games like GTA

May 25, 2006 2:33 PM

My wife really, really likes the Grand Theft Auto series. She doesn't play the story line or missions, just likes to walk/ride around shooting people, cars, helicopters, etc. She uses cheats constantly. Like I said, it's not about completing or competing, just shooting stuff. What other game could she have a good time in?
posted by signal to sports, hobbies, & recreation (49 comments total)

A lot of people hated it, but I enjoyed the first State of Emergency. Lots of running around and shooting.
posted by MegoSteve at 2:40 PM on May 25, 2006

Postal 2. Basically all you do is walk around and shoot stuff. There's a free demo you can try.
posted by agropyron at 2:42 PM on May 25, 2006

"Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction" is a lot of fun too.

I play GTA:III for the same reason. Mindless destruction & wanton violence. The Hulk game has also entertained me quite a bit.

"Manhunt" is another fun one. The Resident Evil games are fun, but perhaps there's a bit too much plot.

"25 to Life" is another mindless adventure.
posted by drstein at 2:50 PM on May 25, 2006

Forgot to say: she uses a PC.
posted by signal at 3:19 PM on May 25, 2006

True Crime is very close to GTA, especially the more recent 'New York City' version.
posted by chrissyboy at 3:25 PM on May 25, 2006

I only played the first True Crime, and on PS2. I hated it. Maybe the sequel / PC version is better?

I'll second Postal 2, or even the first Postal if she likes older games.

There are 6 GTA games for PC, does she have them all?(GTA, GTA:London, GTA2, GTA3, GTA: Vice City, and GTA:San Andreas).

If so, has she tried any mods?

The latest Tony Hawk games (THUG 2 and THAW)offer GTA-style freeform gameplay, to some extent, but are totally different games of course.

Mafia is a great game, but lots of story and only occasional free form wandering. It is basically GTA in the 20's but much more linear.
posted by utsutsu at 3:27 PM on May 25, 2006

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is a great fantasy sandbox game. With cheats.
posted by boo_radley at 3:27 PM on May 25, 2006

I sometimes enjoy using cheats in "Hitman: Contracts" and running around and shooting people. Same with "Half Life 2" which is an awesome game, so she can fool around and you can actually play it if you're into that.
posted by RustyBrooks at 3:28 PM on May 25, 2006

I only played the first True Crime, and on PS2. I hated it. Maybe the sequel / PC version is better

Me too, although all my GTA playing compadres liked it, but the NYC is loooooads better.
posted by chrissyboy at 3:29 PM on May 25, 2006

NYC version. I meant to say version.
posted by chrissyboy at 3:29 PM on May 25, 2006

My girlfriend used to play Doom and Quake in God Mode to relieve stress during university exams.
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:29 PM on May 25, 2006

Resident Evil 4, in particular, is loaded with good shooting—they reworked the whole style of gameplay to be more action-oriented. However, as drstein says, it's fairly plot driven, so you can just wander indefinitely shooting zombies.

Manhunt is not what I would qualify as "fun"; it's like GTA, but with a lot more stealth and a lot less goofy fun.

Shadow of the Colossus has a very beautiful and expansive world in which to wander around (on horseback, even), but there's very, very little in that world to actually shoot at. A sort of Zen GTA, tha tway.
posted by cortex at 3:30 PM on May 25, 2006

This isnt quite the same, but has she tried Katamari Damacy? I know it looks all cute, but its kind of sinister if you think about it. It's basically running around the world causing chaos and destroying things. heh.
posted by atom128 at 3:30 PM on May 25, 2006

Oops just saw the PC thing. Never mind.
posted by atom128 at 3:30 PM on May 25, 2006

How about The Godfather? It is very GTA'ish
posted by fjom at 3:40 PM on May 25, 2006

There's no shooting at all, but maybe she's be into Myst or one of the other games from Cyan where you put the story togeter as you explore worlds.
posted by princelyfox at 3:45 PM on May 25, 2006

i second the doom and quake suggestion, and add unreal tournament (GOTY edition is best IMO). a lot of these suggestions are for games with rich plots and interactions, when the point is she just seems to enjoy plain old FPS.

(fellow girl who enjoys mowing down pedestrians)
posted by nyanko at 3:51 PM on May 25, 2006

Straight up shooting: Serious Sam.
posted by cortex at 3:54 PM on May 25, 2006

Escape Velocity Nova
posted by ludwig_van at 3:58 PM on May 25, 2006

Just a possibility: Destroy All Humans. Haven't played, but the main idea is to, well...
posted by NortonDC at 3:58 PM on May 25, 2006

Carmageddon 2. You drive around running over people (and cows, and dogs, and clowns) and smashing into other cars that are likewise trying to run over people and smash each other.

As a bonus, there are lots of silly power-ups and bonuses (ie, if you do an absurdly huge flip and land on your tires smushing a clown, you might get a CUNNING STUNT BONUS).

Also very cheat-friendly -- type stuff in to get powerups. BIGTWAT turns your car into solid granite, POWPOW gives you the Opponent Repulsificator.

Old game, graphically limited, but should be very cheap (or even abandonware)

Avoid Carmageddon3. It is teh suck.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:02 PM on May 25, 2006

Buy a used Xbox, and a copy of Mercenaries. You will not regret it. It is like GTA in North Korea. You can fly helicopters, steal lots of vehicles (tanks and such).. You can call in many kinds of 'air strike' on targets (make everything go boom).
I don't use cheats but I am pretty sure they are available in Mercenaries.

The GTAs (3, vice city, san andreas) are some of my favorite games; I like Mercenaries almost as much.

Oblivion (for PC) is also great.
posted by jockc at 4:10 PM on May 25, 2006

Mafia. Great, underrated game.

It's like GTA, in the 30s. However, it is a bit more plot-driven and linear than GTA, but you can roam around if you want.
posted by graventy at 4:35 PM on May 25, 2006

F.E.A.R. has fantastic combat (and very little plot). Shooting up office parks is extremely satisfying because of how much stuff there is to break apart and how much debris gets created during a fire fight. There's a "bullet time" reflex feature you can kick in for brief periods that's well implemented. With cheat codes you can use it as much as you want.

It's a bit spooky, I don't know if that's a plus or minus.
posted by justkevin at 4:37 PM on May 25, 2006

(fellow girl who enjoys mowing down pedestrians)
posted by nyanko at 3:51 PM PST on May 25

Oh my goodness, there's more than one of us!

I played UT for around 6 years, so I have to put my vote in for that (I'd still be playing if there were anyone besides bots on servers).

Second the suggestion for Serious Sam (and SS:Second Encounter), especially if you set up the server for permanant ammo (so that the ammo doesn't dissapear when someone else picks it up). It's just spray and pray goodness! Endless supply of interesting/funny baddies running towards you for you to kill. Just talking about this makes me want to reinstall. :)

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is pretty fun... and a free download.
posted by mileena at 4:53 PM on May 25, 2006

Oblivion's great for wandering around and doing whatever you please. It's a fantasy-style game (swords, magic, quests), so it's definitely different from GTA. I found that I enjoyed both games equally.
I don't think F.E.A.R. would be a good game for her - while the game's fun (and quite creepy if I say so myself), you don't have the type of freedom that you do in GTA or Oblivion. You can wander around whatever complex you're in and play with the physics engine, but it's a plot-driven game.
posted by Meagan at 5:09 PM on May 25, 2006

I (a girlie violent gamer) use GTA for the same thing, wanton destruction and mayhem. While it's certainly a different genre, she might want to try Burnout (the one before the latest one). There's this mode where you're entire goal is to knock cars off the course and they just keep respawning. It's awesome for anger release.

I second the Hulk suggestion and would like to add Spiderman (NOT the newest one). I spent 2 weeks wandering around, finding secret hidouts and kicking ass. Good times...
posted by nadawi at 5:10 PM on May 25, 2006

I love to shoot things (in games only), I am a girl, I play Unreal Tournament on my PC constantly. Not the newer ones either, classic Unreal is the best.
posted by yodelingisfun at 5:18 PM on May 25, 2006

Oh and you can pick up Black & White and be an unmerciful god and make your villagers SUFFER, it's not shooting but you can eat them and sacrifice their children and stuff.
posted by yodelingisfun at 5:20 PM on May 25, 2006

Nadawi is referring to Spiderman 2, I believe. The PC version is not the same as the PS2 version and is vastly inferior. None of the free roam awesomeness and lamed up versions of the levels.
posted by utsutsu at 5:41 PM on May 25, 2006

Hm, I'm not sure how we started at GTA and ended up at F.E.A.R. and UT. It should at least be mentioned that you'll want a beefy system to enjoy F.E.A.R. and Oblivion.
posted by ludwig_van at 5:56 PM on May 25, 2006

Fourthing Oblivion. On the PC, you'll have enough console commands to cheat away. Or if you're like me (and 360 bound), just build a suit of 100% Camo armor and kill with wald, wild abandon.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:27 PM on May 25, 2006

I asked my son, who is a serious gamer, and he claims that Halo is the best shoot-em-up series there is on the planet. Better if you like multi-player, is the proviso he offers.
posted by msali at 7:39 PM on May 25, 2006

I second Serious Sam for this. You just shoot a lot of stuff, for a long time, in a great way. The level requirements never get more complex than Doom-style "find the X key to open the Y door," and they're not hard to find, as you mostly just walk forward shooting stuff.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 7:46 PM on May 25, 2006

(Another girl who likes to shoot things on computers here...) Just wanted to add another vote for Unreal Tournament and to some extent Diablo. However, I don't know of any cheats for Diablo, but Unreal has a decent amount of them.
posted by sperose at 8:11 PM on May 25, 2006

I have a special place in my heart for XEvil. Very easy to play for 10 minutes or a couple hours, fast 2d shoot 'em up that works great on slow, inexpensive pc/linux/osx machines.
posted by enfa at 8:22 PM on May 25, 2006

hahaha Serious Sam (either 1 or 2) would be awesome for this, it has the best feeling of you versus an unending army, and it's very fun and goofy.

Diablo II is pretty good mindless seratonin-drip-delivery.
posted by spatula at 8:24 PM on May 25, 2006

Fifthing Oblivion.

With cheats or modding in uber weapons, killing sprees are very doable. Besides, getting your hands wet and sticky with gore is sooo much more satisfying shooting someone with a gun, surely.

Also, there's a (fairly) easy to use construction set. If she gets bored with exploring the very pretty world, she can spend some time modding/building her own fortress/domicile and stocking it with helpless, er, victims for... amusement.

With the construction set, possibilities are pretty open ended. Check out youtube and video.google for Oblviion vids. People mod insane situations (having an enlarged end-boss in the "arena" gladiatoring against a host of various combatants, killing annoying characters in interesting ways, building a giant bowling alley in the game, &c&c). Also, Oblivion allows you to customize what your character looks like - which could be a plus.

I'm still waiting for a modder to put togather a reasonably well made (modern) automatic weapon for Oblivion. Or maybe a flamethrower... hmm...

wanders off to figure out how hard it would be to mod in a chainsaw

(tessource - a good repository of user-made mods)
posted by porpoise at 8:26 PM on May 25, 2006

Second the Burnout 3: Takedown recommendation. It's a racing game, but you get powered-up for trashing other cars. No licensed cars in that game (car manufacturers have severe limits on what damage they allow developers to show on a car.) And there's a crash mode where the object is to cause as much destruction as possible. The slow-mo replays are very rewarding :).
posted by formless at 8:44 PM on May 25, 2006

It's not exactly another game, but another way of playing GTA: Multi Theft Auto. You get to play GTA in limited multiplayer modes. I had a lot of fun with it but ran into bandwidth issues playing it online a lot of the time. It was a fun romp with the hubby over LAN if you want to do that. Also, I can't speak for the SA version, as I played the older GTA:VC one.
posted by spacelux at 10:38 PM on May 25, 2006

Is it more about the shooting, or the non-linear gameplay?

I find myself doing the same thing in the GTA games, wandering away from the missions and just kinda roaming around looking for trouble.

Simpsons Hit and Run is good like that too. GTA in Springfield. Pretty entertaining. I saw the PC version the other day at Fry's for ten bucks.
posted by First Post at 11:57 PM on May 25, 2006

If she's into nostalgia gaming try MDK.
posted by PenDevil at 1:24 AM on May 26, 2006

And how could I forget Duke Nukem 3D.
posted by PenDevil at 1:25 AM on May 26, 2006

Someone mentioned Destroy All Humans. I'll go into more detail on it. There's levels you need to pass to get to other levels but it's not too hard to get through a few levels and once that's done you have your choice of which location to go to. Once there, there's main missions and side missions you can play but you can also just run and/or fly around destroying humans, making their brains pop out of their bodies, destroying buildings and vehicles.

I find it less immersive than the GTA games (specifically GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas), probably since it has this 50s alien movie setting, but also because the combat's not usually as intense. Still, if you just want to wander around killing things/blowing shit up, it fits the bill.
posted by DyRE at 3:20 AM on May 26, 2006

I'd second Mercenaries. It has some insanely unbalancing cheats such that you can immediately use the best vehicles/weapons, calling in airstrikes to blow up large sections of the map. Tons of fun.
posted by gregchttm at 5:51 AM on May 26, 2006

I second State of Emergency (the first one). You get to incite riots in shopping malls and city centers and you can just run around hitting people with picked up chairs, garbage pails and the like, as well as automatic weapons.
posted by EiderDuck at 5:51 AM on May 26, 2006

Syndicate
posted by NortonDC at 8:40 AM on May 26, 2006

First Post writes 'Is it more about the shooting, or the non-linear gameplay?'

It's all about the shooting. The game-aspect doesn't really interest her, just shooting things and people.
Thanks for all the answers, everybody!
posted by signal at 9:05 PM on May 26, 2006

My wife and I like playing as team-mates on Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. She enjoys being a sniper.
posted by jeversol at 12:14 AM on May 29, 2006