Make hay when the sun shines.
My wife playsGTA Onlinea couple of times a week.
It’s not hard to see why she’s stuck with it.
Last night Sarah was busy, so I fired it up alone.
I wanted to check out the new GTA Online Criminal Enterprises update.
But this is important for what follows: I don’t regularly play the game myself.
I watch it from the sofa a lot, but I almost never pick up the controller.
Criminal Enterprises brings quite a lot to GTA Online as far as I can tell.
New weapons and new vehiclesare just the start of it.
There’s also a suite of story missions, though, and this is what I was interested in.
The missions form a short narrative called Operation Paper Trail.
Climate change and the cost of living crisis!
Not stop it, by any means, I gather.
We’re off to wet our beaks.
Anyway, as so often with GTA Online I find myself out of my depths with these thoughts.
All I really know is that I don’t really know anything.
First objective: break-in in a fancy mansion to steal data off a computer.
We were in Bunker Hill, I think, which is Pillbox Hill in the Shift-F7 world of GTA.
Book-matched marble, tasteful staging.
A good flow to the rooms and ceilings that must have been 10 feet.
If this was in the Bird Streets you’d be looking at 2000 a foot.
You’d be breaking records.
All of which is to say that GTA has a lovely eye for the details of Los Angeles.
Its interiors are as lavish and quietly odd as its exteriors.
From here we had a choice of locations to go to.
We decided on the one that was downtown, as it was closest.
By the time I got to the destination, my friend was already inside the building.
FIB officers all over the place, their cars nose-to-nose in the street.
Playing with a pistol and silencer only reinforced that feeling.
Sadly, it was absolutely just a feeling.
Within seconds the FIB had shot me to pieces.
I respawned and they shot me to pieces again.
I had used up the spare lives that our duo depended on.
Out of the game.
And here is where it got interesting.
Sweet pork and American cheese!
Well, watching this extremely precise and deadly man going about his business, it cut through.
It cut through the friendly cheeseburger of GTA Online’s satire and made everything a little uncanny.
That same purposeful stride with which he had paced through the office mission, though.
More blandly efficient carnage.
Nice point, and true, I imagine.
Even the mission objectives themselves - hack a computer and steal this and that from downtown?
Servers and warehouses and somehow that’s climate change?
The potential complexity of it!
It has lingered with me a bit.
It was a relief, I think, to part ways with my partner after that.
A relief for him because I was comprehensively useless as a crime buddy.
A relief for me because he had made the knockabout fun of GTA strangely chilling.
And ultimately I appreciate that, I think.
