|
Yes, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is full of strippers, and gangsters, and foul language, and kill-anyone-you-want gameplay. Yes, there's plenty of blood, and violence. Yet the game is "grown-up" in more ways than those. It is an evolution of Grand Theft Auto III which, rather than make embarrassing attempts at radical revision, plays it relatively straight, and only changes what needs to be changed. It is a mature evolution, an adult reminder that the Japanese game designers we westerners admire are not infallible.
Vice's story is nothing special -- while "mature" in its tone, what with all the "kill my wife" missions and cocaine deals, it is comprised mostly of laughable clichés.
That it is supremely well-acted makes it supremely enjoyable. We've had Bruce Campbell narrate the tutorial in Spider-Man, yes. We've had Haley Joel Osment skillfully whine, pause, whine, pause, whine his way through Kingdom Hearts. However, having Ray Liotta's tough-guy Tommy Vercetti take no guff from Luis Guzman's coke-lord Ricardo Diaz -- this is the real deal. The bar has been set for acting in videogames, and I like it.
The playability bar set by Grand Theft Auto III has been raised as well, if only slightly. The problem with the "go anywhere, do anything" genre of games is that the producers can't help shedding loud pink neon lights on the places you can't go, and on the things you can't do.
My, my, Ocean Drive looks so nice at night, all lit up. It's a shame I can't enter a single building other than the Ocean View Hotel. It's a shame I keep getting stuck on the leaves of a potted plant as I try to head for the stairs. It's a shame that the North Point Mall has no ceiling, and that the folding chairs in the food court are composed by the resolution of a late-era PSOne game. It's a shame that, in a city with so many "unique" people, I can pass thirteen carbon copies of a red-bikini-wearing woman on one trip down the beach. It's a shame that every cop looks exactly the same.
This game may or may not be simply training wheels for Grand Theft Auto IV. Its indoor environments, while welcome, are black-ceilinged and lacking detail. The five-alarm lens-flare effects while driving toward the sunset are eye poison I'd rather play without: forget "realism" -- I'm already driving from a vantage point outside the car.
"I mean, really, isn't a lens flare a weakness of a camera lens? This is a videogame -- the camera is virtual."
I can say some mean things to a game when I'm playing. And that's a real shame -- especially when the game I'm playing plays so silky-smooth.
God Bless Rockstar North, for doing something that needed to be done. In Grand Theft Auto III, anyone with a working knowledge of Sega's Daytona USA could maneuver every vehicle (except the Dodo airplane, which only freaks and no one can fly) with the expertise a gangster-film getaway driver. In some places, the physics bent toward the real, yes. Yes, I understand that we play games of the Grand Theft Auto variety partly because we can not, under normal, lawful circumstances, shoot an old woman in the face with a shotgun and steal her money. Yes, I understand that this is a game we play to escape from the real world, a virtual adult playground where we can drive prostitutes out to the beach and then bludgeon them with a baseball bat -- or, in Vice, slash them with a samurai sword -- after we've had our virtual ways with them. These are not things we do in real life.
Still, it sent joy coursing down my spine the first time I rode a PCG 600 (think: Kawasaki Ninja) motorcycle. Motorcycle-fan I, who finds Super Hang-On's music sexy even today, almost cried. For the first time in this series' PS2 line of incarnations, I am driving a vehicle that feels really, truly real. Furthermore, you can be sent flying clean off the bike if you touch anything -- a wall, a moving car, a telephone pole -- adding a level of twitch to your realistic motorcycling.
This mix of escapist videogamey goodness and die-hard realism hits me like that pleasant feeling when you stand in the doorway of an air-conditioned grocery store on a hot summer day: hot and cold, mingling, and you can't tell which way you feel most. Grand Theft Auto III was heavy on videogamey. Vice mixes reality in beautifully. One minute you're piloting bomb-equipped remote-controlled helicopters into a construction site in need of deconstructing. The next, you're picking up a sniper rifle at a "multi-story car park" (We call it a "parking garage" over here, Rockstar), and then driving down to an alleyway where a coke deal is going to take place.
In III, you sniped from a building as your assistant paraded around docks setting explosives in a most Gyromite-ish fashion. In Vice, you're sniping Haitians from a fire escape as your man receives money from Cubans. It's total chaos, with the Haitians and Cubans stuffed in that alley. It's hard to tell what to shoot. If you can shoot what you're supposed to shoot, you then face the problem of the two Haitians on dirt bikes who slide by and steal the briefcase of money. One of them gets shot, and leaves behind his bike. You know what this means -- an Uzi-equipped high-speed chase through back alleys. If you're lucky, there'll be some Run DMC on the radio (A radio on a dirtbike?). It was Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" for me. I changed the station, and almost crashed into a dumpster.
This occurs less than two hours into the game. So beautifully executed is this mission that it eclipses everything in Grand Theft Auto III, and sets a bar that the rest of the game proceeds to jump over, higher and higher each time.
The freedom is still there, too. Stealing a police car, crashing it into the front of a dance club, running into said dance club, and carving up dancers with a chainsaw as the cops run in firing: indoor environments + chainsaw + smarter cops + more people = the experience of going off on a violent, 3D tangent is as fresh as it was in Grand Theft Auto III. That the game lets me do all of this in golfing plaid if I so choose: well, that adds a couple hundred points to its score.
The addition of real music, in a way, completely refreshes the experience of joyriding. I must have taken forty laps of the stadium parking lot in my motorcycle, just so I could hear the entire playlist of the pirate radio station, Wildstyle FM. I could see the harbor, and palm trees, and the rain hitting the pavement and blowing and whipping around. I felt like I was living an eighties I hadn't had the chance to live.
On the negative side, the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," a song that's always brought back unpleasantly weird memories for me, has the habit of popping up whenever I have to do a drive-by shooting. It kind of messes up my aim. This is a personal thing, however, and shouldn't hurt your enjoyment of the game, unless you and I share some strange luck in common. One thing that might annoy you is the volume of the music in the cut scenes. A friend of mine jeered at this particular point, saying that Rockstar simply wanted to show off their licensed music. I agreed for a while, until a few of my memories of the eighties surfaced, and I remembered: "People did listen to the radio back then, didn't they?" The song "Video Killed The Radio Star" had yet to really make its point. So there.
Curiously -- and I don't think I'm the only person to notice this -- Vice City feels smaller than Liberty City. Maybe it's the fact that the entire city is open to exploration relatively early in the game. It's kind of hard to tell. Nevertheless, the addition of motorcycles and music and indoor environments -- including condos you can buy, with multiple garages and even helipads -- more than make up for it. Maybe, as I now hunger for short RPGs I want to play more than once as opposed to obscenely long ones I might never finish, I might someday want a smaller, more compact environment in my "go anywhere, do anything" game?
I don't know if that someday has come yet, however.
[Next: the future]
|
