Where GTA lauds movies and music as cultural touchstones, SRIV takes on games. It trades on ridiculousness – but unlike its raison d'etre Grand Theft Auto, it's never sneering or cruel. I'm still not quite sure how that happened.īut I think I've got an idea. He talked like Jason Statham huffing a birthday-partyful of helium balloons and loomed out of the screen like a child's drawing of a nightmare. I created a monster, with an ageing wrestler's body, a pencil moustache, and giant buggly eyes, and gave him a cockney voice pitch-shifted to 60%.
If you really fancy, you can play as a small white hovering toilet. Or, if you really fancy, you can play as a small white hovering toilet. Or as a him with a her voice, or a her with a him voice, or a her with a her voice pitch-shifted to 100%, or even as a him with Nolan North's voice. But you're also free to play him straight, a man in a suit amid the madness of an imperfect simulation of an already-mad city.
I played my hero for laughs, dressing him in a towel, then in Lara Croft hotpants, then as a giant foam hotdog. For the first three hours, simply seeing his face kicked me into fits of giggles. The overweight, hollow-cheeked, elfeared weirdo you see in these screenshots is a product of that. Long ago, PC Gamer developed the concept of 'maximum face': mutants produced by pushing every slider to full. It's even present in the character creation screen.
