Grand Theft Auto IV Thoughts and Destructoid Appreciation

OK this is not going to be a full review because I fell I would focus too much on what irked me and induce a subsequent flame war which I have no interest in.
The fact is that I just finished the game and that while I thought some aspects of the game were amazing, some were simply awful and one could argue, close to broken.

I loved the reproduction of NYC, the size and feel of the city. I love the voice work which is simply top notch especially when compared to the talentless zombies who dub Japanese RPGs. I thought the firefight gameplay was more than adequate and so on.
On the other hand I thought the sometime ridiculous dialogues went in the way of the realism of the city and story. I was amazed by the awful texture pop-ups as soon as you go above 50Mph in your car and I didn’t appreciate that they forced me to date Kate (Patrick’s sister) whom I had hung up on each time and never called when what I wanted was to have Kiki, whom I saw often and sent me lovely tests, as my official girlfriend.
And last but not least I HATE the stupid checkpoint system which makes you go back to the very beginning of some mission without your original car because you had the bad idea to get out of it before dying….

Told you I shouldn’t review this.

So anyway the point of this post is because I’m just amazed at all the biased hype around this game. I expect it from fanboys but not from the professional press and while the game is certainly not a bad game by any means, some aspects are deficient and it does not by any means warrant a score 10/10 or 100%. At most it should be around 85-90%.
And so I got curious and checked out Meta Critic to see the various review scores. First of all I had to scroll down for a while to go beyond the perfect score (sigh) but also the lowest score was 80 (which seems a fair score) and almost none of the people who gave it 80 seem to be from recognized publications.

that is until I noticed that Desctructoid did give it a score of 80. So I got curious and decided to read there reviews and found out that is was probably the most accurate score tied to a review (for this game at least).
So from now on I will always check out their reviews when I’m interested in a game to see what they think.
Thanks Jim Sterling! (and Nick, Ashley, Anthony and Dale (thanks for the music too!))