Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony

"I should be sent to prison, shouldn't I?"

As I'm sure you know, you can't have a game called Episodes from Liberty City without a second episode, and The Ballad of Gay Tony has, according to some, gone down as one of the greatest GTA games of all time. For a shorter, more episodic experience, what does that say about just how well crafted a piece of entertainment this is?

Club owner "Gay" Tony Prince is borrowing money from the wrong people, and his business partner and bodyguard Luis Fernando Lopez is the man to solve all his problems, of which there are many, and they are bonkers. The kind of bonkers that only a GTA game can offer.

Let's hit the streets of Liberty City one more time to see them under the glitz and glamour of the neon lights of the night.

Fun Times

As with The Lost and Damned, it was 2017 when I first played The Ballad of Gay Tony, but it wasn't the first time I had seen Luis, as the stories found in Episodes are weaved in with that of GTA IV. In this case, Luis was at the bank you spectacularly rob in the main game, keeping his head down so that it doesn't get shot off. Wise man, but that's only the beginning of the shit that will go down in his life.

When you're not patrolling the club or mixing it with the locals on the dance floor in a minigame that I can't say I fully got the hang of, you are - of course - dealing with the criminal underworld of the city in the way that makes the most sense for a GTA game: violently.

But this time out, at least at the start of this ballad, it's not with guns and bloodshed, but on driving ranges with golf balls. You get to practice your swing, and whoever this bloke is that is getting tortured gets to spill the beans or, I don't know, lose some other beans?

Things escalate and firearms are involved before the chase spills out into the city, but this mission sets up The Ballad of Gay Tony as a bit of a breath of fresh air. This is GTA, but it's brighter, cheerier, both in tone and look. The City is vibrant, the weather is generally sunnier, the skies clearer. It's almost hopeful, and fun, rather than a slog to survive.

But it is still a GTA game, and blood never fails to make an appearance.

To help out his boss, Luis takes jobs from criminals to pay off the debts, and the size of the debts mean some pretty big jobs. You'll soon be blowing the city up in search of cash or drugs or cash for drugs, all in an effort to save Tony's clubs from closing or being sold off, even to the point of working for potential purchasers of those clubs.

One such character is Yusuf here, an eccentric real-estate developer with some insane requests - well, insane for anything that isn't GTA. Other characters would have you steal a car for a quick turnaround. Not Yusuf.

The Lost and Damned had us rolling around the city on our bikes. The Ballad of Gay Tony has us steal a helicopter from a yacht, use the helicopter to blow up the yacht, and get the hell out of there with, I assume, nobody any the wiser.

How? GTA-logic, I suppose. Why? I couldn't tell you. I don't know what Yusuf wants this helicopter for. Fun? Profit? I can't even remember why we meet Yusuf in the first place, but what I'm noticing, in stark contrast to my screenshots from The Lost and Damned, is just how much over-the-top joy The Ballad of Gay Tony is giving players.

Attack helicopter, N.O.O.S.E. armoured car. Yusuf, I don't know where this is going, but you're mad and entertaining, so let's get cracking. This is Ballad in a nutshell. It's as though you've been freed to actually enjoy what's going on, rather than chained to a storyline that must happen like it has been scripted to happen.

That's not to say that Ballad isn't heavily scripted - you'll still be following objective markers and taking part in setpieces - but it is to say that it feels more like the chaos of GTA's past than the cinematic GTA of the present.

Further evidence of this comes from Luis' love of base jumping. If you were chained to the ground in The Lost and Damned, you're soaring like a bird in Ballad, to the point where the races in the side missions are extreme, being with a base jump, transitioning into a powerboat race before finishing in a nitro-equipped supercar. Everything about Luis' life is extravagant.

It's a colourful life, but it has to tie into the story of GTA IV, and The Lost and Damned, and through some stolen diamonds they're all intertwined. I don't think I appreciated or even noticed this at the time, but you end up stealing something and escaping from somewhere as Luis in Ballad, chasing Luis and stealing that something as Johnny in The Lost and Damned, then dropping it off for Niko to collect in GTA IV.

Playing them all separately, separated by many years, is not the way to play all these GTA IV games.

It all feels like it's working towards the way GTA V would be presented, with its multiple protagonists and mixed stories. Ballad even introduces these mission objective checklists to the main series, only displayed after completing a mission to tease you at how badly you ended up completing it, and what you need to work on when going through it a second time.

This is, unfortunately, specific to Ballad, and is the only of the three games like allows you to replay missions once you've finished with the game - the other two require you to reload save files that you've hopefully been keeping track of.

Once you complete the story, though, you've got quite an elaborate series of missions to go back and play around with.

When the dust settles after what I've written down as 8 hours of meat that forms the story of Ballad, you get to sit back in a park with Tony and Yusuf, laughing at what happened to lead you all to this point in time, remarking at how you're still standing, and your problems are solved.

The clubs remain in Tony's possession, though they're going to need quite the cleaning after waves of enemies died on the dancefloor, and I've no idea what Yusuf is doing with all his stolen vehicles, but he seems to be having fun with them, and maybe that's the takeaway.

Final Word

The diamonds that serve to tie everything together are lost and life goes on. Liberty City never sleeps, and it forms the backdrop of thousands of stories, The Ballad of Gay Tony perhaps showing us the most absurd of them all.

Unlike The Lost and Damned, I did like Luis and did want to see more of his ridiculous story through the city, helped massively by Tony and Yusuf, two more overly elaborate characters that you can't help but pay attention to for different reasons.

Again, you can argue that Ballad is just more of the same GTA IV, but it uses that familiarity to launch into something that isn't just about the miseries of life and the struggle to survive the criminal underworld. Yes, these characters are pricks, to understate their personalities, but they're likeable pricks. Yes, there's a lot of blood spilt in the pursuit of their goals, but they do so for their own noble-ish purposes. Well, nobler than the rest of GTA IV.

In short, Ballad puts the joy back into GTA IV. We've had the seriousness of the main game, and the grunge of The Lost and Damned, and now we get the bright lights of Gay Tony's clubs. The city isn't always a shithole. From up here, it looks like a playground. Please, excuse me while I jump off this building, would you? I enjoy the rush on the way down...

Make sure you play The Ballad of Gay Tony. In fact, you might want to play it as a bite-sized experience of GTA IV at its best, instead of reaching for the main game. They're all great, of course, but this one shines.

Fun Facts

Minigames are all over the place in Ballad, but my skills on the dancefloor are just as bad in-game as they are in real life. I haven't checked, but my skills in base jumping are far higher in-game, though...

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony, developed by Rockstar North, first released in 2009.

Version played: Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City, PC, 2010.