends, and each weekend since then I’ve slowly been working my way through the various missions (both story and side) that I need to complete my character Nico Bellic’s rise to power in the underworld of the fictitious Liberty City .

There is definitely a lot about this game I love, for starters the id-pleasing levels of violence and mayhem, both incidental and story-driven definitely allow me to take my daily frustrations out in a relatively harmless way, secondly, the game world is well set up, and the stuff you can do throughout the game world is pretty impressive.  Finally, the game actually requires you to make friends, hang out with them, take their calls, call them, and change up the stuff you do with them if you’d like them to become really good friends with you (in the game really good friends are willing to do special tasks for you) which is kind of funny, because for everyone saying how terribly anti-social the GTA franchise is, this concept of making and keeping friends has a lot of potential for application in the real world.

My biggest problem with the game is the stuff you need to do to complete the game at a 100% level.  This involves doing every main mission, driving every type of vehicle, doing every stunt jump in the environment (50) and killing 200 pigeons.

There was a time when I would have happily spent my weekends running through a videogame collecting all of the various things to get that precious 100% score, but honestly, once you’ve killed a few pigeons, you would have to be pretty dedicated to say, sure I’ll do this 198 more times.  At least with the stunt jumps you get cool camera views of the jump, but even with the 50 seems like it would take an awful long time to complete.

Right now I’m about 5/8ths of the way through the main part of the game, and it’s pretty fun.  I think my days of doing absolutely everything in the game are behind me – I’ll happily finish the story, but after that I’ve got other games to play.