The two extremes.

Played Borderlands and GTA today, and the differences between the two are almost saddening.

You have Borderlands, which sacrifices richly detailed landscapes and any hint of realism to just be balls-out fun. You have unlimited respawns, fully dynamic saving, a magical hawk that divebombs enemies, a gun with unlimited ammo that fires plasma, enemies with "Badass" right in the title, midgets that get knocked over by their own shotgun kickback, and missions that make absolutely no sense. All in all, it's a phenomenally fun experience with tons of replayability. The only thing wrong with it is the lack of compatibility with completing the story missions in co-op. Everyone in the game has to be at the exact same point in the same playthrough, otherwise stupid things happen and the host will get random missions from far later in the game assigned to him or no one gets to save progress or something. I defy anyone to seriously fault the single-player experience for anything.

Then there's GTA, which, I'll say time and time again, is the most realistic and detailed experience to date, and honestly would be right up there with the ENIAC and MS-DOS on a timeline of humanity's accomplishments with computing devices. Just walk around the city, and note the level of detail in the NPCs walking everywhere. They actually do things, not just walk around aimlessly. The city-wide traffic grid functions perfectly, the in-game internet is more advanced than China's real one. Unfortunately, that's about all you ever do, just drive around the city, and at 30mph to boot because any faster and you'll flip on every goddamned turn you make. Every mission is punctuated with random phone calls from your friends, asking you to go on dates that you have to accept, or you get no awesome things like free quicktravel or guns. Half the missions are just stupid A-to-B things. GTA IV's just not a video game, it's a simulator. It depresses me to think about exactly how fun it would be had that much attention and money gone into something like Saint's Row 2. As far as I'm concerned, GTA IV is one of the worst video games ever, just on the sole fact that it's not fun to play. Microsoft Word would make a horrible video game too, but Microsoft was smart enough to promote that as a word processor.

Unfortunately, Borderlands is almost over, while I still have quite a bit to do with GTA. All that's left for Borderlands is for me to play half of the story again to rank up to level 50, and then await DLC, which AC2, MW2, and L4D2 will keep me from playing for a while. As far as GTA goes, I'm slowly but surely getting to the $5 million for Wanted, and now going into mop-up mode for Gay Tony. Unfortunately, mop-up's going to take me about 3-4 times as long as the story, which is even more reason for me to hate Rockstar.