Poor fella.

I manage to push the slo-mo button just in time to watch his limp, flailing body careen off my front bumper. Now THAT'S what I call satisfaction.

I am in the midst of yet another classic GTA moment. It is 1am and I have to get up for work in five hours' time...

It's been a fair few months since I played any kind of console game, but the siren call of GTA IV was too much to resist.

There's always been something magical about the GTA series.

In GTA III it was the sheer joy of being able to peg it around a living, breathing 3D city armed with a flamethrower, toasting random shoppers and watching them run whilst melting.

In GTA Vice City there was nothing cooler than climbing into a helicopter and skimming the sun-drenched quays to the 80s keyboard vibes of Jean Michel Jarre.

Well, apart from unloading an Uzi into a chasing cop car whilst simultaneously performing a nigh-on impossible 360 degree spin manoeuvre at high speed.

In GTA San Andreas, the previous incarnation of the controversial franchise, I never did manage to get that damned combined harvester up to the top of the mountain, although I tried and tried. And tried.

GTA somehow transcends game genres. You can do anything. If you want to race cars, you can; if you want to shoot people, you can; if you want to play retro arcade video games, you can.

In the new GTA you can even watch TV (a series of truly funny parodies of modern culture, one of which follows the silver spoon celebs as they compete to see how much coke they can snort and how many rehab clinics they can visit). Dry wit is everywhere.

There's a chain of internet cafe's called TW@; a take-away chain called Clucking Bell; and endless skits on everything from iPhones to the war on terror. There's a comedy club with stand-up comedians, among them the now ubiquitous Ricky Gervais.

Of course, being GTA, there's also a dark underbelly, so read drugs, sex and crime being round almost every corner. If you go into a bar and get drunk, the world goes all wobbly, which makes driving a bit more difficult and kind of ups the pedestrian kill count, too.

The sheer scale of Liberty City - the make-believe metropolis modelled on New York - is breathtaking, as is the attention to detail. It might take you half an hour to get from one side to the other. You can do that on foot, or by car, motorcycle, boat, helicopter, plane, tube, train, you name it.

The in-game action is all about completing missions for nefarious characters - standard GTA fare - and if Rockstar had only bothered with that, I'd have to say the game would still have been amazing.

What takes GTA IV to a whole new level is the online action. There's tons of it. There are 15 ultra-addictive online game modes, with everything from killing sprees to team-based mayhem.

In 'deathmatch', you try to 'ventilate' up to 15 opponents, some of whom will find cars and try run you over, others will lob grenades over walls and there's always some prat running around with a rocket launcher. There's something far more satisfying about dead-heading an online opponent than a glitch-ridden CG character, because you know wherever they are in the world, they will be cursing the screen (and their own stupidity).

Despite the thugs, drugs, prostitutes, sex shops, lap dancing clubs - all the things wishy-washy liberal politicians don't want to acknowledge and believe have no place in a video game, GTA remains politically and culturally astute to the point where it actually becomes a commentary on the hypocrisy of our way of life and especially our institutions - just listen to the mocking radio talk shows to see what I mean. In case you were in any doubt about this game's popular appeal, it's shifted £500m worth of copies in its first week alone.