Just finished the main storyline of GTA: The Lost and Damned.
Over ten hours on the clock, with a percentage complete around 67%. Got four of the five Trophies, did six or seven of the 25 gang wars. Barely bothered with the bike delivery missions. Certainly didn't care about getting my gang brothers' Like rating up to 100%. Did not spend a single second in multiplayer.
So plenty more to do there (about 33% more), although I think I'll just move on to Ballad of Gay Tony.
The motorcycle focus was not as bad as I had suspected. Having driven very few bikes in GTAIV, I anticipated a lot of me spinning off the road and losing the mission. That only happened a few times; the vast majority of missions were fine, despite being largely on motorcycles.
The motorcycle physics are crazy. You can hit the curb of a sidewalk and end up careening end over end. And if you're on a bike, and you hit a car head on, you can enjoy seeing Johnny Klebitz sail six stories into the air before arcing gracefully into the road half a block away. Makes me wish the PS3 version had YouTube support.
Even though it's been a while since I lived Niko's story in GTAIV, it was fun seeing how his and Johnny's paths overlapped. Most of the crossovers are fairly blatant - like, Niko is right there - but there are some subtle points that make me hope Gay Tony will be just as meshed in.
Let's follow the release chronology. Peter Moore (then at Xbox) first revealed the episodic DLC in 2006. GTAIV came out in April 2008. Microsoft continued to call the DLC "absolutely exclusive" and it was expected in the fall of 2008. The number thrown around that Microsoft paid for that exclusivity was an absurd-sounding 50 million.
Personal pause: I restarted my unfinished GTAIV game in October 2008 when the PS3 Trophy patch came out.
Lost and Damned didn't actually come out for 360 until February 2009. Ballad of Gay Tony arrived on Xbox in October 2009.
Reports of the two episodes coming to PS3 began in January 2010. And in April, the two episodes showed up as a pair of $20 downloads on PSN, and in a $40 retail edition. Clearly, the move to PS3 was in the works for a long time.
In August, Amazon put the PS3 edition of GTA Episodes from Liberty City on a special sale for $20. That was my bite point. (I've seen it at Target for $30.)
So, $10 for 10+ hours of gameplay inside the familiar GTAIV world, two years after GTAIV was first released and a year and a half after the "exclusive" DLC finally bowed? Not bad at all.
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