Gone In Sixty Seconds: Revisited

I am a humongous fan of Grand Theft Auto III and when I heard word that they were making another one I just had to get my hands on it, but I made a mistake. I showed my father the game and ran over a pedestrian. He was pi*sed! I had to take back GTA III to the store and get a refund. Once Grand Theft Auto: Vice City came out October 2002 I knew I couldn't buy it so every time I went over to my friend's house I would play it constantly into the night and eventually I beat it without taking it over to my house. When Vice City came out last year everyone was talking about it; all of the game magazines, all of the video game shows, and politicians and media alike. The magazines and TV shows were all psyched for the new game and couldn’t wait to get their hands on it while condescending politicians who blamed the Columbine shootings on Marilyn Manson and who thought that the insert in a Dead Kennedys CD was harmful, really didn’t want the game shipped out. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City has to be one of the most controversial games that have ever been released and Rockstar Studios went way past the mark with a couple games already prior to this release. Well, the hype was big and my question at that specific time was: can this Playstation 2 game live up to all of this? The answer to my question was answered when the final cut scene played at the end of the game.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City takes place in Vice City, FL sort of a video game replica of Miami as was GTA III’s Liberty City (a la New York City) in the late eighties. We find Tommy Vercetti working out a drug deal when it goes bad and he needs to hang low and get the loot back to Sonny before he gets killed. While hanging low, this thug starts doing errands for local druglords and crimelords alike earning respect amongst them all by doing missions and earning tons of money in the process. By the end of the game you try and be a big mobster yourself. That’s basically the goal of the game.

Basically in Vice City, you go around the city and participate in missions. Now when these missions get completed you get some dough and you can come back and do another mission from the same guy until he runs out of things for you to do. In the last game the missions weren’t balanced. You could do a really frustrating mission one second and then the next there would be a very simple one. Now, although there are some like that in Vice City, a lot are really well balanced. There are a crapload of missions to accomplish in Vice City, far more than there were in Liberty City, and I thought that maybe a lot would be rehashes, but I was wrong. There were one or two missions that seemed familiar, but the rest were very fresh and new. And talk about genius ideas for missions! I love all of the missions in Vice City. One of my favorites was when you were doing some missions from a rock group called Love Fist and you had to drive them to a concert when you found there was a bomb strapped onto the car and if you stopped or slowed down you would blow up. Well, this sounds an awful lot like Speed, but it’s much funnier because the rocker’s are drunken Scottish men and they are just hilarious. Another one that I was pretty fond of was when you had to steal a fast boat for a man named Diaz and race some other gangsters to it, but the mission wasn’t over then. On the way back someone else drove while you (in First Person) shot at helicopters and boats a like trying to chase you, which leads me to my next section.

I was astonished by how many vehicles were in GTA III when I first played it and I’m proud to say that there are even more vehicles with this installment of the series including some new things like motorcycles (choppers, dirtbikes, and MOPEDS), boats, and even helicopters. And now all of the cars and vehicles have different handling and you need to get inside every car to see how good it handles. Some cars take sharper turns than others while Banshees might go faster than Stallions. You need to figure out which car is right for you like I have. What’s my favorite car in the game? The Sabre! A lot of the cars are modeled after late eighties editions of cars, but not all are faithful to the period. Since Toyota or Chevrolet probably wouldn’t lease any of their car models for the game (for the same reason you can’t have damage on your cars in Gran Turismo III), the developers at Rockstar North had to construct and name their own cars. You’re probably wondering how the motorcycles and helicopters handle. Well, Helicopters (depending on which ones you fly) can get shot down pretty easily if your enemy gets all of their shots in and if you’re riding a motorcycle and crash chances are you will go flying off and lost health pretty easily (which is why I never use them in missions unless I’m required to).

There’s more weapons in Vice City as well. I forgot the exact count but I think there were a little over forty weapons compared to GTA III’s eleven (or something). A lot of the weapons are just awesome. You can have chainsaws and Molotov cocktails as well as Katanas and Uzis.

Something I love about GTA III and Vice City is that the possibilities are endless. If you get bored of doing the regular missions and advancing the story line or if you just want to take a break when things start becoming hard, then you can participate in some worthwhile side missions like delivering pizzas on mopeds or selling ice cream. Along these side missions come the ones carried over from the previous game like missions where you become the cop, firefighter, or paramedic.

Another thing I thought was awesome in Vice City was how you could buy real estate. Let’s say you have $120,000 dollars and you wanted to buy the Malibu Club. You walk up to an icon and press the L1 button and you buy it. Inside you can find some side missions for serious dough and the property also becomes one of your safe houses where you can save your game. Finding and buying the best properties is a heart wrenching mission all by itself because if you bought a property for an insane amount of money and find that you hate it, you can’t sell it back to the city. But these properties are very convenient and key ways to beat the game. If you are practically dying or the cops are chasing you, all you have to do is find one of your safe houses and save your game.

The controls are much superior in Vice City than they were in Liberty City. Sure, you still have the same camera problems, but that’s probably the only problem with the controls despite how the helicopter and boat controls are very awkward. The controls from the previous game were carried over so chances are if you mastered GTA III then you will get along with Vice City’s. What I despised about the last game was how hard it was to aim at people when you had a gun, but Vice City truly does a great job with how well you can aim at people. By pressing a button you can quickly aim your gun at someone, but the only problem is that sometimes you lock onto the wrong person and this proves very inconvenient if you’re in a mission and the person you’re trying to assassinate is among crowds of people.

Vice City is bigger and meaner than Liberty City was. A majority of the city is open to you from the start unlike how you had to unlock portions of your city in GTA III. The city is humongous and it’s fun to explore because of all of the very big environments and all of that. And also, you can now go inside buildings! You have fully rendered environments ranging from malls to airports. You can go inside buildings! The city is so big, but the pop up is very bad. Sometimes when you’re driving alongside the road you can’t see a tree coming and you crash into it, which really sucks if you are on a motorcycle. The graphics are basically rehashed from GTA III and are not much better aside from the new water graphics and neon-light mechanics. Game mags have commented on this and I wanted to make my own catchphrase, but I can’t so I’m just going to say what people are saying: Vice City is basically Liberty City only with a fresh coat of paint on it. The same blurry movements from characters are still there, which really plagued the third game’s graphics.

A lot of people were big fans of the first game’s soundtrack, but I have to say that this game’s blows the other out of the water definitely. The licensed music from big musicians like the Cutting Crew and Judas Priest is just awesome even if you have some Michael Jackson tunes stuck in there. But the music isn’t just the only part that’s awesome and nostalgic: you also have talk radio. You have a variety of stations you can flip through when you get into a car and you can choose to listen to music or listen to talk radio. Talk radio is hilarious with insanely funny characters and even better commercials in between. This is the finest points of the game, which I just love. As for voiceovers, you shouldn’t even get me started. Ray Liotta leads the all-star cast as Tommy Vercetti, but among him you can hear voices by Miss Cleo, Dennis Hopper, and many more! This is basically a mob game with a ton of Hollywood-style influence. The car sounds and helicopter noise is all grade A and very realistic and if you’re expecting cussing, you will be excited to know that there is a lot of cussing just no F-bombs like The Getaway (one of the countless GTA clones out there) expressed.

Grand Theft Auto Vice City was one of the best games to come out last year and it fully lived up to the hype. Everyone just wants to play it due to the controversial factor as well as the fact that everyone is playing it and I wanted to play it for this game reason as well, but it all comes down to how good the game is and Vice City is a great game. Joe Lieberman is having a field day on this game due to the fact that some idiot kids were shooting cars and stuff and through quick thinking these kids chose to blame it on the video game (and make the developers and publisher pay for his actions) and not blame it on his own damn self for picking up a shotgun and shooting a car. Although there are a lot of mature sexual and violent themes in Vice City, not all of it is as gratuitis as it was in GTA III and I think that if you are a fan of mob movies like Goodfellas or The Godfather Trilogy that you should give this game a shot because of all the great things that it has. Look past the controversy and play GTA: Vice City and also be aware that the next game in the series might be coming next year under the same Sin City...could that be a hint that it could take place in Las Vegas? Well, we’ll know soon! Play Vice City!

© Jason Haskins, 2003

“JiggyJay”


”Grand Theft Auto: Vice City”

Developer: Rockstar North

Publisher: Rockstar

Year: 2002

Rated: M for Mature because of violence, sexual themes, language, and thematic elements.

Also recommended: Grand Theft Auto III