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The Good: In-Game Camera
The camera in San Andreas was probably the best 'weapon' behind the purple dildo (potential movie title). Not only did it zoom, but it saved the photographs you took, which could later be extracted from the game save file as individual images after transferring it to your computer. This made taking in-game screenshots from your console (and creating a photo library of every single vehicle) a walk in the damn park. No longer did we have to use a point-and-shoot digital camera to photograph our television screen in order to share our own screenshots with others. And they actually came out as clear as they looked in the game (maybe even better than, depending on how crappy your tv was in 2004). Televisions nowadays are flat, and have an LCD or LED screen - the complete opposite of eight years ago - so using a real camera to snap a pic of GTA4 on your screen resulted in a pretty decent shot compared to, say, in 2002. You still have to deal with scan lines (which intensify if your lens isn't completely parallel to the screen), glare, focus, and the fact that the HUD elements are in the way and need to be cropped out. An in-game camera that saves the photos you take (and uploads them to the Social Club, hint hint) would be one of the best features of GTAV.The Bad: Cheat Codes
I thought the idea of using special phone numbers to enable cheat codes was an interesting and, at first, welcomed step. I was even more joyed when I found that once you enter a code for the first time, it saves it to a menu on your phone with a description. This made it easy to enter the code again without having to re-dial the number, unless of course that code is to lower your wanted level while you're being shot by the FBI. Every bullet you take makes the phone disappear, and by the time you manage to get through the menu, you're eating pavement. So we can fix this one of two ways: work it so that the phone stays up no matter what, or bring back the old way of entering cheats by using button combinations. I had the cheat codes for GTA3 down to a science, and I'm sure countless others did as well. The few seconds it takes to mash out a sequence of buttons would make all the difference, especially over navigating the phone's dialier with the D-pad.The Ugly: Vehicle Damage
This probably should be just a "Bad" because a lot of improvements were made in GTA4 to really highlight cosmetic damage done to the body, glass, and even the tires, but one thing seemed to piss a lot of people off and that was the fact that no matter how many times you crashed your car, the only body panel that would come off completely was the hood. Sure, the bumpers would tease you for a while but then eventually retreated into the twisted wreckage that became your ride's front end. If I crash into a tree at 90 miles an hour I want to see my bumper fly off and take out a group of hipsters siting on a bench arguing over who preordered their iPad3 first. Also, the hitboxes for gunfire absorption need to be looked at. I sent a full rifle clip through both the front and rear windshields of a Buffalo; no bullets hit the car itself, only the glass, but by the time I was reloading I was also running away because the fuel tank caught on fire. Lastly, health damage to drivers is, at times, wildly inconsistent. If I t-bone a cop car doing three times the speed limit, I'll go flying through the windshield and tumble half way down the block, only to get up, dust myself off, and grab a hotdog just in time for the cop that I just hit to be running my ass over. But if I rear-end a taxi, the driver could die before I have the chance to find my insurance card. Maybe it's all just a marketing scheme for the Maibatsu Monstrosity.
