[Review] Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

[#REDSTAR ♪ ♫]

game information:

Developers Rockstar North, War Drum Studios, Rockstar Vienna
PublishersACE (2), Rockstar Games
Release DateOctober 29, 2002
PlatformsPlayStation 2, PC, Macintosh, iPhone, Android, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox

 

 

Discounting Grand Theft Auto
 3, there's no other game that offers anything like the experience you'll have with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The game of fast cars and ruthless criminals packs more action and excitement into the first few hours than can be found in the wholeety of most games. Released almost a full year after the previous version (and right during E3 - thanks, Rockstar), there are a number of compelling, albeit minor, changes to the model that captivated us so much last year. I played through a lot of the game on the PS2 and have been hard at work this past week playing through it once again on the PC.

 

For those of you who've already experienced the joys of the previous game on the PC or PS2, let me spell out the major differences and improvements in store for Vice City. The story is much stronger this time around with a fully-fleshed out protagonist. The missions themselves are often longer and sometimes involve more kinds of gameplay than before. Buildings play a bigger role as well as the game permits players not only to enter structures but also buy them, opening up a new range of missions and rewards. Add to that more weapons, vehicles and a host of other surprises and you'll see that Vice City raises the bar for the series. The only downside is that the overall design of the game does not have the same impact that the previous game did. Hey, if it ain't broke ...

 

If you've played Vice City on the PS2 there are fewer surprises in store. The two games are wholly identical in terms of content (making things a bit easier on our strategy guide guys). All the missions, bonuses and characters are completely identical to those in the console version. But the PC version benefits from better graphics, a slight tweak in the controls, a custom MP3-driven radio station and a customizable character skin.

 

 

If you've never played either game on any system, you're in for a real treat. Vice City tells a much tighter, more personal story that GTA3. While the anonymous nature of the character in the previous game made it a bit easier to loose yourself in the role, the main character in Vice City is tied to the overall narrative much more tightly. The story plays out in a series of cutscenes that set up the action of each individual mission.

 

The game takes place in the 1980s, before the events in GTA3. You play as Tommy Vercetti, a gangster who's just finished a 15-year stint in prison. Once he's out his bosses send him down to Florida's Vice City as the point man for some new operations. Once there Tommy teams up with a shifty lawyer (think Fredo) and the two begin plans for a big drug score. Once the drugs and the money disappear, Tommy finds himself fighting to discover who's cheated him while fending off the existing criminal elements of Vice City. As you might imagine, this type of scenario does involve a fair bit of violence. What you might not expect is how the game can walk a line between humor and horror while presenting all this material.

 

Vice City itself is a fully developed island town that lives and breathes like a few other game settings before it. Cars drive up and down the streets, boats ply the water ways, news copters zip by overhead and everywhere you turn the citizens of Vice City are going about their business. The crooks, cops and citizens of the city are all capable of a level of dynamic behaviors. But even if you're not shooting at them, they still have agendas. You'll see rival gangs fighting each other in the streets and traffic accidents escalating in to fist fights.

 

And while you'll spend plenty of time walking amongst these encounters, the real heart of the game is stealing cars and driving from crime to crime. The list of cars available in the game is far too long for us to examine each of them in turn but some general comments should give you a good impression of what to expect. You'll find lots of small sporty cars and lots of large family sedans and wagons with plenty of gradations in between. Large delivery vans, city buses and trucks give you a slower but more damage-resistant ride. It's just what you got in GTA3, there's just more of it this time around.

 

 

Although it's not new for the series, I should probably say a few words about the rules of the road at this point. Rockstar's struck a great balance between offering you consequences for your actions and letting you run around without worrying about the real rules of the road. Cops aren't too worried about speeding, running red lights or even causing crashes. This keeps the pace of the game high and also ensures that, when you really do do something to cheese off the cops, it becomes a dynamic part of the game rather than an inconvenience. The pace of the game is also helped in that crashes aren't as catastrophic as they might be in real life; you can take a few hits and keep on going.

 

Getting back to the vehicles themselves, the motorcycles are a fantastic addition for the series, not just in terms of the "cool" factor but also in terms of some new gameplay opportunities. At the most basic level, the four types of motorcycles found in the game offer a really fast and nimble mode of transport. Zipping in and out of tight spots in traffic is much easier from the seat of one of these two-wheeled demons than from the driver's seat of your sedan. (A cute little scooter, called the Faggio, is included for your velociphobes.) You can shoot ahead of you while on the motorcycle which makes them a great vehicle for the game's chase sequences.

 

Tons of ramps are laid out all across the city. While they're placed fairly obviously, they never seem terribly blatant or out of place with the rest of the environment. Naturally some of the placements are a bit too obvious ("what's that giant ramp doing pointing out over the river?") But for the most part, the ramps are positioned unobtrusively. Once you get a helicopter, you'll even begin to see how many ramps there are on the roofs of buildings. Quite a few of these are laid out in courses, letting you ramp from one building to the next across large sections of the city. While the motorcycles let you tilt up or down for some of the trickier stunts, you can take most of the jumps in a car or on a bike.

 

There are a lot more boats this time around and they're more often the focus of missions. You'll be called on to take part in boat races, boat theft
, and boat destruction missions throughout the course of the game. Completing certain mission strands will even grant you respawning boats at particular locations. The boating model is slick with just the right amounts of drifting and sliding to make water seem distinct from pavement. The only really difficult part of driving a boat is getting on and off without falling off the dock.

 

Which brings me to one of our pet peeves - namely that you can't swim. I wouldn't mind so much if the game weren't set on a pair of islands. As Such you're frequently near the water and there are plenty of times that you'll find yourself drowning to death three feet from shore. It's particularly frustrating when it comes right before the end of a mission. Rockstar's explanation that "Gangsters don't swim" seems to dodge the issue a bit.

 

And although they're not available until later in the game, planes and helicopters are also on the menu. You'll unlock these as the result of completing certain missions or buying certain properties. Some missions even require you to use these vehicles. But to be honest, once I managed to secure a few helicopters for my own use, the PS2 version lost a bit of its structure for me. But that's merely me responding to the wonderfully open-ended nature of the game. For almost a full week, I rarely even bothered to take on any new missions, preferring instead to soar high above the city or swoop down narrow streets in my nimble copter.

 

The control system as conceived on the PS2 was quite convenient and the PC version maintains the efficiency throughout. But the PC controls surpass those of the PS2 in a few key areas while falling short only in one admittedly crucial area. (While you can easily replicate the established control scheme with a gamepad, I prefer to focus on the new keyboard controls in reviewing the game.) The translation of the controls is pretty straightforward. The game comes with configurations for both the WASD and arrow key style of play. There are a few inconveniences here (like the sprint key being mapped to the right shift key, a problem for us WASDers) but since you can set up the controls any way you want, you can easily change this yourself.

 

Mouse support is probably the biggest story here. Fanboy preferences aside, being able to use the mouse to aim your weapons makes this a much easier, more convenient game. I'm not knocking the Dual Shock system but the analog aiming definitely takes second place to the mouse for me. For those who aren't quite familiar with the difference, the aiming on the PS2 is handled with the analog stick. The centered position represents no movement of the reticle while a full press in any direction starts moving the reticle in that direction. The mouse allows for more precise controls as the reticle stops moving once the mouse stops moving.

 

 

The new aiming controls make some of the missions much easier. Sniping Haitians from a distant rooftop or shooting fools from the skid of a helicopter is much simpler this time around. Those two missions took several tries on the gamepad; I got through them both on the first try with the mouse.

 

But driving with the mouse is, as the French say, le crap. It uses the same scheme as the PS2 aiming controls: the mouse moves away from center and the car turns in proportion to the amount you moved your mouse. Having to move the mouse back to center to go straight again is a bit of a pain. Perhaps if I laid out a grid on my desk .... The alternative of course is forcing the player to keep moving the mouse to stay in a turn. And my desk isn't big enough for some of the really hard turns I've needed to make.

It's better then to go with the default keyboard steering. While it doesn't offer the same incremental control that analog inputs provide, the thoughtful use of small, short taps almost duplicates the finer controls available with analog devices. Again, as I said at the start, this could be fixed with the use of a gamepad, but then you're going to lose the mouse control or be forced to switch back and forth every time you get in to a car.

Besides getting in and out of cars, you'll also be able to get in and out of many of the city's buildings. Vice City
 has a number of locations that you can explore, from police stations to mansions to shopping malls. There are even lots of missions that take you inside one or more of these structures. While there's a brief load as you move in or out of some buildings, the rest of the game continues outside. You can look at the window of your first hotel, for instance, and see the traffic passing by on the street. When you step out, that's the traffic you'll see.

 

 

You can also buy a lot of the properties in the game. You'll acquire some properties as a result of finishing particular missions. We can't really get in to those without giving away some key story points, but you will find yourself set up with a few choice pads around the city. You can use these buildings as save spots, naturally, but you can also use many of them to store extra vehicles. I've got a hotel on the north side of town packed with various police and FBI cars, for instance, and a mansion with a fleet of sports cars. Some buildings give you even more mission opportunities.

 

While there is a definite core story in the game, you're pretty free to take on extra side missions that support the main story without necessarily advancing it. This gives you a chance to go and try something else if you hit a roadblock in the main story path. Sometimes a little time away from a particularly difficult mission (and the missions here are a bit more difficult than in the previous game) is all you need to bring a fresh perspective to the problem. In this way, Vice City offers almost limitless playability. While you won't necessarily stumble upon any significant content, you'll be just as happy spending odd hours driving around looking for the small rewards scattered throughout the game.

 

 

Apart from the vehicle missions that put the player in the role of ambulance driver, police officer and even pizza delivery guy, the game does not offer the same kind of dynamic story-telling and quests that worked so well in a game like Pirates! . But it makes up for this with the kind of depth of story-telling that's just not possible in a purely dynamic game. The missions here can be much longer and comprise multiple parts. On the one hand, this makes for much more interesting and engaging gameplay. On the other hand it can require a bit of backtracking if you fail. Fortunately the new game puts a taxi cab right outside your recovery point (hospital or police station) and takes you right back to your uncompleted mission.

 

If you can't tell from the screenshots, the visuals are breathtaking. Vice City differs from Liberty City in that it at least gives the appearance of being somewhat clean. There's a pastel glow to nearly everything that hides the nastiness that lies beneath. High rises, sprawling golf courses, industrial ports and a host of other locales are all rendered with fantastic detail and fit in well with each other. The transitions between particular areas and neighborhoods of the city are seamless and very natural. The weather and time of day effects are brilliant; you can feel the warmth of the sunrise or the dampness of a thunderstorm in the colors they use.

 

If you've got a fast enough car and a straight enough road, you're bound to see some of the content popping in. Pedestrians appearing in front of you aren't such a big deal. It's the cops on the street and the rocks in the ocean that are the biggest problems. Luckily the problems with this type of streamed content are rare. Also on the subject of going fast, I'm glad to see that Rockstar has done away with the irritating blur effect that comes as the default graphics mode on the PS2.

 

Once you get your hands on a helicopter, you can take to the skies and see just how good the draw distance is. At the higher altitudes you lose some of the details but that's a small price to pay for seeing the entire city laid out below you. Once up in the air, you may notice that there are some huge areas of the city that never really get featured quite as they ought to. But that's like complaining that you did not get soup with an eight course meal.

 

Again, having played GTA3, it's the little details that impress me most in the sequel. You can see the back of Tommy's shirt fluttering as he drives down the street on a motorcycle. Another nice touch is that the hood of your car will fly off once it raises up. (In the previous game, the hood being up was part of a distinct damage state. You had to damage your car even more if you wanted it to come off.)

 

The smooth frame rate and stunning visuals are even more impressive when you consider the overall stability of the game. Where GTA3 definitely took some knocks for performance, so far we've yet to have any technical problems at all with our versions. I've had a small bit of trouble getting my Audigy card to work but with a game this dense, that's only a very minor annoyance. I'm soothed by the incredibly quick load times. On the PS2, I could always count on a little sandwich-time while the game loaded up. On the PC the game loads in less than a tenth of the time it takes on the PS2.

 

 

Overall, the system requirements are quite reasonable. In fact, the game is so well designed that you can probably even get away with running the game on a system a bit lower than Rockstar's planned minimum spec. We've run it on a range of machines at both ends of the spectrum and were pleased to see that it ran well at 640x480 on even 500MHz processors with 256MB of RAM. A lot depends on the video card though, so if you're even considering playing the game on anything less than the recommended spec, you better make sure you make up for the deficiencies in the video card department. Although if you have a 128MB video card in a 500MHz machine there might be something wrong with you.

 

Apart from the streaming pop-in, the cutscenes tend to show off a few other small problems with the graphics. Mitten-hands and some minor clipping are the worst offenders here but, as with most other annoyances in the game, they're immediately cancelled out by more impressive features. In the case of the cutscenes, the real stars are the script writers and voice actors. It's rare that game dialogue carries any real emotional impact but nearly every scene in this game pulls it off. The script it witty without being goofy and mature without being overly coarse. There is obscenity in the game, of course, but it suits the story.

 

But it's the voice actors who steal the show. I'd be curious to know how much of the profits from GTA3 went in to hiring talent for the sequel. Nearly every member of the cast is a fairly well-known personality in their own right and they all, without exception, voice their roles remarkably well. Burt Reynolds, Luiz Guzman, Dennis Hopper, Gary Busey, Phillip Michael Thomas and a few others all lend their talents to the game and really enhance the experience. Of course, Ray Liotta's voicing of the main character is as perfect a job of casting and reading as I think anyone could expect.

 

Where Grand Theft Auto
L 3 made good use of brand new music, Vice City offers a set of radio stations that play over 100 tunes from the 80s. You'll hear songs from artists as diverse as Lionel Richie, Wang Chung, Ozzy Osbourne and Run DMC. The music really helps to make the game work, much better than any newly commissioned works could. The commercials and talk radio options on the dial are humorous enough to stand on their own apart from the game. Paired with it, they offer the occasional laugh and help to bring the game world to life.

 

While the radio stations are great, most players will eventually try out the new MP3-driven radio station. The setup for this is super easy. Without even referring to the manual or readme file, I dove in to the directory, found a folder called MP3 and loaded it up with all my favorite hits from the 80s. A little Police, a little Talking Heads, that song from Musical Youth (you know the one) and I'm good to go. Once the tunes are in you'll see a radio station called MP3 Player on your dial. Just tune in and listen to the songs you've put in the folder. They play the music make me jump and run, after all.

 

What did you think of GTA: Vice City, Spaz?
Finally, and let me assure you that Rockstar sees this one coming a mile away, we're still disappointed that there's no multiplayer mode. I've finally come to buy into Rockstar's response that they won't add multiplayer to the series until they can make it as engaging and interesting as the game's single-player mode. Our only concern at that point is that Rockstar eventually does do something new and exciting on the multiplayer front. If they're going to deny us something even as simple as a four-player mayhem mode, what they finally come up with needs to be really, really impressive. In the meantime, the nearly infinite playability of the title puts complaints about missing multiplayer to rest.

 

 

Verdict
In the end, any criticism I can offer on this game is merely nitpicking. The occasional weaknesses of the game are few and far between and the overall momentum of the game propels you past the dull spots so quickly that you'll only begin to notice them once you start looking for things to criticize.

As a matter of personal taste, I think I'd prefer to play the game on the PS2 for the simple reason that it feels more fun in a living room environment. (Plus it gives me something to do while the wife is playing The Sims.) Kicked back on the couch with the surround sound turned way up, you'll find that you're pulled in to the whole experience much more immediately than is perhaps possible in a desktop format. Gamers who have more comfortable, EAX supported environments around their PC will find it more difficult to favor the console version for these reasons.

Still, the new additions and control tweaks for the PC are slowly but surely tearing me away from the television. Heading back to play the title on the PS2, I'm more aware of the frustrations of aiming and the lack of a custom soundtrack. Those additions are powerful enough to almost justify playing both versions of the game.

 

While Vice City is a better title than its predecessor, it does lack a lot of the surprise and discovery of the first title, at least in terms of design. I won't hold that against Rockstar too much. After all, there's not much incentive to innovate when the previous game is still selling like crazy. Still, the few additions they've made make Vice City a better (if not as unexpected) a treat.

 

system requirements:
(minimum)
Memory: 128 MB
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6200
CPU: Intel Celeron
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City File Size: 915 MB
OS: Microsoft® Windows® 2000 / XP