Screw The Movies, Live Out Your Gangster Fantasies Here

Author's Rating:

Pros: Umm, yeah, the police are pros, I suppose. And the mob too

Cons: Hell, this entire city is full of cons, and ex-cons!

The Bottom Line: 
I'd like to do a drive-by on the bottom line.

Author's Review
Back when the original Grand Theft Auto was released for the PlayStation and PC, I remember looking and playing the game, and thinking “this is a game that’s well ahead of its time” – all the ideas that DMA Design (now Rockstar North) came up with were great, but the limitations of the hardware meant that it would be crippled until more advanced game systems were created. And it was quite crippled – the original 2 GTA games were awful. When the PlayStation 2 was released, the time finally arrived, and the Rockstar/DMA team unveiled Grand Theft Auto III to the world. Finally, technology had caught up to the ambitious ideas, and GTAIII would be the fruits of their labor. Little did even Rockstar/DMA know, Grand Theft Auto III would be the beginning of something so phenomenal – in terms of rave reviews from the gaming media, huge, runaway sales at retail, and of course, the uneducated controversy surrounding the game and the various seedy activities. It’s not really a surprise either – as GTAIII is an amazing achievement, and while it can always be argued that the eventual “sequel” GTA Vice City is a better game, the open-ended gameplay and huge game scale of Grand Theft Auto III basically changed the ways some people think about gaming. Now, how many games can claim that kind if influence?

The Facts

Grand Theft Auto III’s story runs deep in Mafioso themes – the opening shows an unnamed character running away from a bank robbery in Liberty City, only to be betrayed by his “girlfriend”, and forced to spend some time in prison. However, thanks to his prison buddy 8-Ball (who’s voiced by one-half of the rap outfit Gangstarr, Guru), who’s an expert at blowing the crap out of things, the pair escape from a police truck transporting them to the jail, and completely destroy the Callahan Bridge to boot. From here, the duo head to meet with Luigi, and the adventure begins.

And when I say adventure, I mean it. As the unnamed character (known in many places as Fido, or just The GTA Guy), you’re free to roam through Liberty City in any fashion you choose, doing basically what you want to do. It’s not all so simple though – there’s main story missions, where you climb through the ranks of the Mafia, earning the respect of your mob bosses, that will be required if you want to open up more of the game (since the Callahan Bridge eventually reopens, letting you cross into other parts of town), to do more stuff. Besides that, you’re able to tackle various side jobs, from different bosses, or partake in a little moonlighting as a taxi driver, vigilante cop, or even an ambulance driver, delivering injured people to the hospital.

Of course, it wouldn’t be GTA if it wasn’t for the “theft” part. You can rip off many different vehicles, from pieces of crap like the Perennial or the Manana, up to the sporty speedsters like the Cheetah or Infernus. Also, the different emergency vehicles are yours to take, such as police cars or fire engines, which you can use to your own evil needs, be it running people down, doing drive-by shootings, or even picking up some ladies for a little illicit action (please note, you may screw the hookers, then kill the hookers, but you don’t get friggin’ points for doing it – the art of fact checking is lost when it comes to ignorantly hating on video games). This does come at a little cost though, as the police will be after you for doing illegal acts, so you can be punished for being a jerk unless you can find the scattered police bribes, or find the local spraypaint place and get your car fixed to lose the cops and continue at your own pace.

While the main mode of transportation is in vehicles, you do have moments of moving around on foot. In GTA III, the control scheme radically changes around, letting you play with the numerous different weapons (including grenades, molotov’s, and different kinds of guns, from handguns to shotguns), to do your bidding. Since Liberty City is vastly populated with thousands of residents, all conducting their business at the same time, you’re not alone, and as such you have many different options for messing with people, or just leaving them alone. The choice is yours.

The Playtest

While I could go on about the rampages, the hunts for hidden packages, and the little tricks of this games’ trade (such as the infamous Ghost Town), for the sake of some brevity we’ll just move on to the actual game itself. If it hasn’t been beaten into your skull with a small selection of golf clubs, freedom is the lay of the law in Liberty City. Not only are you able to essentially roll around the city at your own leisure, going about the missions in a semi-linear structure, the missions themselves numerous times have multiple options for completing them. Some are fairly black & white, but for the most part, they’re quite open ended – it just depends on your patience and playing style. Unlike a game such as, say, Morrowind, which is at times a bit too non-linear and intimidating, GTAIII slowly progresses the open-ended city, as seen by the Callahan Bridge situation (though, it is possible to get to Staunton Island, and Shoreside Vale early by making a use of a “Flying Cars” cheat code).

It really can’t be stressed enough that a majority of the game is all dependent on the person playing the game. You can, if you so choose, to be a law-abiding citizen, stopping at red lights, and not running down other people (or beating the crap out of them on foot), and avoiding accidents (despite that if a cop car hits you, you get a 1 star wanted level, which is enough to send you into Dr. Evil mode). Or you can be a sadistic, evil kinda person, going on a Liberty City destruction spree – it’s all up to you. Of course, the missions involve particular aggression, but outside of those you’re completely on your own, which is what makes the game great – just exploring the city, checking out the different areas is entertaining in itself. It’s really difficult to explain in a written review, it’s easier to show off the possibilities by playing the actual game and get sucked into the world of Liberty City.

Rockstar North built two separate engines for the driving and on-foot activity; and one is good, and the other is, well, not so good. Driving is not exactly hard to screw up, but they did a nice job anyway, with some exaggerated and stereotyped car physics and making it easy to do a mean drive by shooting. Cars like the Landstalker are extremely wobbly and tend to flip over often – if you guessed that it’s an SUV, you get a cookie. Sports cars are extremely fast but tough to control at high speeds, and a huge truck such as the flatbed truck control like a tank, but also send other cars flying into the stratosphere (which is still not as fun as ramming people off their motorcycles in Vice City, and watch the former riders hit roadside buildings or fly into the ocean). The “Auto” part of Grand Theft Auto is no doubt excellent.

The on-foot controls are a bit wonky, however. While you’re able to run and wander the city without much trouble (and you can unlock infinite run by completing level 12 of the ambulance missions – which is just utter, utter, sarcastic joy), when the time comes to target enemies in a gunfight, it just doesn’t handle quite well. While the sniper rifle is easy to control because of the scope and zooming, the other weapons that have auto-aim have a habit of targeting the wrong threat, and it costs you your life more often than it should be. Nothing like targeting the guy half a distance away because he has an AK, but the guy with the .45 next to you is doing more damage but you can’t target him. It gets extremely frustrating, which is why it’s more fun (and a lot easier to actually pull off) to just get a bulletproof car, and run everyone down, or get out and toss a grenade into the pack to weed out their numbers. But this is just another testament to the amount of freedom you have to complete many missions – by any means necessary.

Despite the annoyance of the targeting system (which was slightly improved in Vice City, but still not perfect), it’s a small problem in the big world of Grand Theft Auto III. Rarely is there a game that not only has a load of great missions that are usually very entertaining, yet also maintain the ability to go around and complete a seemingly endless set of side-jobs, odd-jobs, and other ways to raise hell. It’s not a true, 100% freedom game, but what is? Once you beat the main game, the city remains open, to wander through at your leisure – though when compared to Vice City, the need to actually do it is a bit smaller. Not only is the game loaded with freedom, it’s also a very long game as well – you’ll put in some RPG-ish hour amounts if you’re out to get 100%, or just explore the city. Even if you just follow the main missions and ignore the side missions (which isn’t a good idea, as the side missions are almost as good as some of the main story missions), you won’t be able to blow through this game in a day.

The Looks

In previous Grand Theft Auto games, the top-down perspective was the only possible way to make the game work on PlayStation (look at the chuggy Driver 2 for proof of that). On Grand Theft Auto III for PlayStation 2, Rockstar North was able to finally create a traditional 3D perspective, and it works extremely well, despite the rough exterior of the engine. When compared to other PS2 games, the look isn’t great – characters look weird and poorly animated, cars are rough looking despite being detailed well, and the numerous buildings aren’t up to a level of quality seen in other games. But when you look at the big picture, what was accomplished here is the big graphical plus.

Liberty City is huge. And bustling. And when you look around the city, being able to see the thousands of people doing their thing, both in-car and on-foot, and even being able to see other parts of the city from a long ways away. When I first played the game and saw this whole seperate, huge island that I couldn’t get to yet, it was an emotion of “wow.” Sure, many games have different parts to see in a town or whatever, but to be able to see the other areas from another island is stunning, and a testament to what Rockstar pulled off here. Liberty City is huge, and it’s represented to the letter in GTAIII.

The Sounds

Aside from the actual game, the sound department is one of the best ever stuffed in a video game. When you’re in the car, you can listen to numerous radio stations to keep you entertained and immerse you in the world of Liberty City even more; you’ll find a typical top 40 station, a hip-hop station, an 80’s station that plays tracks from the movie Scarface, a classical radio station, and of course, a talk radio station in the hilarious Chatterbox, hosted by Lazlow. Each one has an hour or so of music looped (some real, some not; a bit is a bunch of parodies, though Game Radio, the hip-hop station DJ’d by Stretch Armstrong has real rap tracks from guys such as Royce Da 5Í”) – not as much as the amazing soundtrack to Vice City, but still really good. The Chatterbox is infinitely hilarious, loaded with amusing stereotypical callers – the crazy woman who’s organized Citizens Raging Against Phones, better known as CRAP, to the guy who’s calling in to tell the city about a protest, but when pressed by Lazlow, demonstrates that he has no idea what the protest is about, to the mea culpa of a pimp passing off his services as a “marriage saving” program. All are well acted and downright hilarious, and is probably the most popular station amongst GTAIII fans. Mixed in are the crazy commercials for a weight loss program that makes you exercise while you’re asleep, to Pogo The Monkey, and GTAIII’s audio is fully loaded (and at times, highly satirical compared to the state of radio today) – and the amount of time and effort put into just this part of the audio is astounding.

It’s not just here when the audio shines – it’s in the voices as well. The voices for the different main characters are done by professional actors from an array of mobster-related films, such as Mark Madsen, and as you’d expect, they’re done well. Your own character never speaks, so you’re on your own to call the action of “what would GTA guy say in this situation?” There’s also hundreds of other voices that you hear when wandering the city, be it the “burrito!!” scream from the Diablo gang when you jack one of their gang cars, to all the people speaking strange phrases on the streets – the construction worker singing “In The Navy” by the Village People, to the weird flasher-looking guy giving us too much info about his mother also being his sister. Going into all the little nuances of this game would take days and millions of words, so we’ll just say that the audio is incredible and the dedication of the developers is highly evident.

The Bottom Line

When the hype of 2001 was all about Metal Gear Solid 2 and Devil May Cry (two awesome games in their own right), Grand Theft Auto III ended up overshadowing both and creating a phenomenon not really seen in gaming before. How the mainstream got ahold of this game is really a shock (as open ended gameplay such as this usually isn’t their cup of tea – must be the hooker thing), but no matter, as GTAIII deserves all the sales it has gotten, because it’s just an amazing game that can be played pretty much any way you can possibly imagine; and no way is wrong. When the time comes to look back on the PS2’s brightest moments, this one will certainly be high on the list of the best of the best.