Bright Lights, Big City
Don't let the top-down angle fool you; Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars does Liberty City on a massive scale. Oh, and it's awesome to boot.
Published: December 1, 2009
A while back, some friends and I got to talking about the Grand Theft Auto franchise. The question game up of GTA III and whether it was as big an impact as it was because of the shift from a top-down perspective or the presentation style. By today's standards, it's actually a pretty basic-looking game, with static-faced characters wielding meat fists for hands, but I still fire it up on the PC and goof around with RISE FM, Chatterbox and perhaps a custom soundtrack rip of BT's "Movement in Still Life" UK album blasting in the background because I absolutely fell in love with that version of Liberty City. I know every mission by heart, know every back alley and stunt jump and yet I still have an infatuation with it that goes infinitely deeper than the HD version in GTA IV.
What's crazy is that there's far less to do in that world than there is in any of the subsequent GTA games and yet I just have fun tooling around in Yakuza Stingers and sniping the moon. But is that a byproduct of seeing the world in three dimensions or just a kind of timeless nostalgia? If Chinatown Wars is any indication, it doesn't matter a lick what perspective you use, Liberty City presented in a simple way simply has some kind of unquantifiable magic to it. For weeks now I've been neck deep in all manner of Triad dealings, dropped into the shoes of smart ass Huang Lee, forced to run endless missions for flawed, squabbling underbosses all trying to ascend to the head of the Chinese crime operations in Liberty.
And I. Love. Every. Second.
Oh, there are problems with Chinatown Wars, make no mistake. Moving in and out of the ubiquitous PDA takes seconds at a time. The old-school perspective can make it tough to figure out if you can hop over a wall, for instance. Or to properly line up a stunt jump at high speed. Or see around overhanging trees. Or lob Molotov cocktails over objects. I don't really care, though, because these things can't really detract from how much fun it is to just... explore. To seek out every little corner of a city larger than any version of Liberty City yet seen. The Burroughs are diverse, the little added PSP effects that weren't in the DS version like volumetric-looking headlights and muzzle flashes, the glow of neon reflected in puddles. This is Liberty City -- the Liberty I fell in love with -- and though I find myself wondering just what it would look like with this kind of detail from a 3D perspective, I'm so busy buying weed from Yardies and selling it to clueless college kids I can't really bring myself to let it be anything but a passing fantasy.
Despite sharing a view of the first two games/expansions, though, the updates to GTA are alive and well. A GPS system makes sure you never get lost (I didn't care unless I was on a mission; I wanted to get lost), the trip skip feature when retrying missions is here (and you will fail them as this is one of the tougher GTAs), and there are a bazillion side missions and actions to do. Why not play some lottery scratchers or moonlight as a tattoo artist or deliver food or play cabbie or enforce the law yourself in between running all over the city to buy and sell drugs in the complex micro-economy? The 70+ story missions will always be there when you get back.
Of course, when you do venture back into the story, the missions (which can be replayed after you finish them if you'd like) show a keen attention to keeping things diverse. Sure, most of it devolves into punching a guy to death or gunning down swathes of enemies with a chaingun, but the set up and distractions are what makes the game. The missions are often multi-segmented, too, with checkpoints breaking things up on longer tasks. The inclusion of being able to buy weapons off the internet and have them shipped to your house means you can stock up quicker before retrying a tough mission than ever before. That's most definitely a good thing. About the only thing I missed was the feeling of being able to "break" the game by exploiting AI or stacking up cars around key areas (actually, you can do that last one; there's even a mission that requires it).
It should be noted that all those GPS and weapon ordering bits can all be done through the game's amazingly dense PDA. It's a little clunky to use at first (though you can map whatever functions you use most to the L and R Buttons, a nice touch), but being able to check e-mail, monitor drug hotspots, set waypoints to the next mission, person of interest, building or dealer with a press of the X Button is a godsend in a city this big. Little touches like spam e-mail "links" (yes, there's a miniature version of the internet that you can use at home) being blocked just show an attention to detail that all the other open world pretenders just haven't quite gotten yet.
What's crazy is that there's far less to do in that world than there is in any of the subsequent GTA games and yet I just have fun tooling around in Yakuza Stingers and sniping the moon. But is that a byproduct of seeing the world in three dimensions or just a kind of timeless nostalgia? If Chinatown Wars is any indication, it doesn't matter a lick what perspective you use, Liberty City presented in a simple way simply has some kind of unquantifiable magic to it. For weeks now I've been neck deep in all manner of Triad dealings, dropped into the shoes of smart ass Huang Lee, forced to run endless missions for flawed, squabbling underbosses all trying to ascend to the head of the Chinese crime operations in Liberty.
And I. Love. Every. Second.
Oh, there are problems with Chinatown Wars, make no mistake. Moving in and out of the ubiquitous PDA takes seconds at a time. The old-school perspective can make it tough to figure out if you can hop over a wall, for instance. Or to properly line up a stunt jump at high speed. Or see around overhanging trees. Or lob Molotov cocktails over objects. I don't really care, though, because these things can't really detract from how much fun it is to just... explore. To seek out every little corner of a city larger than any version of Liberty City yet seen. The Burroughs are diverse, the little added PSP effects that weren't in the DS version like volumetric-looking headlights and muzzle flashes, the glow of neon reflected in puddles. This is Liberty City -- the Liberty I fell in love with -- and though I find myself wondering just what it would look like with this kind of detail from a 3D perspective, I'm so busy buying weed from Yardies and selling it to clueless college kids I can't really bring myself to let it be anything but a passing fantasy.
Despite sharing a view of the first two games/expansions, though, the updates to GTA are alive and well. A GPS system makes sure you never get lost (I didn't care unless I was on a mission; I wanted to get lost), the trip skip feature when retrying missions is here (and you will fail them as this is one of the tougher GTAs), and there are a bazillion side missions and actions to do. Why not play some lottery scratchers or moonlight as a tattoo artist or deliver food or play cabbie or enforce the law yourself in between running all over the city to buy and sell drugs in the complex micro-economy? The 70+ story missions will always be there when you get back.
Of course, when you do venture back into the story, the missions (which can be replayed after you finish them if you'd like) show a keen attention to keeping things diverse. Sure, most of it devolves into punching a guy to death or gunning down swathes of enemies with a chaingun, but the set up and distractions are what makes the game. The missions are often multi-segmented, too, with checkpoints breaking things up on longer tasks. The inclusion of being able to buy weapons off the internet and have them shipped to your house means you can stock up quicker before retrying a tough mission than ever before. That's most definitely a good thing. About the only thing I missed was the feeling of being able to "break" the game by exploiting AI or stacking up cars around key areas (actually, you can do that last one; there's even a mission that requires it).
It should be noted that all those GPS and weapon ordering bits can all be done through the game's amazingly dense PDA. It's a little clunky to use at first (though you can map whatever functions you use most to the L and R Buttons, a nice touch), but being able to check e-mail, monitor drug hotspots, set waypoints to the next mission, person of interest, building or dealer with a press of the X Button is a godsend in a city this big. Little touches like spam e-mail "links" (yes, there's a miniature version of the internet that you can use at home) being blocked just show an attention to detail that all the other open world pretenders just haven't quite gotten yet.
