Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories
You were looking for a reason to buy a PSP. This is it. Our biggest review to date.
Published: November 1, 2005
Still, for all the things added, there’s one very glaring omission. The targeting, one of the main parts of the game, is still busted as all hell. The game will allow you to switch targets after locking onto them with the right shoulder button, but the targets initially picked and increasingly as you’re forced to dive into a sea of available recipients for your next clip of ammo are so ridiculously chosen that one wonders if it was done deliberately to piss the player off.
A simple set-up of prioritizing targets that are, I dunno, shooting at you would have been much preferred, but after three games like this, it’s still a mystery why the developers can’t get it right. It’s literally the only part of the game still broken, and it could have been a wonderful way to offset the PSP’s lack of another analog stick while introducing something that could be used in future games when they make the next-gen leap.
Almost everything else, though, seems streamlined to keep the game as quick and playable as possible. Some may criticize the lack of depth or motivation behind the missions, but this too is a throwback to GTA3’s approach where you were really just a grunt taking orders. I personally don’t mind this a lick, since a smart-ass wiseguy or gangbanger never really sat as well with me as a nameless gun-for-hire.
You do have an identity, of course, though it’s about as far-removed from GTA3 as the moniker-free original protagonist. The Tony Cipriani you play in Liberty City Stories is not the pudgy mama’s boy that doles out a few missions with the rasp of Michael Madsen’s voice, it’s a thinner, ultra-loyal mob man through and through, and while it takes a while to warm to the guy, there are some key parts of the game where his personality makes you glad you’re playing someone with a voice – even if that voice isn’t the same as the game that takes place three years later.
It’s that time difference that is treated so well, though. Like no game before it, LCS afforded Rockstar the opportunity to revisit and further sculpt the identities of everyone involved. There aren’t too many cameos or references to past games, but the work done to make Liberty City both familiar and uniquely different in the GTA cannon is something I didn’t miss.
It’s the little things like seeing how Donald Love amassed his fortune and control of the city, how certain buildings were built or came to be demolished, or how the radio personalities from previous games came to be seated on-air by the time GTA3 hit. These are the bits that fans of the series, and the ones that relish seeing the continuity play out will enjoy, and there’s plenty of them.
Speaking of the radio stations, this too is a return to the first games’ approach, using a bit of licensed music for new stations like Liberty City Jam, which is a hip-hop mix heavy with DMX and Big Pun tracks to Radio Del Mundo, focused on some absolutely awesome Indian-flavored songs, but keeping with plenty of original music for the series. Again, this is something I prefer, simply because I enjoy hearing stuff I haven’t heard before. Licensed soundtracks are nice and all, and some of the stuff in GTA3 was indeed licensed but from complete unknowns that I was made a fan through the game, but I do still like hearing Rockstar’s signature satiric take on the period more.
You’ll get that, from the boy band knockoffs on Head Radio to the awesome return to form on the commercials. The amount of time spent crafting the audio for the game must have been massive, and it shows. I can’t help but get into what a cool nod it was to have Giorgio Moroder cover all the Flashback tracks, as he did the sound work for Scarface, which was the source of all the Flashback songs in GTA3; nearly all of the From Here To Eternity soundtrack is represented here.
The soundtrack is probably the most diverse the series has ever seen, but it’s not without a few flubs. It’s easy to play “what if” with some of the licensed stuff, but after hearing such an amazing trance set on GTA3’s RISE station, I was hoping some of the bigger stuff that was building out of the UK from artists like BT, Orbital and Future Sound of London around the late 90’s would make it into the game. The stuff that’s there isn’t bad, and includes some famous tracks from Josh Wink and The Sneaker Pimps, but none of it is as good as the RISE tracks that happened three years later.
Luckily, it’s almost a non-issue if you have the original MP3s, since Rockstar wisely chose to offer a custom soundtrack program based off a tweaked version of the Exact Audio Converter, which squeezes songs down into an insanely small size. It’s possible to squeeze the entirety of GTA3’s soundtrack onto a 256 meg memory stick and flip between the tracks just like the old stations if you feel like it, essentially bringing you all of the original game’s audio over to the PSP.
