For the first few months of the PSP’s life, the thing you consistently heard from every Sony fan boy and even Sony execs themselves was that it was a console in its infancy, and it needed time to grow. A meagre range of relatively impressive titles certainly hadn’t done the machine any favours as the launch hype died down, and it was to Sony’s main franchises which attention and a certain degree of hope were pinned.

One of those franchises was, quite obviously, Grand Theft Auto. Having fleshed out the series into a trilogy of excellent 3D crime-‘em-ups on Sony’s PlayStation 2 machine, Rockstar were tasked with bringing much the same to the Japanese giant’s first handheld console. Pleasingly, this has been largely successful and has given the platform its first true killer ap.

Much in the same way that you couldn’t possibly imagine the scope and detail within the first 3D Grand Theft Auto game until you actually sat down and spent quality time with it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the translation to the small screen would result in a barrel load of major concessions being made. You can tie concrete around those thoughts and chuck them into the nearest river, though, as Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories looks very much the part, with Liberty City itself being showcased beautifully and literally teeming with life.

Set in the same location as the original GTA 3, Liberty City Stories sees you taking the role of mobster Toni Cipriani. The year is 1998, some three years prior to the events of the PlayStation 2 title, and Toni is returning home after keeping himself hidden away for a number years after a particularly notorious mission. After a brief meeting with a very grateful Don Salvatore, Toni is put to work and so begins a progression of the familiar mission structure for which the previous games are well known.

The missions themselves are certainly a lot more focused and succinct in comparison to the game’s bigger brothers, with each usually keeping themselves to a single task. A wide variety of tasks are dotted around and can be received from a wealth of different sources, so you’ll find yourself carrying out bank robberies, gangland executions and car deliveries amongst a plethora of other objectives. The shorter nature of each mission is certainly due in part to the PSP’s battery life, which can offer as little playtime as four hours given how processor-hungry Liberty City Stories is.

Controlling Toni is fairly similar to how the PlayStation 2 Grand Theft Auto games work, with the obvious difference being that the lack of a right analogue stick has caused camera functions to be shifted to the L button, which acts to centre the viewpoint behind the character. Despite the rather questionable qualities of the PSP’s analogue stick, movement is pleasingly sharp and precise too.

Vehicular control has also made the transfer well, with the player being able to slide around corners, hightail it up narrow alleys and dodge around traffic with relative ease. Additionally, players now have motorbikes at their fingertips, and these prove satisfyingly lurid and blindingly rapid, with the extra manoeuvrability afforded really adding a feather to the skilled rider’s bow in getaway situations.

During your travels around Liberty City undertaking your various missions, you’ll realise that the game is as close to a PlayStation 2 game graphically as anything has managed on the PSP to date. Despite patches of slowdown during epic police chases, the game maintains a smooth framerate and displays a surprising quantity of buildings, cars and pedestrians all at the same time. As an indication of just what the PSP can do when utilised properly it is actually quite exciting, and it’s much to Rockstar’s credit that they’ve been able to pack so much in.
As with the other GTA games, the soundtrack comes in the guise of a number of selectable radio stations offering a few tunes each. Liberty City Stories also offers the player the chance to put his own custom soundtrack into the game, although this relies on using a PC-based program that rips CDs to special files that can then be transferred via USB to the PSP. Quite why Rockstar saw fit to do this instead of enabling the game to detect MP3 files already stored on the PSP is not entirely clear.

Thrown into the mix for people who like to spread crime in a social manner is an ad-hoc multiplayer mode, presenting 7 modes for people to blow each other’s brains out. Despite not initially being something which people would think of as a cracking multiplayer game, a few of the modes are brilliant fun. A particular favourite of mine was ‘Protection Racket’, in which you are divided into two teams and tasked with guarding limousines from the opposition, with things becoming insanely tactical and hectic.

For some time now, the PSP has needed a genuine system-seller of a game. Whilst the sparkly, multimedia nature of the machine itself has helped it shift countless units, there was always going to be a day when people got over the new toy feeling and started scrutinising the software available to justify their purchase. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories is all the justification they could need. As its big brother pushed the boundaries of what was possible and to be expected from Sony’s new PlayStation 2 console, so Liberty City Stories has done the same for the PSP. The story might not be terribly involving, and the missions might be a little short at times, but Rockstar’s latest offers both series newcomers and diehard fans alike plenty of crime capering and a good reason to spend quality time with their machines. Sony certainly has a lot to be thankful for.