Angela and I bought Grand Theft Auto IV when it came out. No, we didn’t wait outside of Best Buy and snatched it at midnight on release day. We have work, you know. We did, however, pick it up later on release day. There were plenty of copies.

Due to work and my schedule, I didn’t get the chance to play with it at all. It took me at least another 2 days until I was able to unpack it and load it onto our PS3. What I got was pretty cool and interesting.

Let me preface this by saying that I got my PS2 for my birthday a number of years ago. The first game that I got for it was GTA3. Rob hooked it up to the tv for me while I was off on a drunken binge. I played that game and finished most of the missions. It was good times. I had the same problem with that game that I have with GTA4: Driving.

When I say ‘driving’, I don’t mean driving in the game. Sure, I suck driving in the game. Then again, I have no problem with it because I can ram right through things. My problem with driving happens when I’m not even playing the game. The issue I have is that when I’m behind the wheel in my car I’m expecting the in-game physics to kick in.

My video game world intersects with the real world and it isn’t pretty.

Car handling in GTA4 is really crap, especially with the low end cars that you start off with. If you want to make a turn the odds of you losing control and drifting are pretty high, even if you use the brake. I normally use the reverse button + brake + accelerator while making a high speed turn. No matter what I do, I tend to either spin out or lurch along like Jerry Lewis.

When I climb into my truck or Angela’s 350, I’m expecting the same type of mushy handling. I’ve also considered driving into/through things that I normally would in the game. That mailbox? I’m sure I could plow through it with my Jeep. That street lamp? Child’s play! I could take out least 6 of those and the 350 would be fine!

It is a pretty bad problem with me. Taking turns I start to get jittery and I keep waiting for my back end to slide out. I’m always at the ready to compensate for the poor handling of a video game car while in the real world.

It is reminiscent of what it was like when I first played Katamari Damacy. I wanted to keep walking around town collecting things in a big massive ball.

Hmmm…if I’m having these types of problems with games maybe I should download a dating sim from jlist.