Last night after the kids went to bed I was able to skip out for a couple of hours and take a quick tour of Liberty City. As my gamer friends already know, Liberty City (the pseudonym for New York City) is the town where Grand Theft Auto 4 takes place.

Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2 were drawn in a top-down perspective, and while they were fun for their time, neither made much of a lasting impression. It wasn’t until Grand Theft Auto 3 hit shelves that the series really began to make waves. Grand Theft Auto 3, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas and later GTA: Liberty City Stories all became best sellers for platforms including the Playstation 2, Xbox, and later, portable gaming systems including the Game Boy Advance and Sony’s PSP.

And so here we are with a new generation of consoles, and a new generation of Grand Theft Auto games. Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA4) again takes place in Liberty City. Although I’ve never actually been to New York City, you can get a pretty good idea of what it must be like from GTA4. The streets and cityscape are the same. According to recent articles, a lot of time went into recreating sections of New York in the game, and Rockstar’s efforts paid off; the result is a city that, for all intents and purposes, feels alive. Traffic moves along, people stand around chatting with one another, birds fly in the distance.

GTA4 puts players in control of Nico Bellic, a Serbian who has been come to Liberty City to meet his cousin (and small time crook) Roman. When Nico arrives he discovers that Roman’s tales of wealth and women have been greatly exaggerated (to say the least). The plot, as it is slowly unveiled to players, involves honor and revenge. As the story’s twists and turns reveal more twists, you (as a player) become more involved in the game’s story. More than a game, GTA4 is like an interactive movie, where you play the starring role and can impact the path the story will take.

Like the games before it, Grand Theft Auto 4 is a “sandbox” game, which means players can go anywhere and do anything. To put it in perspective, imagine if in Super Mario Bros. you could simply say, “eh, I don’t feel like chasing down Bowser today. Instead, I’m going to go to the store, buy some new overalls, and go watch television instead.” In GTA4, you can do just that — in fact, it seems like you can do almost anything. Obviously your actions are limited to what developers thought of and programmed into the system, but when you decide to pick up a girl, drive her to the local bowling alley and go bowling, it seems as though they thought of an awful lot. In a sandbox game, moving the plot along becomes less of a mandatory goal and more of a suggestion. When Roman calls you on your phone and asks you to come pick him up from work, you can … or, you can ditch him, go pick up one of your girls, take her out for a hot dog, and shoot the cart vendor in the head for dessert.

Make no mistake, Grand Theft Auto 4 (like its predecessors) is rated M (for mature) for a reason. The game is bursting at the seams with adult themes, language, and violence. That whole “sandbox” aspect is a double-edged sword. There’s nothing stopping gamers from punching random strangers in the face, mowing down pedestrians in a stolen Hummer, or leading cops on high speed chases for hours at a time. If you want to attack innocent people all day long and stomp on their heads until brains and blood cover the sidewalk, there’s nothing stopping you (although you might refrain from telling your shrink about it). Even when directly following the game’s story mode you’ll be fighting (and killing) other characters. It’s not on me to tell you what your kids should or shouldn’t be playing, but those who complained about the violence in Mortal Kombat just a few years ago will surely faint the first time they hear a Liberty City hooker beg for her life as you empty a clip into her gut and take her cash.

New to GTA4 is online gaming. If you throught the depravity of Grand Theft Auto was fun in your own home, now you can share those adventures with fellow online gamers. Up to sixteen players can duke it out in one of fifteen different online modes. Some are team vs. team, others are co-op in nature. The online game are addictive, and I suspect many gamers will pick up this title for these alone. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn many gamers stick solely to the online matches and never play through the story mode itself.

Grand Theft Auto has hit the current generation of consoles running. It is both completely new and completely familiar at the same time. While the core of the game is still very Grand Theft Auto, every aspect of the original games has been expanded upon — as well it should be, with a reported budget of $100 million (making it the most expensive videogame ever made). With several gaming sites rating GTA4 10/10, it seems that next-gen gamers have finally been granted their “killer app.” It would not surprise me to find groups of 360/PS3 gamers in the future that only own one single game — this one. The exhaustive maps, in depth story mode (rumored to take around 40 hours to complete) and the continually fresh source of online matches is bound to keep gamers entertained for years.

Or, until the next Grand Theft Auto game hits stores.