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Grand Theft Auto III is a game that couldn’t help but be a blockbuster. Released last year for the PlayStation 2, it sold 6 million copies worldwide and stirred controversy over its violence. But the only controversy should have been explaining why it took the industry so long to design such a brilliantly free-form game.
And now it’s been visually revamped for the PC (though the core game is identical, down to the limited save slots and lack of in-mission saves and multiplay). On your PC monitor, GTA III looks twice as good as it ever did on a TV screen, running smoothly at 1600x1200 on a PIII 667 with a GeForce3 card.
What else is the same? Only one of the most innovative and inspired game designs in years, irrespective of platform. Tickets
GTA III is a crime epic putting you in the lead-footed shoes of an ambitious, amoral carjacker clawing his way to the top of the criminal underworld. If it can be stolen, destroyed, beaten, shotgunned, blown up, sniped, run over, or hit with a rocket launcher, you can be sure that you’ll get around to doing it by game’s end.
Missions are set up through a ton of comic book cut-scenes in which you encounter dozens of shady characters — pimps, dealers, Mafiosi, gang-bangers, and high-rollers — who employ you to carry out a cavalcade of dodgy deals on their behalf.
You play mainly from a third-person chase view, walking and running around until you find a car you want or need, at which point you can usually yank out the driver and make off with the new wheels. (Though not always without a fight — I was clubbed and/or shot to death by the irreverent carjackee on several occasions.)
Once in a vehicle, you have free rein of the city streets. As traffic flows and pedestrians amble the sidewalks, you can either obey functioning traffic lights or zip merrily through the city. Certain activities, like maliciously running people over, will draw the attention of the police, who will swarm you and haul you off to jail, whereupon you lose any weapons (bat, pistol, shotgun, grenade, Uzi, sniper rifle, and eventually RPG) and some of your cash.
Dealing with the law is a game-long concern. Depending on the severity of your behavior, the alert could be low-level (an inquisitive squad car or two) or truly seismic (National Guard intervention, complete with attack helicopters).
Each vehicle has its own handling characteristics, and there are way too many of them to even begin to touch on. Sleek European sports cars, clunky stationwagons, vans, pickups, limos, construction trucks — every type of vehicle on four wheels is in this game. And each offers new strategies for dealing with missions. Need to ram an armored car off the road? Pilfer a nice big sturdy truck to do the job. A courier sprint, on the other hand, will necessitate your scoring a fast and maneuverable ride.
A REVOLUTION OF INVENTION
The story kicks off with a brutal attack on a police prisoner-transfer convoy. You’re one of the lucky beneficiaries of the breakout. Back at large, you heist yourself a set of wheels and follow an ex-con’s tip about where to get work from a low-level capo in the Leone crime family.
In Liberty City, the opportunities are endless for a young man with no fear and no morals. The game pays constant homage to the movie Scarface, with your character doing for carjacking what Tony Montana did for coke. From your first mission as a lowly hooker chauffeur, you’ll be learning the ins and outs of the city, making useful contacts at the chop-shop and gun store, and gradually earning the trust of the hoods who employ you.
The genius of GTA III is the free-form playground of its cities, with missions waiting to be tapped in every neighborhood. After a dozen or so missions around Liberty City, you’ll come to visualize the place as a functioning town of very different boroughs. You’ll have developed your favorite shortcuts, and you’ll know the fastest route from the tony terraces of Hepburn Heights to the squalor and crime of the Red Light District.
Speaking of free-form, you can switch between radio stations as you drive,
moving from pop to rap to techno to AM talk. (My fave is KJAH Jah Radio: “Knowledge
is king, mon.”) In a tweak specific to the PC, you can use your own library
of MP3s to provide a custom soundtrack. For me, there’s nothing like sprinting
through Liberty City with H2O’s cover of Ice Cube’s “It Was
A Good Day” blaring from your speakers.
Another PC-specific change is the removal of many of the arbitrary barriers
that blocked off certain routes through the PS2 version. You can also add customized
skins to the main character, allowing you to terrorize the city with your own
mug facing forward.
Some of the best bits of GTA III are the incidental cacophonies of the big city, observed peripherally as you drive from place to place. Turn a corner in Chinatown, and you may find yourself in the middle of a shootout between Mafia gunmen and Chinese Triad toughs. Pick your way around stalled cars blocking busy traffic. Or just admire the chalk outlines left on the sidewalk — remnants of your past victims.
As you become intimately familiar with your stomping grounds, you’ll make the acquaintance of a colorful succession of employers. Some are referred to you by happy patrons, who kick you upstairs to more challenging and higher-paying work for their bosses. Others seek you out as your reputation grows. And others are found just by accident — for example, try picking up any ringing payphones for the random odd job.
Don’t be surprised to hear some well-known voices coming from the mouths of your employers. Joe Pantoliano and Michael Rapaport provide the voices of two of your early contacts, and Michael Madsen, Kyle MacLachlan, and Debi Mazar show up as well. Far from being annoying “celeb cameos,” these crime-film character actors lend the game…well, the air of a crime film stuffed with your favorite character actors.
I became a believer in GTA III’s truly revolutionary inventiveness after figuring out how to assassinate “Chunky” Lee Chong at his noodle shop. Chong is located in an alley inaccessible to cars, and he’s guarded by a cadre of armed thugs. I was maliciously gunned down during every attempt to run up and carry out the hit.
Then I noticed that Chong ran for his car every time I attacked. And a thought
occurred to me: in a previous mission, I’d been assigned to snatch a car
from a lunching mob boss, drive it to a bomb shop, and then return the sabotaged
car to its parking space at the restaurant. The mobster had returned to his
car only to blow himself sky-high.
So…why not?
I loaded up the Chong mission again and this time quietly stole his car. Drove it across town to the bomb shop. Returned it to its spot. Charged down the alley guns a-blazing, but as soon as Chong broke into his run, I fled to safety. Chong wasn’t so lucky — he ducked into his car and tried to drive off as usual, but this time found himself in the center of a fireball.
It was an exultant moment — one of the most rewarding bits of gaming I’ve ever experienced. And from then on, every mission that followed was informed by the tools and tricks I’d absorbed from previous ones. (How many solutions are there to different missions? Well, remember when I said that Chong’s alleyway was inaccessible by car? It actually is accessible, provided you’re smart enough to figure out that an improvised ramp can be rigged to allow your car to vault the concrete rail that blocks the alley.)
It’s almost pointless to start listing missions: there are so many, and so many ways in which to complete them. (There are around 100 missions in all, if you follow every lead.)
While some are more interesting than others, there’s hardly a dog in the whole batch. Steer a don through an ambush at the wheel of a slow, cumbersome limousine. Win a street race against three souped-up sports cars. Hijack an armored car. You’ll eventually make your way through three different islands, each presenting you with new environs to conquer.
One of the very best things about this game is its almost total lack of any visible interface. There are no menus to open and close, no stats to track, virtually nothing to get in the way of cinematic storytelling. All you’ve got to worry about is your health meter, your cash, and the level of law-enforcement heat. It’s a lesson other game designers should take to heart. Transparent interface = immediate accessibility, and PC games in particular stand to benefit greatly from the success of this experiment.
My only complaint about GTA III is the one vestigial headache of its console pedigree — a lack of helpful features that a keyboard might otherwise have enabled. The main thing missing is an overhead map of the whole city that updates itself as you make new contacts: as is, you get a partial map of the city that shows your immediate vicinity. A larger map would make the game so much less frustrating, since you wouldn’t have to rely on memory in the heat of a chase (and then unlearn everything when you unlock a new city).
Another quick word
on system specs: it can be a hog. Though the aforementioned PIII 667 test system
ran the game at high-res without a hitch, its GeForce3 card was critical. (GTA
III ran great on a P4 2.2GHz!) Since the game demands the latest video- and
sound-card drivers, expect a few compatibility issues in the first days of release.
But it’s hard to imagine a PC gamer who won’t immediately take to
GTA III. It empowers you as a player in ways few games even try to do. And it’s
quite simply a whole lot of fun.