Grand Theft Auto III

The Good
As a teenager, this was one of my favorite games. The idea that there was an entire 3D city open to me to do anything I wanted to was a completely new thing to me at the time. No game ever offered me a chance to do this, and as a result, I spent a huge amount of time playing it.

I am, however, disappointed at the fan base the GTA series has created. Most casual gamers see this as the game to shoot a bunch of people while stealing cars and having sex with hookers. As a result, most serious gamers see the game as mindless, repetitive, and boring with nothing to offer but mindless violence and thrills. I am tired of the title this game carries as nothing but a violent, overrated game from 2001. It is way more than that and it deserves more.

The game has one of the best storylines I have seen from a sandbox game. The player is presented with a typical situation of rising up into the crime ladder to get revenge on your girlfriend who shot you during a bank heist and left you for dead. As the story progresses, you will notice things like how gang members will respect you and help you throughout the game. You will be backstabbed by multiple groups of people, and as a result, the groups you have betrayed or have been betrayed by will take it upon themselves to shoot you on sight. The game has some of the most memorable characters and lines of dialogue in any game.

The main character, named Claude Speed (revealed to us in GTA: San Andreas) is the “silent protagonist”. The game developers felt that a personality and voice for the character would get in the way of your own personality. As a result, you can picture that main character any way you want, whether he’s a ruthless killer, or a loyal servant, or just a guy looking out for himself. It doesn’t matter which way you look at him because there is nothing in the way of telling you what to think of him.

The openness of the game is perfect for anything. If you want to do missions, then you are fine to do so. But you can also do a number of sub-missions like firefighter missions, ambulance missions, collecting hidden packages, driving people around in the taxi, and finding cars to deliver to the garage. You can entertain yourself with all of these things (and plenty more ways!). Or just do the simple thing and go on a rampage. The possibilities are endless when it comes to game play and the replay value is through the rough!

The controls are smooth and easy to learn after a few seconds of playing. Driving feels natural and is easy to get a hang of even after a few minutes of driving.

The missions in the game are NEVER the same. One mission you may be partaking in a gang war, another time you are shooting cops off of high-rises, and another time you’re just collecting the protection money that you need. To list every type of mission would take forever because nearly every mission is new, which makes sure the game play never gets stale.

The gangster atmosphere is very realistic in the game. The good parts are that enemy gangsters will recognize you either as an enemy or a friend in the game. When you are a friend, they will sometimes help you out by shooting a pursuing cop, or maybe an enemy gang member. As enemies, though, they shoot at you or your car on sight. This gives you diplomacy towards other gangs, and gives a nice gangster atmosphere with themes of loyalty and betrayal.

The greatest attention is pad to the tiniest of details to make the world seem as real and immersive as possible. Attention is paid to small details like billboards, cars, road signs, and traffic cones to make the city seem like a living, breathing world that you could destroy. Graphics on cars are relatively good for their time. People say things like “watch it!” or “Are you blind!?” when you hit them or are driving poorly. They yell and scream when you begin to shoot in the streets. The fact that the radio not played in certain vehicles like the police car or plane because they don’t have them in real life adds more immersion to the game and the illusion that this is all a real place with real people. Randomly it will rain or be foggy to make it seem like the city has weather. Day and night cycle around (with a real 24 hour clock to aid you) combined with the weather makes the city seem alive and moving and not just a city put on repeat mode every time you turn on the game. It is a great detail that, unlike the previous titles, every car is different in their own way. Sports cars, while fast and sleek, break easily and blow up quickly, while trucks and vans, which are slow and have poor turning, can take quite a beating from cars. All of this adds up to one cool experience in a realistic sandbox world.

Music, though taken directly from real life, is played cleverly through the system of the radio. Instead of making the game seem shoddy by taking songs from real life artists, it makes it seem MORE realistic by putting them on the radio and only played when you’re in a car or vehicle. The songs on the radio are taken directly from the time period, with the exception of the 80’s and classical music stations, both of which have songs taken directly from that era. This, again, adds to the immersion of the game.

Finally, the fact that these types of games were nearly unheard of at the time of this game’s release makes this game a great must-have for any fan of the series. Not only did it make sandbox games a standard industry practice, but it set in motion a new genre of gaming which no one had ever heard of before.

The Bad
A lot of this game’s problems come with AI and graphics. The AI, while it is smart at some parts, is very stupid at other parts. If you stand atop a high rise and fire at the crowd below, police will ram into the wall where you are standing and fire at it. They make no attempt to even aim upwards, which really makes things like rise sniping a very boring and easy task. Also, the people in the city, while seeming extremely life-like an animated, go nowhere in the city. They mindlessly wander streets, and if you follow one person, you will notice that they circle the city for hours with nowhere to go. This really takes away from some of the realism that the game has to offer.

The graphics aren’t perfect for the time. In a time where games like Final Fantasy X were coming out, this game has some lack-luster graphics. It is understandable though that the graphics were stripped down a bit to make sure the game runs without any lag at all. However, the graphics when compared to other games are satisfactory enough to deliver a realistic sandbox game while not completely concentrating on the eye candy. However a lot of good can come out of this. From the lowered graphics I have never ever experienced slowdown or lag, even when the screen is flooded with bodies, FBI cars, and people running and shooting everywhere.

A huge gaping detail they left out is the fact that you can’t interact at all with people or buildings in the city. The only building you can go into is the ammunition and guns store. People won’t talk to you if you go up to them, and nothing can be picked up except guns and other icons lying around that give you missions or hidden packages. Had this been included in the game, it would have made this game even more revolutionary for its time.

The game unfortunately has a limited amount of guns. The two sequels to this game came with three sets of guns, all of them equally interesting and fun to play with. This game had a relatively small amount of guns in its arsenal compared to some other shooters on the console which limits some of the replay value of going around just shooting anything that moves.

Another tiny annoyance that the game has is the fact that it has no easy way of returning to a contact point when you die or get busted. Unlike Vice City, where the game made a taxi show up to bring you to your last mission spot, you have to travel all the way back to the mission spot to get to try the mission again. Sometimes this an get so annoying that you will end up dying on the way there trying to find shortcuts through all of the traffic.

Another problem does not lie with the developers, but with the parents and people who play them. This game, because it displays such a realistic portrayal of violence and crime in the big city, is unsuitable for children. As a result this game carries a bad name with Christian and parenting groups. The truth is that this game is completely acceptable to play if you are not able to handle the type of violence depicted in this game. I do not think violent video games belong in the hands of children, and in order to enjoy this game you need to be mature enough to know the difference between real and fantasy. It is strongly recommended that children do not play this game.

Finally, a huge problem with the game is again not the developer’s fault, but the gamers’. The fact is that this game NEVER gets taken seriously enough to be considered a deep game where in fact that it is one of the most realistic and deep sandbox games of its time. The fact that this game allows players to do nothing but shoot up pedestrians and ride of curbs does not mean that that is the entire game. In fact, it is very far from it.

The Bottom Line
Not only did GTA 3 have a profound effect on the gaming industry, it had an effect on the gamers as well. GTA 3 is just as entertaining as it was 4 years ago. Its influences on modern games are hard to ignore in today’s video games. Too many times this game has not been taken seriously as a revolutionary title because it is known for its mindless violence and its controversy. GTA 3 is undoubtedly a revolutionary title that is worth a try, as long as you can truly appreciate it.

The Good
There's really not much else I can add to the tons of praises and accolades that everyone and his sister has already written about the revolutionary third installment of the Grand Theft Auto series. Basically it's THAT good.

If you've played any of the GTA titles before, then you might have a good idea of the main concept behind the game. You are a thug/hitman/getaway-driver/criminal that gets dropped in a city and works for several seedy characters doing their dirty work which most of the time involves using the many different vehicles of the city to your advantage. Clever as it was, that concept didn't really make it big time until the series got to this sequel, were thanks to the next generation gaming power of the PS2 and subsequently the PC, it finally got to strut it's stuff and fully develop it's concept of playing the role of a criminal in your own virtual city.

Changing to a 3rd-person perspective the game basically thrusts you in a living, breathing polygonal city crafted with an impressive engine that allows seamless spawning of gigantic buildings, rush-hour like traffic made up of fully detailed cars complete with realistic damage and physics models (to an extent, remember it's not a sim) as well as fantastically animated pedestrians that react to your behavior in different ways and whose models sport such niceties as localized damage for creative murders and different textures/models. The game also features decal textures for nice details such as skid marks, bloody skid marks, reflective surfaces, realtime lighting and realistic weather effects that allow the city to have it's own day/night cycles and everything in between with fog and rain effects as well.

You can take to the streets of Liberty City anytime you want, exploring the many locations to be found and cruising around on foot or in your favourite car (obtained through the time-honored technique of carjacking the series is known for). Of course, this by itself could become unimpressive pretty easily, and quite frankly isn't so much of a feat, as similar "sandbox simulators" that failed to provide the gamer a significant gameplay experience besides that of being left to wonder around on your own were already around (see: Shenmue). No sir, GTA3 is much more than a simple city-cruising game, and it is once you start playing that you realize just how far it's scope extends.

Basically speaking the game covers almost all the bases you can think of when you think of arcade/action gaming. There's every variation of racing gameplay possible, 3D action shootfests, sniping sequences and more, all based around simple yet lovingly crafted missions that always involve you doing shady works for opposing ganglords. This missions mostly follow a main plot, but you have also optional missions that you can tackle or not, (which often yield a bonus of some kind) as well as amuse yourself with the extra minigames/professions such as running fares as a cabby or chasing crooks as a cop which can be as much fun on it's own as the main game in some cases. You can also try to find the extra challenges sprinkled through the city in the form of hidden packages, jump locations or "rampage" missions that involve disposing of a given number of persons/gang members or whatever using a specific weapon or tactic... all without getting the attention of the city's cops, which start tracking you once they see you do messy stuff such as stealing a car or running over someone and whose number and aggressiveness increases with the level of mayhem you cause. And boy can they get vicious! (those FBI dudes would run over their own mothers if they got in their way!). The possibilities are pretty much endless and given the nearly gigantic size of Liberty City (sprawled across 3 different sections) the game offers nearly unlimited gameplay experiences even after you passed that 100% completition mark.

Another key factor in the success of GTA3 is it's use of humor to compensate what was at the time a major concern in the gaming industry and which was it's mature content. Yes, GTA3 is violent and mature, and it deals with criminal organizations, has lots of bloody moments on it as well as plenty of mature situations such as being able to pick up a whore and taking her to do "her thang" in order to regain health (don't you just love that?!). But it's all laced with such a distinct sense of humor that nowhere does the game seem as grim or dark as it is made out to be. The gangmembers are all clever caricatures of the many stereotypes surrounding their particular condition (guess how the Italian mafia or the Yakuzas are portrayed) and practically every element in the game sort of winks at you and tells you not to take it seriously and just have fun. After all, what sort of reaction is one supposed to have when one bombs and murders a group of mafia members with an Ice-cream truck??

The comedy doesn't just work as means to compensate the mature themes of the game, but also gets to strut it's stuff on it's own thanks to the wonderfully scripted radio advertisements, billboards and talk shows that take potshots at everything that composes American pop culture, even taking a jab at the videogame industry with such things as the ads for Pogo the Monkey "Just what the world needs, another cutey platform game!!".

These radio ads and talkshows are just a small part of the other fantastic element in GTA3, and which is it's full fledged collection of fictional radio stations, which you can switch at any moment to cruise around to whatever music you want to, be it teeny-booper pop, 80's classics, hip-hop, rock, classical music or any of the other radio signals that include exceptionally well produced material presented by excellently stereotyped DJs, or lenghty comedy bits such as "Fernando's New Beginnings" in the city's most important talkshow station. All voice-acted with exceptional quality and talent that matches the title's stellar production values.

As a clever extra for the PC version, the game allows you to import your own MP3 files and use them as your very own custom radio as well as other PC-only additions such as being able to customize and change your player's skin (I played my GTA3 as Ben from Full Throttle and a friend of mine did so as Snake from The Simpsons!!) as well as improved control that allows the use of the mouse/keyboard combo we PC users so favor. Quite frankly I have no idea how the hell the PS2 crowd got to enjoy this game using their stupid gamepads and the shitty "classic" controls with auto-aiming and camera-dependant movement, but thanks to the nice guys behind the PC port I don't have to find out and get to rejoice with the freedom my mouse gives me.

The Bad
Minor quirks mostly, those are the only real problems that one can point at the exceptional work of game design that GTA3 is. Everyone has their pet peeve and I'm no exception, but make no mistake, they are all just bitching:

No equalization for the MP3 playback which means some of your files may sound too weak and others too loud. Can't your guy swim?? I understand the use of water as a means of limiting the gaming area, but why does it have to mean instant death? The plane sucks ass pure and simple. Some missions are rather weak, and the plot could be more interesting and involving (see the sequel, Vice City for that). And last but not least, the developers neglected to include a little feature that makes the PC version take a substantial performance hit, I'm talking about the shitty idea of keeping the gargantuan audio files in the game CD.

Not many people took notice of this as being the cause of the game's poor framerates, and even fewer realized that the solution to it is really simple: just download a No-CD crack from your favourite crack site (no I don't know of anyone as all my games are original.... uh...yeah, right...) and then copy all the audio files of the 2nd CD to the Audio directory in the game's root and presto! See? GTA3 can fly even on a P3! But it sure sucks when pirates have to do the developer's work...

The Bottom Line
A fantastic game that using creativity and clever gameplay concepts managed to carve it's place as one of the best titles ever developed for any platform. Plus it's probably the first mature title (understanding "mature" as something more than blood and guts) to attain such a blockbuster/instant classic status and not be relegated to the murky pits of cult-fandom.

If we want to really, really understand GTA3's success we should probably trace it all the way back to the classics of the videogame world, and in fact one can better understand the concept behind the game once one realizes that this is probably the first game to be spawned by the Nintendo generation as an homage to itself. Yes, GTA3 acknowledges such gameplay classics as Super Mario Bros. and the titles every 20-something freak like us grew up with, but does so with the mature interests that we now have, and the result is just fantastic.

This game is a must for anyone, if you really are on a budget and want to play the perfect game then you should probably skip it and get GTA: Vice City which is like the ultra-polished version of GTA3, but still this one is a fantastic experience enjoyable by anyone that loves videogaming at it's best.

The Good
The graphics engine is a work of art, which you CAN confuse and end up in untextured areas, but this is just a minor problem when faced with the prospect of texturing an entire city like is done here. As a driving game the physics are good, and are aimed at making the game actually fun to play but keeping semi-realistic properties.

The Bad
I am not a big fan of the sheer mindlessness of the violence, there is no punishment for killing the innocents in the game (State of Emergency at least as this). The gameplay gets very repetitive very quickly, sure theres loads of different things to do, but they all boil down to kill this, blow up this etc etc. There are some very good missions which i enjoyed, but they are few and far between.

The Bottom Line
My one-line summary sums up the game pretty well i believe. It is a lot of fun, and you can do anything you desire in the game, but there are limits to the variety in the missions, and the graphic engine, while very beautiful and a technical masterpiece on the PS2, has flaws which enable you to end up looking down an untextured street and occasionally slows down quite a lot.