Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

The Good
When I played through Grand Theft Auto III, I became an instant fan of Rockstar's work. The game was fun, complex, and open-ended. No game I had ever played before this had given me so much enjoyment from just futzing about between missions. And then the mission structure itself was well-paced and the storyline was great.

Enter Vice City. GTA: Vice City took what I loved about GTAIII and made it better while adding a great 80's theme to everything.

This time around you are no longer a nameless character as you were in the first one. You're Tommy Vercetti, bad-ass mobster. The addition of a real character with a real personality who actually talked in the cutscenes was a big improvement over the previous game. It added to the storyline and made you care about who you were a little more.

Graphics also saw an improvement. Granted, there was not that much of a change in the engine itself. But in my opinion, graphics are at least 50% about what you do with them. It is on that count that Vice City shines. The design and outlay of the city is superb. The atmosphere that is set in each neighborhood is spot on. And, to top it all, the lighting effects in the game are great. I should also mention that where GTAIII seemed overly drab and used too many dark tones, Vice City's presentation is much brighter and just driving about these scenic places in your hot ride can be a pleasure.

80's, 80's, 80's. From great 80's music to the distinctively 80's atmosphere and gimmicks like an early model portable phone, Rockstar really came through with their chosen setting.

And speaking of the music. Besides the music in the game being an excellent mix of authentic 80's tunes, as before you can add your own MP3's to the game. So load up some Huey Lewis and Skid Row before you go on your rampage. Maybe some Motley Crue also?

The game is packed with GTA's own special brand of humor too. The radio features two talk stations this time around and, as usual, no one is safe from being skewered. As well, little gags abound, such as the "Cherry Popper" Ice Cream company.

So all of this and I have yet to talk about the best part of the game: gameplay. After all, gameplay is king. Vice City brings it and keeps it coming.

As you work your way through the storyline, you become a mafia boss and eventually make a play to essentially run the town. The amount of sheer coolness inherent in this scenario is hard to describe. It feeds that little guy inside of you who watched Scarface and said "Cooooool".

Along the way, you get to go through a wide array of interesting and challenging missions. Some are as "mundane" as a street race while others are as elaborate as a multi-faceted bank heist. One mission has you jumping from roof-top to roof-top on a motorcycle. Yet another has you photographing a politician's perverted activities from a high-rise only to have to fight through the FBI on your way out.

Along the road to success, you also get to buy and collect money from various properties. Yes, you can own property.Once you buy a property, you need to take on some missions in order to make it profitable. You can own anything from a counterfeiting factory to a adult movie studio. Nearly all offer you an interesting set of jobs to take on.

The Bad
There isn't much I can find wrong with the game. If anything, then it can be annoying that cars and people spawn and despawn in a weird way. If you see a car you want to steal, but you turn your back to it for a moment, it is indeed quite possible that it may have vanished completely. This can be really annoying when looking for a good ride in a junky part of town.

The Bottom Line
For the mafia boss in all of us! Highly recommended.

The Good
The rollicking, outrageous, un-PC fun, the voices... everything

The Bad
The "save game" bug, but it probably affects only one in a million (read on)

The Bottom Line
I have a bitch about saving your game. You can save your game only in certain locations. But that is OK. What is not OK is that, whenever I saved my game, I was told "game saved". Well, it wasn't. When I tried to load it, all the saved game slots were empty.

I searched the Web high and low, and saw that a chap in Sweden had had the same problem with Grand Theft Auto III, but no solution. Now Vice City is copy-protected of course, and I got to thinking... does it see Alcohol on my hard disk? Does it decide, then, to play silly buggers, like Windows XP when it sees stuff that would make Baby Billy cry? More Web surfing took me to forums where they were discussing how to make copies of GTA, but no-one mentioned this failure of "save" to save games. Those people must have had Alcohol, or CloneCD, or BlindWrite, or whatever, so that could not be it. Eventually I stumbled on a No-CD crack, downloaded it, installed it... and... I could save my games! No, I am not making this up, I am not drunk, and I have an explanation. My CD drive shows up as drive R: and is sandwiched between Q: and S: which are both virtual drives put there, I suspect, when I installed Alcohol. Strange, but I think this is because I have two primary partitions on my hard disk and Windows just got its knickers in a fine twist there. Now I suppose that when GTA Vice City checks for the legit CD, it wrongly sees my drive R: as a virtual drive, and decides to teach me a lesson. It stinks all right, but the worst thing is that you cannot even blame the programmers. Put yourselves in their place, and see. Be warned, though, if you ever need it, that the CD crack disables the cheats. But I can live without cheats easier than without being able to save a game.

Now what a game! Totally un-PC, shockingly objectionable, in a word: wonderful. The baddies (I haven't met any goodies) look like the baddies out of B-grade gangster movies, they talk like the baddies out of B-grade gangster movies, they give you... er... quests??? that would make the Avatar blush and Iolo keel over with a heart attack. Great stuff. And you don't have to do it either. You can just mooch about town, bashing the odd passer-by for gun money, "borrowing" a car or a motorbike for a joy ride. I haven't found any little old lady whom I could help across the street, though, so it's a bit one-sided. But I am sure that if the designers are reading this... how about it, folks?

I don't have a joystick, and I found maneuvering a car quite a bit of a challenge (read: a pain in the bum). But still, it's fun. You crash into a pole, your bonnet flies off, steam billows out of the engine, but you can keep on going full blast. They don't build cars like that anymore ;-)

Final score.

Graphics. What graphics? You don't notice the graphics, they are so well matched to the gameplay. It's like wearing soft hand-made Italian shoes, you don't feel them. Oh, all right, there are some annoying features, like when you switch to the bird's-eye view. Great for finding your way around, but when you go under a bridge for instance, the bridge hides you from view, you and that power pole, and... kaboom!

Gameplay. To be handled with care, extreme care. When I sat at the wheel of my car (the real one), I had to tell myself, "Hey, slow down, watch out, don't swerve, this is not Vice City anymore". If I were the type to carry a baseball bat everywhere, I would have had to keep telling myself: "Careful! you are not supposed to go about bashing people in this town".

Replay value. Difficult to say, short of playing it several times over. But once is rollicking good fun, and bis repetita placent for sure.

The Good
Realism, size and scope - GTA:VC could just be, the biggest, most detailed and realistic virtual world created in a computer game. Bigger and better than GTA3, Vice City screams 80s from every pore. From the beach to ghetto, from the 80s cars to vesper scooters this game has been well researched, well put together and done with a healthy infusion of humor. It's graphically improved with high poly-counts and more detailed animation and buildings can now be entered and explored. There are more realistic options available - change of clothes, purchasing of property, other outlets for weapons of destruction; this game has a lot of options to get through!

The other stand out feature is the sound. First the acting is top-notch with the likes of Ray Liotta give voice-over to the main characters. Sometimes the script is a little cough hacky cough but for the most part it's heart is in the right place. Second is the soundtrack which includes a whole bunch of 80's radio stations with officially licensed tracks including artists like Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash and the inevitable Michael Jackson. Music ranges from Latino Dance to Rap to Jazz to Pop or Rock. There's hours of radio to enjoy, including chat stations and lots of very 80s advertising. Last but not least there's the sound effects - which are awesome as well. I particularly like the chainsaw.

You'd think adding all this content to the game would be enough work in itself, however Rockstar have also out done themselves by adding a series of sub-games to complete. There are too many to list however they include Remote Control car races, dirt bike challenges, destruction derbies, stealing specific sets of cars, street racing... the list goes on. This game has some serious replay value.

The Bad
Unbalanced difficulty - in GTA3, the missions generally got harder slowly and stayed that way. However in the GTA:VC, the missions ramp up in difficultly much quicker, however there is never any middle ground. At any one time the missions available are either really, REALLY, difficult, or quite easy. This can be frustrating and the really hard missions can take quite a number of attempts to find the winning strategy which means that you spend a lot of the time not feeling like you are progressing.

Frame-rates - although the graphics are a step up from GTA3, you can see the PS2 starting to struggle with the amount of detail displayed. It's not too bad, but if you leave GTA:VC and play something else, the lower frame-rate is immediately noticable. On the upside, it doesn't vary all that much, given more on screen, but is quite low to begin with.

Auto targeting - the auto targeting system does not work at all on large groups of adversaries. I remember a mission early on in the game where you had to blow up two cans of oil in order to destroy a bunch of trucks - the catch was you were in the middle of a violent protest with security guards and disgruntled workmen. The only way to effectively target the the cans of oil before being killed was to walk right up to them. Problem is when they explode - they kill you! There should at least have been a option to disable auto target temporarily for automatic weapons.

The Bottom Line
The most open-ended gaming experience available.