Screenshots :.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories
PSP
Matt
07-08-2007
"Neon at sunset. Lovely."
"A Miami Vice moment"
"Pimp golfer"
"Guns and fast cars = GTA to a tee."
"My, what large...pixel's you have"
"Right before you drove off like a loony into the sunset"
Within a couple of minutes of starting the latest portable offering from Rockstar’s collected studios, you find yourself pelting along a highway on a motorbike with Foreigner’s seminal weep-along ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ blasting along in the background. The sun is setting, the population is bustling and you are being sent on your first mission. It’s relaxing, amusing and at the same time strangely rather exciting, with the knowledge that you’re about to unravel the latest segment of possibly the finest series of this decade tinged with the guilty pleasure of 1980’s culture. Yes folks, Vice City is back.
This was always going to be a great reason to pick up your PSP’s again, and it goes without saying that Vice City Stories is a great portion of gaming, with baffling amounts of detail and data crammed carefully onto a UMD. Let’s face it, there’s no point in building any sort of tension throughout the content of this review as to whether the game’s any good or not, because it would have taken a monumental slip-up of Jade Goody proportions to have seen the game fail to build on the more-than-ample framework that previous portable peach Liberty City Stories laid down.
Set two years before the events of the original Vice City, VCS puts you in the role of Vic Vance, a no-nonsense army man who is struggling to pay for his brother’s medical bills. A quick meeting with a seemingly relaxed and anti-authoritarian sergeant sets you off on a couple of well-designed training missions – go here, collect this, bring it back to me and the like – that teach you the basics of gameplay without risking being repetitive or patronising to series veterans. After a few of these missions you are chucked out of the army and forced to make it your own way, which is the prelude to an adventure equal in stature to any the series has offered to date.
In fact, it’s difficult not to gush on about the various quests, rewards and secrets that the game offers, as there are so many. This is sandbox adventuring with style, allowing the player to dip in and out of the multi-threading main story to undertake numerous optional tasks. In fact, you need not advance the storyline very far at all in order to be introduced to the main sideline offering of building your own business empire, and upon doing so the chances are that you’ll spend hours on end looking after the maintenance and capture of new premises to increase the regular flow of cash into your bank account. Heck, even finding the insane stunt locations and each of the 99 red balloons (har-dee-har) becomes ridiculously addictive.
First, to the main game itself. People used to the three-dimensional Grand Theft Auto titles will immediately feel right at home, with pretty much all the controls remaining exactly identical to previous iterations. Thankfully, Vice City Stories now also allows you to go for a swim if the need be (or if you completely screw up and go flying off a seafront wall), and this instantly wipes out the main frustration of dying in Liberty City Stories when any contact with the wet stuff would see you drowning. Unfortunately, issues such as occasional difficulties with the camera and the awkwardness in control when it comes to drive-by shooting still persist, which leads to many a frustrating moment during missions. Otherwise, there are now a few new vehicles to play around with (both air-based and water-based), and a large selection of weapons to cause all sorts of bother.
In terms of the missions you are tasked with, a feeling of familiarity once again abounds, with a selection of ‘go here, get this and/or shoot these people’ offerings littered through most of the storyline. To be completely honest they are a bit of a mixed bag, and this is especially the case in some of the latter missions, which seem to slip back from Liberty City Stories’ ethos of short, bite-sized efforts and return to being quite long and rather frustrating if you fail them. Taken as a whole the game seems a little more tricky then aforementioned PSP debut to boot, so some of the trial-and-error nature can get a little bothersome after a while.
Still, for the majority of the story you’ll be having a great time basking in some true 1980’s culture. The characters themselves are all unique, personable and wryly amusing, with all kinds of stereotype catered for and parodied. Did women really wear those horrific leg-warmer things? How on earth did men get away with those kinds of haircut? For someone who was but two during 1984, having radio advertisements for brand new and exciting technology in the form of cassette tapes also brings a smile to the face, especially when I’m young enough to be able to smirk at such fashion and technological mishaps knowing full well I wasn’t old enough to get involved in them myself.
Then there are the radio stations, which are as amusing and packed full of quality tunes as they ever have been. Anyone with a penchant for Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Blondie, Scandal (!!) or even some Barry White will be tuning into their favourite stations and zooming across the city to a selection of period tunes. The DJ’s and adverts also bring their jaunty humour to the table once more, with bickering aplenty and some brilliant pastiches on classic products slotted in between. For those who would rather listen to their own playlist, Rockstar once again offer the player the option of downloading a small PC-based program to convert and send audio tracks from commercial CD’s onto the PSP for play.
The actual story portion of Vice City Stories is reasonably short and will probably only take you ten or so hours to make your way through. The real longevity, as with previous GTA titles, comes in the form of the many side-quests and exploration of the city. The foremost of these new offerings is in the form of building your own business empire and looking after it, which involves travelling around the map and fighting for control of one of thirty business premises. Once you have taken control of a building (by force, of course), you are given options to open a number of businesses at the location, with loan sharking and protection rackets amongst them. You are also given an option of choosing between smaller, cheaper setups or larger, more expensive ones, and in keeping with the property and business scene in general, the more you invest, the more you get in return.
Not that it ends there, of course. Whilst having a sprawling empire will result in a whole stack of cash flooding into your bank account, it’ll also mean that you’re going to have to be on your toes and keep your eye out for one of your sites being attacked. It all adds up to a huge brawl between various gangs for control of certain areas, and despite allowing you to recruit gang members to help you protect your interests it mostly comes down to you and you alone when they need defending. Still, it’s an engaging and worthwhile addition to the series.
The other major bonus the game packs in is that, even when you’ve pretty much exhausted everything the single player mode offers, multiplayer fun can be had via the ad-hoc wireless options. Whereas Liberty City Stories kept itself reasonably focused and limited in terms of these modes, Vice City Stories really goes for it, allowing up to six players to blat the heck out of each other in cars, planes and helicopters across a varied selection of game types. My personal favourite after much testing was the mode known as ‘Might of the Hunter’, in which players have to leg it to take control of a single helicopter on the map. Upon doing so the other players are tasked with taking it down, whereas the person who managed to get airborne needs to polish off opponents on the ground in order to rack up the points. Despite a slight bit of lag and slowdown, the mode remains highly enjoyable and takes a good amount of time to master fully.
As an overall package, Vice City Stories matches and in most cases beats Liberty City Stories. The single player mode has a larger area of exploration and a great time-waster in the form of the business empire building, whereas the multiplayer offerings have been padded and tweaked. That being said, some frustrations do remain such as the controls in various situations and the length of some of the missions and frustrating trial-and-error nature of them does grate a little. Still, being able to bask in some classically gaudy 1980’s music and fashion is a pretty nifty sweetener, and it reaffirms the knowledge that, when used properly, the PSP can be capable of very ambitious things indeed. San Andreas Stories, anyone?
This was always going to be a great reason to pick up your PSP’s again, and it goes without saying that Vice City Stories is a great portion of gaming, with baffling amounts of detail and data crammed carefully onto a UMD. Let’s face it, there’s no point in building any sort of tension throughout the content of this review as to whether the game’s any good or not, because it would have taken a monumental slip-up of Jade Goody proportions to have seen the game fail to build on the more-than-ample framework that previous portable peach Liberty City Stories laid down.
Set two years before the events of the original Vice City, VCS puts you in the role of Vic Vance, a no-nonsense army man who is struggling to pay for his brother’s medical bills. A quick meeting with a seemingly relaxed and anti-authoritarian sergeant sets you off on a couple of well-designed training missions – go here, collect this, bring it back to me and the like – that teach you the basics of gameplay without risking being repetitive or patronising to series veterans. After a few of these missions you are chucked out of the army and forced to make it your own way, which is the prelude to an adventure equal in stature to any the series has offered to date.
In fact, it’s difficult not to gush on about the various quests, rewards and secrets that the game offers, as there are so many. This is sandbox adventuring with style, allowing the player to dip in and out of the multi-threading main story to undertake numerous optional tasks. In fact, you need not advance the storyline very far at all in order to be introduced to the main sideline offering of building your own business empire, and upon doing so the chances are that you’ll spend hours on end looking after the maintenance and capture of new premises to increase the regular flow of cash into your bank account. Heck, even finding the insane stunt locations and each of the 99 red balloons (har-dee-har) becomes ridiculously addictive.
First, to the main game itself. People used to the three-dimensional Grand Theft Auto titles will immediately feel right at home, with pretty much all the controls remaining exactly identical to previous iterations. Thankfully, Vice City Stories now also allows you to go for a swim if the need be (or if you completely screw up and go flying off a seafront wall), and this instantly wipes out the main frustration of dying in Liberty City Stories when any contact with the wet stuff would see you drowning. Unfortunately, issues such as occasional difficulties with the camera and the awkwardness in control when it comes to drive-by shooting still persist, which leads to many a frustrating moment during missions. Otherwise, there are now a few new vehicles to play around with (both air-based and water-based), and a large selection of weapons to cause all sorts of bother.
In terms of the missions you are tasked with, a feeling of familiarity once again abounds, with a selection of ‘go here, get this and/or shoot these people’ offerings littered through most of the storyline. To be completely honest they are a bit of a mixed bag, and this is especially the case in some of the latter missions, which seem to slip back from Liberty City Stories’ ethos of short, bite-sized efforts and return to being quite long and rather frustrating if you fail them. Taken as a whole the game seems a little more tricky then aforementioned PSP debut to boot, so some of the trial-and-error nature can get a little bothersome after a while.
Still, for the majority of the story you’ll be having a great time basking in some true 1980’s culture. The characters themselves are all unique, personable and wryly amusing, with all kinds of stereotype catered for and parodied. Did women really wear those horrific leg-warmer things? How on earth did men get away with those kinds of haircut? For someone who was but two during 1984, having radio advertisements for brand new and exciting technology in the form of cassette tapes also brings a smile to the face, especially when I’m young enough to be able to smirk at such fashion and technological mishaps knowing full well I wasn’t old enough to get involved in them myself.
Then there are the radio stations, which are as amusing and packed full of quality tunes as they ever have been. Anyone with a penchant for Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Blondie, Scandal (!!) or even some Barry White will be tuning into their favourite stations and zooming across the city to a selection of period tunes. The DJ’s and adverts also bring their jaunty humour to the table once more, with bickering aplenty and some brilliant pastiches on classic products slotted in between. For those who would rather listen to their own playlist, Rockstar once again offer the player the option of downloading a small PC-based program to convert and send audio tracks from commercial CD’s onto the PSP for play.
The actual story portion of Vice City Stories is reasonably short and will probably only take you ten or so hours to make your way through. The real longevity, as with previous GTA titles, comes in the form of the many side-quests and exploration of the city. The foremost of these new offerings is in the form of building your own business empire and looking after it, which involves travelling around the map and fighting for control of one of thirty business premises. Once you have taken control of a building (by force, of course), you are given options to open a number of businesses at the location, with loan sharking and protection rackets amongst them. You are also given an option of choosing between smaller, cheaper setups or larger, more expensive ones, and in keeping with the property and business scene in general, the more you invest, the more you get in return.
Not that it ends there, of course. Whilst having a sprawling empire will result in a whole stack of cash flooding into your bank account, it’ll also mean that you’re going to have to be on your toes and keep your eye out for one of your sites being attacked. It all adds up to a huge brawl between various gangs for control of certain areas, and despite allowing you to recruit gang members to help you protect your interests it mostly comes down to you and you alone when they need defending. Still, it’s an engaging and worthwhile addition to the series.
The other major bonus the game packs in is that, even when you’ve pretty much exhausted everything the single player mode offers, multiplayer fun can be had via the ad-hoc wireless options. Whereas Liberty City Stories kept itself reasonably focused and limited in terms of these modes, Vice City Stories really goes for it, allowing up to six players to blat the heck out of each other in cars, planes and helicopters across a varied selection of game types. My personal favourite after much testing was the mode known as ‘Might of the Hunter’, in which players have to leg it to take control of a single helicopter on the map. Upon doing so the other players are tasked with taking it down, whereas the person who managed to get airborne needs to polish off opponents on the ground in order to rack up the points. Despite a slight bit of lag and slowdown, the mode remains highly enjoyable and takes a good amount of time to master fully.
As an overall package, Vice City Stories matches and in most cases beats Liberty City Stories. The single player mode has a larger area of exploration and a great time-waster in the form of the business empire building, whereas the multiplayer offerings have been padded and tweaked. That being said, some frustrations do remain such as the controls in various situations and the length of some of the missions and frustrating trial-and-error nature of them does grate a little. Still, being able to bask in some classically gaudy 1980’s music and fashion is a pretty nifty sweetener, and it reaffirms the knowledge that, when used properly, the PSP can be capable of very ambitious things indeed. San Andreas Stories, anyone?
8/10
