Grand Theft Auto: Vice City [Greatest Hits]

The best-selling PlayStation 2 game of 2001 returns with a new city, theme, and an assortment of enhanced features. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City offers the same go-anywhere style of play as its violent, M-rated predecessor but with an area twice as large as Liberty City to explore in a completely different setting. Inspired by the look portrayed on television's stylish crime drama Miami Vice, the game takes place in the 1980s with criminals wearing pastel-colored suits, bikini-clad babes relaxing on sandy beaches, and palm tree-lined streets bustling with motorcycles, cars modeled after Ferrari Testarossas, and more. Players can now enter buildings like hotels or discos and walk through hallways to visit rooms. Players can embark on a series of missions to build a reputation or simply explore the city, hijacking one of 120 vehicles (including motorcycles) and wreaking havoc on foot with an arsenal of 40 different weapons. The targeting mode has been refined once players leave their vehicle, with the camera taking a fixed position behind the character's shoulder and an auto-targeting system based on priority and danger level. The change in vistas has resulted in new types of pedestrians populating the streets, including roller skaters, joggers, and different gang members. The AI has also been retooled to account for greater variety in pedestrian movement as well as gang behavior. Now gangs are designed to act independently of the player, such as fighting with citizens or stealing their cars. The police will also respond to these incidents, and may attempt to engage in high-speed pursuits with gangs as players go about their own business. To effectively capture the mood of the 1980s, the soundtrack has been altered to fit the time period. Players will listen to an estimated nine hours of music (nearly three times the amount featured Grand Theft Auto III) across 10 radio stations. The eclectic mix features such noteworthy titles as &"I Ran" by Flock of Seagulls, &"The Message" by Grandmaster Flash, &"You've Got Another Thing Coming" by Judas Priest, and &"Out of Touch" by Hall & Oates. The revamped sound continues on the streets, with over 8,000 lines of spoken dialogue recorded to help bring the fictional city to life. The lead character of Tommy Vercetti will also share his thoughts and musings with players in a departure from the strong but silent protagonist found in GTA III. Actor Ray Liotta provides the voice for Vercetti, and a mix of other film stars round out the cast.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City isn't how game sequels are "supposed" to be done, at least not those released within one year of their predecessor. The follow-up to the smash hit Grand Theft Auto III, a title that sold over seven million copies, could have taken the easy road and just offered new missions within the same Liberty City. It would have sold millions of copies simply based on the strength of the title alone, and players would have likely been happy with a new excuse to cruise down those violent streets once again. Yet both Rockstar North and Rockstar Games deserve far more credit than that, for they have approached their sequel with every bit of the moxie shown while crafting GTA III.

Taking the game for a test spin initially reveals the same style of play that made the original a runaway hit. Driving to a computer character's home or hideout activates missions as cut-scenes explain the motivations behind the request. Early objectives range from taking out specific individuals to running simple deliveries or pick-up errands, and the sequel offers an almost identical control scheme. Yet the game starts to become more and more like a different animal the more it is played. The setting doesn't look radically dissimilar at first, but after a few hours of play the details start to emerge. Players will soon realize the game is filled with a personality all its own thanks to an almost fanatical adherence to a specific theme, something the third installment lacked.

This theme, of course, is the 1980s, and it is perfectly captured in a loving parody that pokes fun of the time period without becoming a sardonic send-up. From the Commodore 64 boot screen captured in the introduction to the outfits, dialogue, phony commercials, and cars, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City offers a richer experience than its predecessor. While early missions are nothing remarkable, the game takes off faster than a yuppie trapped in K-Mart once the rest of the world is opened up. And what a world it is: malls, an airport, hotels, clubs, a sports complex, pizza parlors -- most of which can be explored from inside as well as outside. Everything is done in a much grander scale with the same attention to detail that made the game's predecessor so enjoyable.

Details are everywhere. The setting itself comes alive at night with brilliant neon lights glowing on storefronts and buildings. Rainstorms splash drops of water onto the television screen as they trickle down, and cars twinkle in the sun to simulate light reflecting off mirrors. Pedestrians will stand around and talk to each other or gawk at a body lying in a pool of blood, each offering different comments (an old man will lament "These kids today," a surfer may say "Bummer, dude," while a girl on roller skates squawks "Omigawd, this is so disgusting"). Gang members run up to citizens carrying shopping bags and try to steal them, while nearby cops on the beat chase them on foot. Each day it seems you'll see something new, something that makes you smile.

Vice City itself is a densely packed area spanning two large islands, so buildings, parking lots, alleys, houses, shops, and so forth seem almost right on top of each other, linked together by sinewy streets and sidewalks offering a staggering amount of intersections. The sense of scale is far more evident here than in Liberty City -- Starfish Island in particular is home to a number of ornate mansions whose grounds take several minutes to explore. Tennis courts, swimming pools, gardens, and even a hedge maze or two are featured, and these elements often represent a single estate. The division between the haves and the have-nots is significant in Vice City, giving players something to shoot for (sometimes literally) while carving out a reputation. You don't want to end up on the rundown streets of Little Haiti.

Vice City is also home to an 18-hole golf course and an airport roughly two to three times the size of the one found in Liberty City. Players can hop on a golf cart or a baggage cart to explore their surroundings, but there are some restrictions. Vercetti must wear proper attire to gain access to the golf course, and players who try to enter the airport must first walk through a security gate that strips away their weapons and leaves them outside. It's easy to get lost in this world because for every building or house in Vice City, there are stairwells to climb, roofs to explore, parking lots to pilfer, and alleys to search through. Players can comb beaches in a dune buggy, race along a hilly track on a dirt bike, enter a stockcar race in a stadium, and of course, cause as much mischief as possible in between missions.

Missions start basic and then become far more intricate and involving as players delve deeper into the seedy world of Vice City. There are significantly more characters to interact with this time around, and they don't disappear entirely after players complete a group of missions. This allows for a more diverse storyline than in the previous game, and the scaled back salaries awarded to players make the concept of earning a living more meaningful. To that end, players can use their earnings to purchase buildings in Vice City, effectively giving them new residences or safe houses, or simply adding an extra save point on the map.

Players are now more motivated to complete missions or engage in various other extracurricular activities to earn cash, whether it's holding up a store or delivering pizzas to a hungry public in a mini-game patterned after Paperboy. The fire truck, ambulance, taxicab, and vigilante missions are also back, along with ice cream deliveries, and the police are armed with a few new tricks to make breaking the law a difficult proposition. The police in Vice City are much more aggressive and resilient than Liberty City's finest, and earning a wanted rating of only two stars is flat-out dangerous. Players won't be able to shake them off unless they change clothes or have their car spray-painted. Helicopters are back and more deadly, with automatic guns and SWAT team members rappelling down to the ground. It could be a nice opportunity for some target practice....

One mission, appropriately titled "Sir, Yes, Sir," has players trying to steal a tank in the middle of a convoy. Three soldiers jog on either side, while trucks and jeeps appear in front and back. The mission objective is to capture the tank, but how players go about it is entirely up to them, which strikes at the core of what made the original so great. Block the route by parking a car in front of it, and the commander will order his troops to move the civilian vehicle off the road. If you try to stand in the middle of the road, the officer will give you a terse warning to get out of the way and then send a soldier to forcibly remove you. Open fire on the troops and you will be cut down to shreds within seconds.

The changes to the environment, missions, and vehicles may have created some problems, however. Whenever the character runs into a wall or a barrier, the camera has a panic attack and zooms close to Vercetti's face, thus obstructing the view momentarily. The targeting system is better but still not perfect, as players have to constantly cycle through enemy targets in order to find the right one -- the lock-on system seems to only target those in Vercetti's direct line of sight, so gangsters shooting at him to the immediate left will go unnoticed while a group in the distance is highlighted. Another minor annoyance is the constant "phasing in" of background objects. Palm trees, buildings, and other objects will materialize into view while driving along the streets, but the frame rate is fast and fluid throughout.

As in Grand Theft Auto III, such problems are taken with a grain of salt when a game comes around offering such an ambitious scope in design. Vice City offers a better storyline, a more engaging lead character, and more things to do in a larger environment. The addition of motorcycles, speedboats, and aircraft completely changes the feel of driving around the environments, and each element has been carefully thought out instead of tacked on. Follow-ups that come this quickly are not supposed to be this rewarding, which makes Vice City a remarkable achievement at a time when companies are all too willing to release so-called sequels with only a few tweaks and cosmetic changes. ~ Scott Alan Marriott, All Game Guide