Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories
Oh the portable Vice is very, very nice.
Published: December 10, 2006
This effectively resets the building, leaving it open for you to buy and convert to any number of seedy businesses, from loan sharking to drug running to prostitution -- yes, that means the hos you beat can now be your own. You can opt to throw just a few bucks or a whole bundle into the business to determine its initial size, but if you want to upgrade it later, you certainly can, earning you more money come pay day (which is, nicely enough every day at a pre-set time). You can also run a somewhat painfully repetitive sequence of missions to build rep for that business, helping it to make more money no matter the size.
Of course, the more businesses you have, the more targets for your rivals there will be, so later on in the game, a fair amount of time will have to be spent protecting your digs and repairing the ones you didn't get to in time. It's slightly annoying, but you can always recapture things again and the money you'll start earning early on will make repurchasing property fairly easy if you're on top of your empire from the start.
The other additions are a little less major, but certainly welcome. Vic can swim, something of a necessity given that he is in a clone of freakin' Miami, though unlike CJ, he can't swim forever; a stamina gauge slowly drains (and drops faster if you swim faster), but if you can find them, jet skis (along with ATVs on land) were also added to the vehicle stock to help travel between the islands which are, in classic fashion, slowly unlocked as you move through the story. Speaking of vehicles, once you start collecting for the now-infamous car lists (dubbed Civil Asset Forfeiture this time around), you actually told when you hop in that a car is needed.
Trip Skip, the ability to simply press up on the d-pad to warp long distances if you failed a mission, is back, but it doesn't show up every time, which is frustrating. If you die or get arrested while on a mission, though, you now have the option to buy back your full inventory before hopping in a cab to drive back to the start of a mission, which is anything but frustrating. The bribe to get your stuff back is high initially, but it's invaluable if you've stocked up on a lot of items and/or body armor.
The multiplayer, something that was surprisingly solid in Liberty City Stories, returns, with up to six players and 10 different modes, most of which are different takes on the whole "Liberty City Survivor" types found in LCS. There are some cool other diversions, though; races, scavenger hunts, an almost Risk-style empire building competition, a race to get to a chopper (and then to shoot it down if you don't get it), and even a mass carjacking competition. All of these are extremely well thought out, but since they use the whole city, they absolutely scream for online play, of which of course there is none. Guess Rockstar wants to save some major stuff for the next-gen versions of the series.
In fact, there a number of things that seem to have been held off on, and it seems like they were only avoided because it would make the next proper entry into the series that much more improved; the auto-targeting system is still broken as hell, targeting far-off enemies or people behind you when you just want to lay into that guy charging you with a bat. Should he close the distance and start beating you, there's really nothing you can do but run, because swapping back to melee attacks (which have been beefed up with actual punk/kick combos now) takes far too long and there's really no such thing as a point-blank weapon attack in VCS unless you get really lucky and get a shot off between animations.
