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Grand Theft Auto: Vice City It is 1986. You are nine years old. You've just watched a pirate video of Top Gun that your mate's older brother had 'obtained'. You're wondering what your playground call sign should be whilst stacking multiple hula hoops on each finger. Suddenly, there is a blue lightning flash followed by a metallic thud in the driveway. Yet the weather is fine. You dash outside to see the Doc clambering from his steaming Delorean.
Short of breath, he pierces you with those mad, bulbous eyes. He's carrying a strange black plastic box that looks like some kind of futuristic radiator, around a foot long, 3 inches tall and half a foot deep. You can just make out the letters PS and the number 2 in sky and royal blue angular type, on what you guess must be the top of the device. Before you've had chance to ask why he's back again from the future, in his own babbling way he starts to tell you... "Marty - something terrible has happened. I've just come back from 2003. This little black box I'm holding is more powerful than any computer even the Pentagon has got in the past, the present, or wherever it is we are now. But in the future they are only using it for playing games and watching films. Can you believe it? Why this thing could probably enable teleportation or..." The Doc tails off as the cogs start turning behind those eyes. "Okay okay Doc, calm down" you say, nervously shifting your weight from one white Nike basketball boot to the other. You've been through this a couple of times before. The Doc re-focuses and continues."But Marty, that's not the worst of it. There's one game in particular that we have to stop them making. It's called Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and it's set in 1986! Can you believe it? The future is so boring that all the kids can do is play a videogame about the recent past! No time to talk Marty, just get in the car!
WE HAVE TO HELP MAKE THE FUTURE MORE INTERESSTTTIIINGGG!!!! "Blue lightning. No Delorean. It is 2002. You are 25 years old. You slide the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City disc into your PS2. After the Rockstar games logo you are greeted with a mock C64 loading screen. You can just make out the strains of "Video Killed the Radio Star" playing in the background. The 1980s theme in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is clearly a masterstroke. In effect, Rockstar games have made the first ever costume drama videogame. In theory at least, GTA: VC opens the floodgates for all manner of hitherto unimagined videogame worlds. It also proves that sequels can actually improve upon their predecessors and don’t have to be insipid cynical dilutions.
Without going into the history of the Grand Theft Auto series here it is worth mentioning that this is the fourth instalment of the infamous car- jacking and drug- running series, albeit only the second in 3d. The original PSX games were viewed from a top down perspective. It is fair to say that the controversy the original courted has been in part responsible for the series making it to a fourth incarnation. GTA III (the previous instalment and first on PS2 in 2001) is by far the best- selling PS2 game to date, (12m copies worldwide, the first 1m selling game in the UK*) with GTA: VC likely to be the only title to challenge it for the foreseeable future (with record UK sales of over 250,000 in just two days*).
GTA: VC is not, as could be heard whispered before release, a simple expansion pack. It is huge in every possible way, at times frighteningly so. For starters, Vice City is twice as big geographically as the Liberty City of the previous game. From the neon hotels along ocean drive at night to the swimming pools in the gardens on Starfish Island in the blazing sun, Vice City is also incredibly beautiful. Apart from anything else, the bigger city broadens the possible game-play opportunities within it exponentially. A wise move by the developers is that on arrival in Vice City a storm warning renders the western island of the city inaccessible. As well as hinting that bigger things are afoot, it provides valuable impetus to get to grips with the city and its’ idiosyncrasies, without totally overwhelming the casual visitor.
Vice City is a parody of Miami. This has enabled the developers to throw a never-ending stream of references and in-jokes at the player, from Scarface to Reservoir Dogs to, yes, Cheers. Forget the random inconsequential violence, the over-18 certification could be required due to the mere fact that anyone younger will be missing half the elements that make up this rich game world. Strangely, this is a game which will be played by kids who shouldn’t be playing it, but is about the films we used to watch when we shouldn’t have been watching them.
Possibly the most significant change between this game and the last is that you are no longer just a nameless thug for hire. You are Tommy Vercetti, just released from prison after a 15- year stretch. Your boss doesn’t want you bringing back any bad memories for old rivals on the streets of Liberty City, so sends you to Vice City to get involved in some entrepreneurial activity. This extra detail makes a massive difference to the way you experience the game, the fact that Ray Liotta performs the main character voice still more.
Your first mission, a drug deal told through non-playable cut-scenes, is ambushed. You lose the money and the drugs trying to escape with your life, and your Liberty City boss isn’t best pleased. It is through the smarmy lawyer Rosenberg, the other surviving member of this corrupted first mission, that you start trying to get to the bottom of the ambush. You begin to liase with criminals of varying stature in the game (under) world. At first you are merely trying to get your revenge, essentially running errands for your bosses and making connections, but all the time you are gradually working your way up ‘the family’ tree. Ultimately, you end up defending your own criminal empire (there are many properties in Vice City which you can acquire part-way into the game), in the sense that attack is the best form of defence, of course.
GTA: VC cleverly combines this logical and compelling narrative with an amazing sense of freedom. As in previous instalments you can commandeer any vehicle in the game with the press of a single button, dragging reluctant victims to the tarmac with a deft one-liner. The vehicles range from weedy pizza delivery scooters, through Lamborghini and Ferrari tributes all the way to helicopters and tanks. Just driving around getting used to the variations in handling and performance is great fun, but also helps you to identify valuable short cuts and even special stunt routes, which you can use subsequently in the missions. Choosing the right vehicle can be crucial to completing a mission successfully. Of course the fast cars and bikes catch your eye first, but sliding an unwieldy and virtually indestructible rusty garbage truck through suburbia, whilst slamming the chasing cop or gang cars into the cold concrete, is a uniquely enticing experience.
Weapons also offer a further set of game play layers, from melee weapons to sniper rifles and grenades, finally to first-person fired rocket launchers. Understandably, it becomes imperative to choose the right weapon for the job, as the game gets progressively harder.
Still, by far the greatest achievement of GTA: VC is the sound, and in particular the music. Getting into any vehicle (or even when piloting RC helicopters) you’ll hear one of NINE! Radio stations. From Wildstyle, which plays Grandmaster Flash and Run DMC, to Emotion 98.3, where you’ll hear the sultry (i.e. rubbish) tones of the REO Speedwagon classic ‘Keep on Loving You’, you’re going to be re-visiting a whole lot of the soundtrack to your life which you could have sworn you got rid of in a car-boot sale. There are even a couple of talk-only stations.
Whether you actually like any of this music of course is hardly the point, just be prepared for the flashbacks that’s all. You’ll probably hear less repeated tracks over the course of playing this massive game than you would if listening to Radio 1 for, say, twenty minutes. Every detail in this game (both audio and visual) is clearly the result of a labour of love, and the humour goes right through to the core of the game-play. This counter-balances everything perfectly against some of the darker elements of this ‘crim sim’, and the controversy inherent within such a concept.
But it can’t be all good can it? Well no. Anything this ambitious is going to have flaws. There is something uniquely odd about the continuous striving for ‘realism’ in videogames, when games (of all kinds) allow the opportunity for escape. The closer we get to ‘realism’ (in the case of GTA: VC I mean the notion of having a meaningful 3 dimensional city and interactions with several distinct characters rather than say, graphically), the more frustrating it becomes when parts of the game world go wrong. When we had a white square on a black background we really had to believe we were piloting a state-of-the-art spaceship.
Playing Vice City you can be sure of two things. You will lose sleep and hair, one through healthy addiction, one through interminable frustration. In part this is because some missions verge on the impossible and require many attempts. You may even find yourself scoping some missions out the first time around, subconsciously resigned to the fact that a bit of planning will pay dividends, even if the ultimate answer is to go in all gung-ho.
Making your own mistakes of course is fine- you can always grab a bike and listen to Kool and the Gang, admiring the sunset along Ocean Drive, or seek out a couple of the varied sub-missions dotted around, whilst planning your strategy. Inevitably though, with a game this ambitious a number of bugs creep into the experience. These instances are rare, but naturally they always seem to occur at particularly tense moments, usually when big pay packets are at stake. For example, you might find yourself up to your waist in concrete after exiting a burning vehicle awkwardly, unable to get ‘back up’ to ground level but still able to get busted. More frequently, a vehicle you have carefully positioned for a quick getaway has disappeared by the time you get back on the streets and are being hotly pursued, whilst vehicles you ditched seemingly days before will lie untouched and burnt out across the city.
In it’s defence, a considerable part of the fun to be had here is simply playing with the possibilities on offer within Vice City, testing the elasticity of the game boundaries. The bugs are part of the overall tapestry and you soon learn how to minimise their appearances. In short, if you have a PS2 but don’t have Vice City you should be ashamed. If you don’t have a PS2 or Vice City you should still be ashamed.
To conclude, GTA: VC is a lot like Groundhog Day. You have to perform tasks over an over again to get them right. You go through phases- at first you find Vice City fascinating, but soon it will drive you mad after getting wasted for the 1000th time on a mission, only to wake up the next day at the previous save point again. Later you will learn to be more careful, and succeed because you and your alter ego Tommy Vercetti are at one with yourselves and Vice City.
Not convinced about the Groundhog Day relationship? Well try buying the Ice Cream Factory and saving your progress there. The game is likely to crash irretrievably. If you have no other saves you’ll have to start again. The characters you’ve made fortunes for (or knocked off) don’t have any idea who you are. You’ll have to jump through all the same flaming hoops for them all over again. And they’ll never thank you…
…It is 2003. You are 26 years old. You slide the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City disc into your PS2. After the Rockstar games logo you are greeted with a mock C64 loading screen. A radio is playing in the background, but it’s a different song this time. This is odd. It’s been the same song for as long as you can remember. Something is going to be different today. You can just feel it…
And then you start to think to yourself that maybe, just maybe, you could see yourself staying in this godforsaken place after all.
* Source: Edge #119
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