Grand Theft Auto is back!!!

[ImmaculateClump]

Even then all that stuff felt decidedly optional

Yeah, it was totally optional, but the rewards were like extra time you could spend under water before coming up for air, and you could spend longer running and shit like that.
Not being able to run when you were on foot was pretty annoying. I mean, it wasn't that much fucking faster to begin with. I don't care about realism! I care less about that than horse scrotum contraction.

Do they still make you constantly tap the button to run in these games? I bet they do.

[Consignia]

You still need to at least to spend loads of time swimming under water to get lung capacity up, otherwise there is a block in the story in San Andreas. Replaying San Andreas, it is a great game, but it does have points were you have to do busy work to progress. I'm not there yet, but IIRC you have to do loads of the turf wars stuff late game.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I liked the turf wars, for the most part. They could get quite tense, looking up the road to see a group of baddies crouch-walking towards me.

I put the time in to conquer the whole city, which made it feel like more of a punch in the gut when I suddenly found myself in exile.

It was a bit annoying having to stop what i was doing to defend my territory though. I guess that's a bit like the socialising in GTA4.

[Mister Six]

I think I deliberately got buff/fat/whatever to get the various girlfriend bonuses, then didn't touch any of those aspects again. It's fair to say that it's an indicator of the "realistic" shit that would clutter up Rockstar's games and get in the way of having fun in the future, though.

[Ignatius_S]

The stat grinding stuff wasn't great but I found it innocuous enough. In however many dozens of hours I played San Andreas, I probably only spent several minutes doing gym stuff.

I didn't make it far enough in GTA4 to find out if the notorious phonecalls are as annoying as everyone says.

For me, the real issue with those elements was that they were heavily touted as something new and better over the previous game - at the time, the company I worked for published a lot of gaming/computing mags and Rockstar really pushed that element. Whereas, in reality, it was pretty 'meh' and brought nothing to the table.

Personally, I felt that it was them trying to do something interesting with the open world aspect but what really needed work was the missions and greater freedom in accomplishing them.

re: phone calls - would agree with the other comments about it not being an issue. Mission design was another matter...

[bgmnts]

At least I remember who Little Jacob and Packie McReary are, I couldnt tell you a character from V apart from the 3 main leads.

[beanheadmcginty]

Still amazes me that they thought having a character called Packie was a good idea.

[spanky]

I loved how if you were in San Fierro and got notification of someone in Los Santos trying to take your turf, you could just click L3 to turn on and off the taxi missions and it went away. Saved my young sanity after the Zero missions threatened to destroy it entirely

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

For me, the real issue with those elements was that they were heavily touted as something new and better over the previous game - at the time, the company I worked for published a lot of gaming/computing mags and Rockstar really pushed that element. Whereas, in reality, it was pretty 'meh' and brought nothing to the table.

I certainly remember them hyping that stuff up a lot and thinking it sounded shit. I specifically remember that taking care of your car was made out to be a big factor, which sounded terrible, but didn't really translate to the finished game. At most, it might occasionally be mildly handy to add a turbo boost for the odd mission - but if you needed a fast car, the answer was right there in the title.