Grand Theft Pandemonium

If you’ve stumbled upon any games website this week you’d be forgiven for thinking that Grand Theft Auto V is the only game in existence, all other games have been taken round the back and shot. Not only is GTA V not out yet, it hasn’t even got a release date, but what it has got is a whole load of pandemonium over a trailer.

A trailer? People love trailers these days, they can’t get enough of them, more excitement is generated over a trailer than the final product it’s promoting. Perhaps people are too busy to watch a film or play a game and watching a trailer is not only a viable substitute but a more preferable one, who wants to sit down and watch a film for two hours anyway? A trailer can be anything from twenty seconds to four minutes and that’s enough time to formulate some deep opinions without stopping what you’re doing (masturbating probably).

Film trailers are undoubtedly useful, if a trailer can bore you in sixty seconds then chances are you’re not going to want to see the film. You are able to produce a list of suitable reasons to why it‘s not for you, I don‘t like the actors, the plot is ludicrous, the “jokes” aren’t funny, Robert Pattinson is in it.

Game trailers however are far from useful, in recent times we’ve seen totally distorted depictions of games in their trailers, promising something that can never be delivered. Far more interested in achieving a cinematic appeal, very little of the game is shown, we’re treated to a pretty looking sequence which while impressive tells us nothing about the game. We can’t make any judgements like we can with a film trailer because we haven’t seen what the game really looks like.

So why all the hysteria over GTA V? It may have revealed a few details about the game (none of them revelatory), but it hasn’t showed what playing the game will be like. It’s admittedly quite exciting to see glimpses of the city but is this really enough to warrant multiple articles on one website? Have we been shown enough to be able to concoct accurate judgements? Looking at the comments section of said articles, apparently so. If we are to take these comments as gospel then GTA V will either be TOTALLY GNARLY! Or a sleight against god and all humanity.

It’s fine to speculate (in moderation) what GTA V might be like but to make such dogmatic judgements after seeing just over a minute of footage is moronic, as is criticising the trailer. Apparently looking at a screen for a minute is too much for some people as one commenter shared his anger of having to watch an advert before watching the trailer, seemingly failing to see the irony behind his stupidity. If you can’t spend a minute of your time keeping your eyes open then how are you supposed to play the damn game? Do you have a tantrum whenever you come across a loading screen? Do you throw the controller whenever there’s some more reading to do in Final Fantasy? What happened when he sat through the credits of Iron Man? “I WAITED TEN MINUTES FOR THAT? ARGH!”.

…Anyway, GTA V isn’t out for a long time, let’s just be content that we know where it’s set and PATIENTLY wait for Rockstar to reveal more details or, and I’m just putting this out there, just wait until the game is released. While you wait, read the #grandtheftautomemories hash tag on twitter and be thankful you’re not one of those people.