I've been watching this dude play Grand Theft Auto 4 with the traffic at 9999999 'warp speed' and it's both hilarious and some sort of surrealist masterpiece

Every so often the algorithm gets it right, and on this occasion YouTube served up one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. Several months ago Australian comedian Tom Walker embarked on a Grand Theft Auto 4 playthrough using a mod called Warp Eleven (Super Fast Cars), which changes the behaviour of every vehicle in the game (barring Roman's car) so that they "travel at 'warp speed', in other words they will drive (and crash) at ridiculous speeds, with or without a driver."

And boy does this mod deliver. Walker is a fairly big deal in the Australian comedy world and often streams games (apparently his Truck and Farming Simulator videos are great), and he's both a big GTA enthusiast and has the kind of mindset that can tolerate the madness which unfolds in a Liberty City filled with endless vehicles smashing around and exploding at stupid speeds.

It is almost impossible to avoid death. Cars, trucks, motorbikes, every vehicle GTA has to offer is just flying around the place, in some cases literally, with collisions and explosions happening every second. If Nico stands still, a car will soon smash into that location. If he runs across a seemingly empty road, something will send him flying out of nowhere. Simply getting from point A to point B is a Sisyphean task of constant restarts and annihilation out of nowhere.

I don't know quite why I find that so funny, but luckily Walker does too, and persists in trying to clear one of the game's first missions, involving getting to Roman's apartment. Beyond the yucks of watching a truck splatter Nico out of nowhere, it quickly becomes a fascinating exercise in negotiating a Liberty City where the floor isn't quite lava, but may as well be. Walker quickly learns to prioritise things like height, using the hanging mechanic to cross bridges and sections of road, and safer zones like railtracks where traffic rarely appears (but, due to the way this mod works, there's always a risk of a random car landing on you out of nowhere).

What ended up enrapturing me in this video were the sights this mod serves up. The constant crashes, bangs and comedy ragdoll deaths remain amusing (and boy does this thing give the Euphoria physics a good workout), but at times you'll see simply remarkable things: at one point Walker's in the water looking at a road where, for whatever reason, the traffic is hitting such an angle it's all taking off. There's this huge mass of vehicles zooming through the air in loose formation, in constant motion like a flock of birds.

On another occasion Walker comes across various vehicles simply suspended in mid-air, a tableau of burned-out dreamcatchers brought back to Earth with pistol shots. At times he walks across bridges as cars fly into the sky from either side, some odd automotive salute. On one mission he's driving Roman's taxi, and a series of collisions send it spinning off lazily aflame through traffic whipping past at a million miles an hour, coming to a slow stop just in time for Walker to dive out of there before the boom. It's all oddly beautiful as well as bananas, which Walker plays up when he overlays Death Stranding music on some of the scenes.

The Warp Eleven mode is inspired by an older GTA mod called Carmageddon, which funnily enough PC Gamer staff played around with many moons ago. Look at how young and fresh-faced they all were!

Anyway: this is a great playthrough, and even if you just watch a minute you'll get a few laughs and the general idea. It perhaps also taps into one of the things that's so special about the GTA games, that great sense of freedom you have to decide your own goals and how you want to screw around with these wonderful sandboxes. It can be amusing to break things, and when it's as ludicrous a twist as this it sometimes shows just how good that experience is: the fact that GTA 4 not only works as some sort of surreal vehicular deathscape, but is so hilariously brutal and fun in doing so.