GTA IV was not a game I loved for its central storyline. I had had enough “hey cousin”s and “big American titties” by the first hour or two, and driving around one of Roman’s cabs on the least exciting island of three was not making the game very easy to endure. But like that magical moment at the end of the grim, dark movie, the clouds opened up and the sun shone in and every living soul wept at the beauty of the simple sensation we daily take for granted; finally, after hours of nonsense, I was free. Free to be a total fucking dick to a fictional New York City. If you haven’t played GTA IV like this, you really haven’t had that much fun in your life.

The best thing about this expansion is that it lets you do that from the very start. By the nature of its addition to the original title, it gives you immediate access to all of Liberty City and lets you tear around with the new guns and vehicles wherever your heart desires. Thankfully, though the story is not a totally compelling ride, it is short and quickly paced, getting you to that state of accessibility very soon. After only a few stupid escort and attack missions, you are given enough money and allies to equip yourself for Armageddon.

The second best thing about TLaD is that it’s proportionate. The price might be high for …pretty much everything ever released on the Xbox Live Marketplace, but it is a lot of content. New songs on the radio, new characters and dialogue and vehicles and guns and multiplayer modes and more of everything you already paid sixty dollars for. This time, you get twenty dollars worth of stuff, and it’s compatible with the original content. It’s really not that bad a deal. You may take some time to realize the full scale of the content added to your old GTA IV, but that’s just part of the process, I think, when it’s incorporating everything new into what already existed. We had three apples, and now we have an orange, so it’s only a 25% chance that I see an orange when I look for a fruit. That was a stupid metaphor, but you’re even stupider if you don’t figure out what I mean.

The other best thing about TLaD is that R* figured out how stupid the original game was and toned down the bullshit. I don’t have to date girls anymore, and nobody calls me to ask me if I want to play darts, heartbroken when I say “no, I’m fucking sick of playing darts with you Brucie, I just want to murder old ladies with a helicopter and start fires in a gas station.” I was so sick of seeing the little notification that I had lost a certain percentage of friendship with certain characters because I hadn’t picked up my phone when they called to ask me to go on a helitour or play pool. TLaD skips over all of that nonsense, and thank the gods for it, because it makes the expansion your preferred mode of play from now on. I would have paid twenty bucks just for that and the new shotgun.