The Ballad of Gay Tony brings the trilogy in one part to a close, and it may indicate that the writers of Grand Theft Auto are more clever than you might expect. As in Lost & Damned, Gay Tony enjoys a separate-but-equal status. It’s a self-contained story/game, wherein you play as a Louis, a Dominican-American club manager/ladies’ man instead of Niko, a borderline suicidal Slavic immigrant. The difference between the two games is readily apparent with the higher-octane gun-action and base-jumping. Louis is straight-up fucking girls in the club and getting head in the back room, while Niko is cradling his dead Irish girlfriend outside a church (*SPOILER ALERT*). If you were a fan of San Andreas and all the shit you could get up to in that game, this DLC is truer to that game than GTA IV proper. It’s also more challenging. The guns are bigger on both ends, so you’re getting as good as you’re giving. Meaning: you’re dying more. They also added a new scoring system. After each mission, there’s a breakdown of how well you did, which is uploaded to your Rockstar Social Club profile. You could nail the whole mission, but there’s still aspects you may have missed. Did you get a headshot? What’s your firing accuracy? Did you parachute into the boat? No? WELL YOU SUCK!!! AND NOW EVERYONE ON THE INTERWEBS KNOWS!!!
Plot-wise, Louis’s character is less sympathetic and deep than Niko Bellic. He’s an ex-con who’s days are filled with club hopping and gun fights. The biggest problem is his coke-toking gay boss, Tony, and his Lucy-esque schemes.
I think the most interesting thing about the game is how it overlaps with GTA IV and Lost & Damned. Johnny, Lost & Damned’s protagonist was already an established character in GTA IV, but with Louis, it’s a bit more tricky. Louis makes several appearances in both editions, but you don’t realize it until you play Gay Tony.
Gay Tony starts with Niko’s botched bank robbery attempt, wherein Louis is an innocent bystander during a hostage situation. He’s later a key figure in a botched diamond smuggling operations… TWICE. You know when you’re going to trade the diamonds to the Jews in the Museum? (I’m not being racist, they’re Jews,) Louis is the black-looking guy who shows up in the window over your heads. (I’m not being racist. He’s the black looking guy). This overlayering of plots kind of messes with the continuity of the game. Since GTA IV was somewhat open-ended, you could finish a number of missions at your own leisure. That means to you, some of the characters Louis is dealing with are already dead. That kind of takes you out of the moment when you have to think about what happened when in GTA IV.
Also out of context are the news bulletins you read online in the game’s in-game internet. When you blow up a construction crane, you’d think news of it would reach NIko, especially when he drives by said crane every day. Of course, cranes can be replaced, so I guess it’s not completely out of place.
Aside from that, Gay Tony modernizes the game a little bit with people Twittering all over the place.
Also, there’s this:
Watch out, Anime, Rockstar has your number!
If I had any complaints, aside from cars that handle like boats, and getting my head shot off as soon as I walk through a door, would be the use of racial slurs in the game. There’s at least fifteen different slurs used in the first hour of playing. I know it’s trying to be “edgy” and shit, but I don’t need to know how spics eat tacos and how fags gobble cock, etc. For fuck’s sake, the game’s called “Gay Tony.” You could have left it at that. There’s cocaine use in almost every cutscene as well, which is to be expected with a game about a gay nightclub owner, I suppose.
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