Vice At a Price
Yeah, Vice City Stories has hit the PS2, but it's far from a perfect port.
Published: March 20, 2007
These days, I'm a lazy man, so I'm going to do the whole cut/paste thing yet again for most of this review of GTA: Vice City Stories, mainly because the game is (obviously) a port of the fantastic prequel to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City that appeared on the PSP almost five months ago.
I'm also going the lazy route as sort of a half-assed attempt at replicating the same job that Rockstar Leeds did with porting the game to the PS2. It's a problem that plagued the PS2 port of Liberty City Stories, but that game at least had a city that had wormed its way into the nostalgia centers of my brain and actually let me revisit things with a new story. VCS does that, of course, but I never dug Vice City as much as Liberty for whatever reason, though that's not really my beef with the conversion.
Things like a wonky framerate, worse textures than in the original, bugs like AI buddies completely disappearing and a general malaise that permeates the whole experience drag down what should have been a chance for folks that were as attached to Vice as I was Liberty. Instead, the game just screams "oh, shit, VCS on the PSP didn't sell nearly enough, quick, throw it on the PS2! They have a 100 million systems out there, that should recoup some of the losses, right?" It just feels a little lifeless, and, perhaps fittingly, makes the PSP version of the game the superior one by far. Even stuff like aiming feels wonky, though finally having a second analog stick is greatly appreciated.
So... yeah, there you have it. It's a crap port of a game that, as you'll see when you read below, is actually pretty damned good. It's just a shame non-PSP owners have to suffer if they want to explore Vice City two years before the original game takes place. Here, then, is our take on the original version. In the spirit of laziness, I'm keeping all the references to the PSP hardware in there because I honestly think the game is worth getting a PSP for. That, and again, I'm a lazy bastard.
---
Vice City is, for many, their favorite GTA setting. Maybe it's all the 80's glitz, maybe it's the layout of the city, maybe it's the main character, Tommy Vercetti (voiced with nasally panache by Ray Liotta), who was about as good a cross between GTA: San Andreas' CJ and the mute lead from Gran Theft Auto III. Whatever the reason, folks fell in love with Rockstar North's depiction of 1986 Miami.
Now, two years earlier, while Tommy is still in the clink, another tale will be told. Victor Vance, brother to the eternally retarded Lance Vance, one of the most annoying characters in Vice City, has arrived in Vice City on a military transfer and, after just a few "errands" for his CO, quickly finds that the corruption winding its way through the Vice City underground has more than a few tendrils out into the "respectable" community. He's quickly framed, tossed out of the Military and onto the city streets, left to fend for himself.
Thus begins Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, and while I was never one of those people that counted Vice City as a favorite locale (truth be told, I think it was the weakest of the three PS2 games due to a handful of bugs and a city that never really felt like home -- give me Liberty City's more modern climate and layout any day), I'm still in awe of what Rockstar Leeds has done with the PSP hardware. This is, in nearly every way, a better looking version of Vice City -- with an absolutely massive draw distance, plenty of detail in the vehicles, and some fantastic direction in the cutscenes.
I'm also going the lazy route as sort of a half-assed attempt at replicating the same job that Rockstar Leeds did with porting the game to the PS2. It's a problem that plagued the PS2 port of Liberty City Stories, but that game at least had a city that had wormed its way into the nostalgia centers of my brain and actually let me revisit things with a new story. VCS does that, of course, but I never dug Vice City as much as Liberty for whatever reason, though that's not really my beef with the conversion.
Things like a wonky framerate, worse textures than in the original, bugs like AI buddies completely disappearing and a general malaise that permeates the whole experience drag down what should have been a chance for folks that were as attached to Vice as I was Liberty. Instead, the game just screams "oh, shit, VCS on the PSP didn't sell nearly enough, quick, throw it on the PS2! They have a 100 million systems out there, that should recoup some of the losses, right?" It just feels a little lifeless, and, perhaps fittingly, makes the PSP version of the game the superior one by far. Even stuff like aiming feels wonky, though finally having a second analog stick is greatly appreciated.
So... yeah, there you have it. It's a crap port of a game that, as you'll see when you read below, is actually pretty damned good. It's just a shame non-PSP owners have to suffer if they want to explore Vice City two years before the original game takes place. Here, then, is our take on the original version. In the spirit of laziness, I'm keeping all the references to the PSP hardware in there because I honestly think the game is worth getting a PSP for. That, and again, I'm a lazy bastard.
---
Vice City is, for many, their favorite GTA setting. Maybe it's all the 80's glitz, maybe it's the layout of the city, maybe it's the main character, Tommy Vercetti (voiced with nasally panache by Ray Liotta), who was about as good a cross between GTA: San Andreas' CJ and the mute lead from Gran Theft Auto III. Whatever the reason, folks fell in love with Rockstar North's depiction of 1986 Miami.
Now, two years earlier, while Tommy is still in the clink, another tale will be told. Victor Vance, brother to the eternally retarded Lance Vance, one of the most annoying characters in Vice City, has arrived in Vice City on a military transfer and, after just a few "errands" for his CO, quickly finds that the corruption winding its way through the Vice City underground has more than a few tendrils out into the "respectable" community. He's quickly framed, tossed out of the Military and onto the city streets, left to fend for himself.
Thus begins Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, and while I was never one of those people that counted Vice City as a favorite locale (truth be told, I think it was the weakest of the three PS2 games due to a handful of bugs and a city that never really felt like home -- give me Liberty City's more modern climate and layout any day), I'm still in awe of what Rockstar Leeds has done with the PSP hardware. This is, in nearly every way, a better looking version of Vice City -- with an absolutely massive draw distance, plenty of detail in the vehicles, and some fantastic direction in the cutscenes.
