Grand Theft Auto

The Good
GTA is bizarre. Given my computer programming background I can't help but gawk at how bad its engine is, but on the other hand it's just hours of pure fun.

To summarize:

• Decent graphics. Nothing to write home about, but they do the job, and they do it well.
• Good controls, unlike the extremely crappy Carmageddon. The controls here are fairly smooth and efficient and won't outright frustrate you.
• Decent level and mission design; the missions are dull at worst, and hillarious at best ("My brother's found out I'm f***ing his wife. F*** the f***er before he f*** me"), but I can't help the feeling that they were an afterthought - some of them are practically impossible to do, while others require that you race around the city to deliver all sorts of crud to all sorts of places you normally wouldn't bother with.
• The freedom in this game is a great deal more obvious than in other games; if you get bored with the default missions, why not just run around town and wreak havoc? Personally I like the police chases best, and if things get too sticky you can always "autospray" your car and move on.
• Decent music. Not great, not bad. Just enough.

The Bad
But then we have the ludicrously bad engine. I don't see how Martin should think that it runs well on a slow PC, because it doesn't. On my P166 it was completely unplayable on anything higher than the lowest, 320x200 resolution. Adding a Voodoo2 helped a lot, but even then the game wasn't actually smooth because of a horrendous timing mechanism; it seems that the programmers chose to simply limit the framerate (F8 is enable/disable framerate limiter) instead of produce a functional timing loop. This results in jerky motion even with my Voodoo2 - not unplayable, but not smooth either. Disabling the framerate limiter (the afformentioned F8) would result in completely smooth gameplay - but absolutely no timing, so the game basically runs impossibly fast ("Ludicrous speed! GO!") and is completely unplayable.

Furthermore the physics engine is an absolute joke. OK, so they didn't implement actual collisions, rather plain momentum conservation, so your car doesn't actually get damaged by, say, running into a wall at over 70 MPH. Furthermore, what physics laws actually governed have a great deal of bugs, but since it makes the game even funnier I guess I could let that pass. But I will NOT forgive the stupid pixel-perfect collision bug, which happens when you graze a wall when you're directly parallel to it; often times this would result in your getting stuck to the wall, not being able to move your car and even occasionally not being able to get out of the car. When it happens it's absolutely frustrating and unacceptable.

Basically, the software engine is SLOW. I don't understand it; it doesn't do that much besides scroll-zoom-putsprite. I would expect seasoned programmers - especially ones from a company that produced the amazing Amiga game Blood Money - to be able to write a better engine. Maybe I'm being too critical, but I don't think so. There were plenty of games that came out years before, did more and did it better too.

The Bottom Line
If you ignore the obvious technical faults of this game, what you have is basically an extremely fun little slaughterfest.

The Good
There is one part of GTA, which I think, is really great: The audio. This game has a great soundtrack, with all sorts of music (70's funk, 80's hard rock, gangsta rap etc.) and weird samples all mixed into one great musical melting pot. Each type of music has it's own radio station. By default different cars have their radios tuned into different stations. You'll hear techno music in a sports car and country music in a pick-up. You can switch channels while you are driving. I recommend you listen to the CD in your audio player at least once, so you can hear all those funny samples that have been mixed in between the songs. The sound effects are not bad either, the developers paid a lot of attention to tiny details (police scanner, things people say when you walk around with a gun, the little beeps you'll hear when you put a truck in reverse). Too bad there's so little speech in the game, cause the accents are great.

You have a lot of freedom in this game, you can play the missions or just mess around and do some very, very bad things. You can almost wreak havoc without limitations: slam your car into a police barricade, participate in high-speed car chases with the police, hijack, steal and assassinate.

Some of the missions are really cool (like using radio-controlled cars to assassinate somebody), others seem to be included into the game for the single purpose of making you race from one end of the map to the other. Once you reach San Francisco and Miami the missions become rather difficult and some of them are pretty annoying. Before the real meat of the mission starts you'll first have to make a couple of phone calls... great stuff when you have about 30 seconds to reach a public phone on the other side of the map in order to make the call :-<. Somehow I got the impression that the missions were a bit of an afterthought to the open ended crime simulator idea. Hmm, seems like I'm talking about the bad stuff already.

The Bad
Well, like Tomer says, the graphics are really bad. Of course great graphics are nice but I don't consider GTA's lack of graphic polish as a major problem. However there are some other things that took some of fun away from playing this game. I think I would have really enjoyed this game if:

• You could save your game. I think you should have been able to save your game after completing, for example, three missions. It can take you a couple of hours to reach the multi million score you need to progress. Moreover, sometimes you have to complete a pair of missions (up to 5 or 6 missions) before some other missions become available. It's frustrating to play those first five missions over and over again, but you'll have to, if you want to see what the other missions are like.
• There was a background story. Games like Star Control 2 offer a lot of freedom to the gamer, but you have the feeling something big is going on in the background. GTA has no background story. Consequently there is no build up of suspense, no "working towards a higher goal". You're just playing for the sake of collecting points. The levels and missions don't really seem to be tied together. I think it would be a great idea to add some RPG aspects to the game and let the player rise to the top of a crime syndicate (I've always liked big, over-ambitious games). But hey, Rockstar fixed that with the release of Vice City.

**The Bottom Line**
A highly explosive piece of software with more f***s per minute than a Tarantino movie. The use of cheat codes doesn't spoil the satisfaction you'll get from this game and saves you from a lot of frustration. It's the open-ended nature of the game that makes it great, not the missions.

The Good
Near the end of my high school years, an old friend of mine installed a computer game that was all the rage at the time. It was known as Grand Theft Auto, and when he started a new game to show me how it worked, he moved his character around for a bit before deciding that it wasn't the game for him. The thing is, he didn't get very far into the game before reaching his decision, as the game's blocky graphics put him off despite his system meeting the requirements.

This year, playing the original game from 1997/98 is my first foray into the GTA world. The game is spread across three fictional cities (based on New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami, respectively) with two levels each. The game involves you doing anything you like in three fictional cities based on the real-life US counterparts. You can, for example, walk around the three cities in the game, steal a car and drive around, go on a killing spree, and other stuff (with all your actions likely attracting the police). However, the highlight of this game is taking on a set of missions, most of them involving stealing cars, killing or following gang members, bombing their hideouts, and other stuff. You don't have to successfully complete each and every mission, just enough to reach your target score and advance through the game.

A huge variety of cars are on offer, ranging from the useless-as-shit Beetle to the super-fast Beast GTS. You can steal any car you like, but a faster car is recommended if you are on missions with strict time limits. Then, you can drive like a hoon, risking people's lives and smashing up the car you are driving to the point where it is about to explode, in which case you can steal another one. I like the Beast GTS as it helps me get to destinations quicker, while smashing into heaps of cars and mowing down a few pedestrians. Steal too many cars, and the police will be onto you.

Grand Theft Auto uses CD audio tracks but doesn't play them constantly throughout the entire game. Instead, they play only when you get in your car and start driving around. You see, each car is tuned into its own radio station, with only two of the worth listening to. The radio stations pause as soon as you get out of the car (unless you change the music mode to "constant") and continue when you get back in. The tracks can be accessed outside the game, meaning that if you enjoyed listening to a particular station, you can load up the track and start listening it as many times as you like without any interference.

Scattered through each city are crates, containing something that will help you get through the missions, and it is either a weapon or a power-up. There are four weapons to choose from, with the most effective ones being the rocket launcher and the flame-thrower. I found the power-ups quite useful as well.

There are a couple of things that I found amusing, if you are on foot. One is encountering the monks with their orange robes and getting in their way on purpose. They follow you no matter where you go, even when you cross the road. Another is deliberately bumping into people so that they curse at you.

You are supplied with three maps - one for each city - which have to be used to make your way around the city, to find out the best route to your target destination. All of the maps are clear and show the complexity of each city. They point out the number of bomb shops and respray shops that you need to go into every now and then. In my opinion, Grand Theft Auto taught me how to read maps properly.

The graphics are excellent, and there are a total of six FMV clips which you only get to see when you have completed a level. These clips have a character having a word with you, and this is the same character who gives you your missions. Some characters congratulate you, some insult you. My favorite is El Burro, the gay Mexican that you get to deal with when you reach San Andreas.

The Bad
Like many games of its time, your progress through the game gets saved. Unfortunately, you can't just go to the menu and choose the "Save Game" option (there is none). Instead, you have to wait until you complete the level. This is a major let-down of the game since levels take ages to complete.

Also, I didn't like the zooming effects as you drive around the city, smashing things up and doing other stuff.

The Bottom Line
I believe Grand Theft Auto is the first game that allows you to do anything. You can, for example, you go on a killing spree in the three cities or complete missions to earn money. The latter option is recommended as you earn more money by doing things that may or may not attract the police. To get around the city, you can steal cars and use the arrows to direct it to your destination, and listen to some great tunes along the way. As I just mentioned, maps of the three cities are supplied with the game, and I recommend that you use them as a reference. There are up to four weapons that you can use, with all of them become useful in certain situations.

GTA is possibly the best game that I have played so far. Right now, I am walking around Liberty City and blowing up police cars as I go along. But I would love to play all the missions again, especially the ones that I missed. I look forward to playing the sequels, especially the games where the view is presented in third-person.

There are several cheats for the game, but I found that some of them make certain missions unplayable. Enabling the "All Weapons" chat, for example, will cause the game to not let you pick up the flame-thrower you need to blow up a limo. The only way I could fix this is by not entering the cheat as one of my names and start the level again.