I stand by my opinion that the game is a little slow to get going – but this is only if you dive straight into the linear storyline. The sandbox concept of gaming is put to best use in Grand Theft Auto IV where you can stick to following the plot, or ignore it, put it on hold and explore the virtual city causing mayhem and leaving a wake of death, chaos and broken virtual families in your wake… if you like.

The gameplay in GTA IV is superb, even if the story is nonsense and the missions you get sent on are fun, if perhaps a little easy (so far). I’m approaching 20% completion of the game, which offers 100 hours of gameplay, and possibly more depending on how much time you spend aimlessly murdering and robbing the unfortunate inhabitants of the virtual world.

The game is awesome in multiplayer mode where up to 16 players can invade Liberty City and wreck the place – for fun, or with tenuous objectives. This adds to the value of the title which carries a high price tag but delivers hours of fun in return. In this way GTA IV is unlike many other titles for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 that, while fun, are short-lived and leave you feeling betrayed considering that you had to exchange a kidney for their purchase. None of that nonsense here, and that earns Rockstar Games an affection in my books which until now has been reserved for those magnificent bastards at Valve.

I’m glad I stuck it out with GTA IV and look forward to plowing my way through the rest of the storyline. In this case humble pie tastes good and I will have mine with a side-order of virtual carnage.

It must be mentioned, however, that I am playing the game in campaign, or ‘single-player’ mode and am yet to experience the online fun I am promised awaits me on Xbox Live. But I wanted to get my initial impression of the game out in the interim and will perhaps do a more comprehensive review later on, should my opinion change.

The game begins with a video that is a little too long, introducing us to the main protagonist Niko – who has just arrived in Liberty City aboard a boat from an unnamed Eastern European country. The story is immediately tedious to me but the game does reward you 5 gamer points for pretty much just watching the intro, which I felt was apt for stealing precious minutes of my life I could have spent playing Half Life 2 – which remains the king of games.

After getting your character and its bad accent (couldn’t they find any real Bosnian voice artists?) off the boat you are hurled into a series of yawn-inducing missions that can thankfully be put on hold. You meet people in the game and can take them out on dates… and buy clothes for your character to wear… I’m not interested in playing Barbie-dress-up or The Sims, I thought that you mindlessly killed people in creative ways in this game. And to be fair, the two fights I experienced in my first half-hour with the title were amusing, but not worth all the extreme poofness of creating a wardrobe for my character, and taking it out on dates with piles of pixels before and after the killing. Your in-game girlfriends also don’t mind you deliberately driving over people on your way to the bowling alley, which disturbs me.

I’m told that the game gets better later on and that multiplayer is awesome, but the thing is that I have a life. I can go out and buy cheap jeans at Woolworths if that’s my thing. What I want from a game is instant gratification – turn it on, shoot the living bejesus out of anything that moves and then hit the power button and go spend time with my wife and kids or on doing something constructive. Not phoning computer-controlled characters on my play-pretend mobile to arrange dates with them that I then have to dress “Niko” up for.

GTA IV is definitely for people with more time on their hands. I’ll stick it out for a little longer and come back for some humble pie if things do improve. Perhaps I’m just impatient… or lucky enough to have grown up in an era where video games rose and fell by their game-play, not the sheer amount of pointless extras that the developers have managed to pack in.

To give credit where it is due; the artwork and models in GTA IV are amazing and ‘Liberty City’ where the storyline is set is an awesome piece of work, despite its daft name. The amount of vehicles and weapons on offer are also rad and a lot of effort has gone into developing mini-games and other entertaining activities that can be experienced in the virtual world, if you really must spend time doing so.

When I get back to my console and give this title another spin I’ll be putting the storyline, if you can call it that, on hold so that I can aimlessly run around the city and beat the crap out of its inhabitants; a pass-time I’m sure I will grow tired of soon and probably not an activity worth buying the entire game for.

This functionality is made even radder by the fact that the 360 supports external storage devices or can be used as a media extender for any computer running Windows Media Center. You can even share media stored on a Mac in iTunes using connector software called Connect 360.

Of all the options available storing media on an external hard drive seems most logical to me, but this is easier said than done given the Xbox 360′s limited support for filesystems.

You basically have two options in terms of filesystems when formatting an external drive for use with your 360: FAT or HFS+. Weirdly, the Xbox 360 does not support Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem, but does support Apple’s HFS+. This is a side-effect of the Xbox being designed to work flawlessly with the iPod.

While it is the most compatible across the board, FAT is a useless filesystem for storing media. For one, it doesn’t support the storage of files larger than four gigabytes – so storing any high definition video is pretty much out of the question. That should be enough reason for us to move on to the more competent HFS+ filesystem.

And this is where we find an interesting anomaly; the Xbox 360 will not recognise external hard drives formatted for HFS+ under Apple’s Leopard version of the OS X operating system. Which sucks for people like me, who solely use said operating system.

But there is a solution. One that involves using a Windows PC, or a Mac running Windows using Boot Camp or virtualisation software.

The steps are as follows:

• Download a piece of trial software for Windows called MacDrive.
• Install MacDrive on Windows.
• Use MacDrive to format your drive as ‘HFS Extended’ and DO NOT use a case-sensitive form of the filesystem.

Et voila – you now have an external drive rocking the superior HFS+ filesystem and fully compatible with your Xbox 360. Skop some media on it and plug it in. The drive will also be compatible with your Mac for file transfers and if you want to use it with Windows, pay for MacDrive and enjoy unlimited support for the filesystem.