Robbery, shooting, doublr-crossing and a jailbreak. That's just in the intro. (Grand Theft Auto III (PC))

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Grand Theft Auto III (PC)
Date:	27/02/03 (1140 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great fun and lots to do, Great sound and visuals

Disadvantages: No multiplayer, Technical issues, No multiplayer

Computer games have always been linked with violence and the dropping standards of education in today's youth and mostly this has been unproven. Once every so often though, a game comes along which re-ignites the argument. The original Grand Theft Auto (GTA) was one such game, a top down (or birds eye view, if you prefer) of your character going around the city, performing missions for some top ranked gangsters and earning some cash into the bargain. It doesn't sound too bad, but when the missions are stealing, killing and general mischief, all of a sudden Mr and Mrs Smith don't want little Johnny playing on his PC or Playstation any longer. To be honest, if it hadn't been for the actions of Max Clifford, a publicist who managed to get tabloid coverage of the game ("Ban this sick filth" etc.), it's doubtful whether anyone outside the gaming circle would really have noticed the game with high levels of violence and dubious moral fibre. That said, it was still a terribly fun game to play, and the gamers cried out for more.

They got it as well - an add on pack called GTA: London 1969 which 'recreated' London and used British cars with all the usual GTA shenanigans, only with Dick van Dyke comedy voices, and a proper sequel, GTA 2 which took on more of a cartoon style. However, these both differed from the original sufficiently enough for the people not to be pleased, despite not being terrible games.

Then came the news that GTA 3 would be realised in 3D form, and the world was excited. This was the way the original GTA was first planned until the developers realised the technology wasn?t advanced enough.

So, now GTA 3 has been released since last spring to wide acclaim on both PC and Playstation platforms.

? So, what do you do in this GTA3, then?

Well, after robbing a bank in fictional Liberty City, you are shot and left for dead by a Latin American woman who proceeds to get away. You&#
39;re caught by the fuzz, and are being transported to jail when a pre-planned jailbreak by friends of a fellow prisoner (an old Oriental gentleman) leaves you at the side of the road with another convict with bandaged hands and an empty car. This young gentleman with the strange moniker, '8 Ball' directs you to a place where you can get some proper clothes, and informs you of another person who will offer you employment.

Thus begins your adventure in Liberty City.

? What?s to do in Liberty City?

Unlike the previous incarnations of GTA where success was measured in terms of how much money you earned, this game is mission driven. Your missions are given to you by a variety of people, some are necessary to further the story and some are there just for enjoyment and some bonus cash if you're successful. My advice to anyone who starts playing the game is to grab a car from somewhere (you can carjack people in the middle of the street, just make sure there are no cops around!) and explore the city getting used to how cars handle and where all the shortcuts and useful hideouts are hidden.

The missions range from the innocent (giving a girl a lift from the hospital to her boyfriends club) to the not so innocent (killing members of a rival gang). Obviously, as the missions (and story) progress, they get more difficult. This is not a problem as you can save the game at any point except if you've started a mission, and then you'll have to wait until you complete or fail the mission to save.

Each mission is preceded by a short cut scene animation describing the mission and showing you anything you might need to know for the mission. If you're playing through the mission more than once, you can handily cut these short. The variation in the missions is good enough so that you don't do too many of one type in a short period of time. There are vehicle-based missions, missions to be undertaken on foot, killing
missions, survival missions, racing missions plus numerous other types. There are also things called 'rampages' which replace the old 'kill frenzies' of earlier GTAs, and these usually require you kill or destroy a certain amount of people or vehicles in a short time period.

Advancing the plot sufficiently will open up further areas of the city. You start in Portland which is mostly industrial, and after completing the 'Mafia' missions, you can move onto the next area, Staunton Island which would be more commercial before the final, residential area of Shoreside Vale. Each of these has their own style, feel and look to it. The first area, Portland, will be filled with construction workers, prostitutes, gang members along with many vehicles according to that type. Moving onto to Staunton Island may yield more yuppies, older people and vehicles to match e.g. sports cars etc. You can drive between these areas, once you have opened them up, and indeed, it?s necessary to do so for some of the later missions.

Not all missions are done by dealing with gangsters and bent cops, mind you. Steal a taxi, police car or ambulance and you open up other missions. With the taxi, you have to ferry people from place to place within a certain time limit, in the police car, you can have vigilante missions where you have to kill criminals within a time limit and the ambulance missions require you to ferry people from somewhere to the hospital without killing them with your reckless driving (again, within a time limit). These all provide handy cash boosts, and can be a nice distraction from the

Each of these areas is a square of sides 4km (if you catch my drift) which gives you a lot of exploring to do. It's not all flat either, so there are hills, tunnels, bridges to explore in your vehicle with footbridges and rooftops to explore when you're out and about for a stroll plus an elevated train around Portland and a subway system t
o take you between areas (which only opens up later on).

Liberty is a vibrant city, and if you pay close attention you will see that the citizen's behaviour is well worth watching. If a car blows up, check out all the pedestrians rushing to gawp at the carnage. Driving fast past a pedestrian? Sound your horn and watch them leap put of the way, shouting obscenities at you. Of course, as day turns to night, a different breed of people appears. Ordinary citizens all but disappear and you'll see more gang members around. It's easier to commit a crime at night than during the day with less 'concerned citizens' around to call the police. There's a clock running in the top right of the screen informing you of the time of day, and this is not just a superficial feature because some missions require you to be somewhere at certain times.

There are many different types of vehicle to use in GTA 3, and each of them has their own handling characteristics so that fancy driving you can do in the Mafia Sentinel (a BMW), you couldn't do in a Patriot (a Humvee). The cars aren't given their real life names, but are given names similar. Superficially though, they'll look remarkably like those in real life.

As you might have guessed from the place names, real names aren't used in GTA 3, although Liberty City is sort of meant to be New York, and you'll see various instances around the city which are reflections of real life. The cars are one example as are the place names. The gangs are all 'real world' though - Mafia, Yardies etc.

? Playing the game.

You can customise the controls to suit yourself, and there are quite a few controls to get to grips with. There's a set for when you're controlling a vehicle, and another, different set for when you're on foot. The default configuration is quite good though, and you should be playing away in no time whatsoever.

The screen la
yout is excellent and provides all the information you need without being too cluttered. You get your radar in the bottom left of the screen, details of your car and the city neighbourhood pop up briefly in the bottom right. In the top right is where the most important information is displayed. Here, you get the clock, your accumulated cash, health and armour status and your wanted level which is represented by six stars. If you're doing a timed mission, then your countdown clock will appear here, also.

A wanted level of one is easily shaken off after a few minutes and you'll have maybe one or two police cars chasing you (or one or two 'beat' cops if you're on foot). Get up to six stars however, and it seems you turn into a combination of Saddam and Osama as Uncle Sam lets loose with its boys and their toys. Tanks and troop carriers rush to your position to back up the cops and all hell will break loose.

Don't worry though, as you have many different types of weapon to defend yourself with from your own fists or a baseball bat in the early stages to a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher later on, plus if you're sneaky, you might get to steal a tank!

? Pop culture.

Within the game are loads of references to pop culture, although you really have to look closely at the game to see most of them properly. One of the more obvious ones is one of the main characters called Tony Cipriani, who has an overbearing mother and phones into the local talk radio station for therapy. Extremely like a certain Mr Soprano, isn't it? What about 'Mean Streets Taxis' in Portland? One of the later missions for a female Yakuza member refers to 'an oddly animated undercover cop called Tanner' which is a reference to a PC/Playstation game called Driver. There are many more little references like this throughout the game, but you probably won't see most of them unless you take time out from the missions and go
cruising around the city.

? The Visuals.

GTA 3 is a beautiful game to look at. Liberty City has been created so well, you could almost believe that it's actually real. Day turns into night with orange sunsets, and the streetlights turn on around this time. Weather effects are well done with rain and fog creating problems for driving. If there was one down point, it would have to be the variety of pedestrians. The same people crop up again and again and while this might be good enough for displaying the huge number of different gang members, it's no particularly realistic. This is only an aesthetic matter, and doesn't affect the gameplay at all. Blood spills from crime victims and soon after, chalk marks appear. These are all nice little touches which show how much work has been put into the game.

? The Audio.

As with the original game, you have radio stations to choose from, and each station has its own genre of music. The quality of music is quite good, although you may get fed up of listening to the same stuff time and again. There are reggae stations, pop station and retro stations amongst others. There are two other 'stations' to mention. The first is 'Chatterbox 109' with Lazlo, and I thought this was exceedingly funny. It's a talk radio station where people phone in to talk about all sorts of stuff: killer bees, puppet festivals ("Dude" Guys with puppets get chicks!") etc. and every so often, you might hear one of your employers call to sound off about something. The last 'station' is an mp3 player. If you copy some mp3s to the required folder in the GTA 3 folder, you can listen to your own music as you play the game!

The sound effects in the game are excellent with each vehicle having its own engine noise and horn. The atmospheric background effects are well realised with the background noises being louder during the day than at night. Pedestrians shout at you
as you run past them, if you cut them up on the road, they?ll sound their horns and berate you.

With all this work going into the minor aspects of the game, it's perhaps not surprising to learn that the same amount of work has gone into the main character voices. While not boasting A-list stars, there are certainly some big names in the GTA 3 cast list: Joe Pantoliano (The Matrix, Bad Boys 1 & 2 and Daredevil), Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs, Die Another Day), Michael Rapaport (Deep Blue Sea, Men of Honour, The 6th day), Kyle MacLachlan (Sex and the City, Twin Peaks, Showgirls) and Robert Loggia (Lost Highway, Independence Day) are the more well known actors. Everyone who provided a voice did an excellent job, but I think the best work was done by the people who are the Liberty City radio DJs.

? Didn't you mention something about adult themes?

Well, yes. This isn't a game for the youngsters out there. There is plenty of swearing and violence in the main game, and more than a small dose of sex in the game. More often than not, mission will involve a murder of at least one person and those that don't will probably require theft of something.

If you go into the red light district of Portland in a flash car with a wedge of cash and park at the side of a road, you'll attract the attention of a working girl. She'll get into your car (implying sex), and you?ll gain some health points for that.

It's obvious that this is a game for adults, so parental discretion is advised when letting younger people anywhere near it.

? My overall impressions.

I loved this game. I've always been a fan of the GTA series, and to finally experience it in full 3D with a wide variety of missions is simply breathtaking. There's longevity and replayability in the game as well as you'll probably not find all the missions when you go through the game the first time, plus loads of secret things to f
ind and do. The graphics and sound are amazing, and should are quite configurable, giving a wide range of differing specifications of PC to play it on (although, be warned, it still required a fairly recent graphics card [at least a GeForce 2] and a substantial processor [at least 700 MHz CPU] and a decent amount of memory [at least 128MB]). Hint: turning off the 'trails' in the graphics setup screen will dramatically help performance. My only criticism of the actual gameplay aspect would be the lack of any sort of multiplayer mode. I only played the multiplayer version of the original GTA a few times, but it was fun racing around the city trying to kill your mates, and the idea of doing it in full blown 3D is too tantalising! Sick, but fun! Even with the lack of multiplayer, I'd still recommend this to any adult gamer.

? Warning!

OK, I've crowed on about how good this game is for yonks. There are only 2 major drawbacks with this game. The first I mentioned above about the lack of a multiplayer aspect. The second is how long it took me to actually get the bloody thing up and running.

Firstly, I had a problem with loading saved games. This was easily fixed by applying the 1.1 patch from Rockstar Games (you'll get it on the website). Secondly, I had real problems with corrupted graphics and my game crashing every 10 minutes. Sometimes it would just quit, and sometimes it would actually reset the PC. This was eventually solved by updating every driver I could think of ? soundcard, graphics card and my motherboard drivers and applying the latest version of Microsoft's DirectX software (currently version 9.0, although GTA 3 claims it only needs version 8.1 to operate). I don't know what the actual problem was regarding the crashing and resetting, although the graphics problem is a result of some DirectX incompatibility and can be rectified by applying a patch from Microsoft, or updating to version 9.0 of DirectX.
>
Once you do get it running, you'll be in for a treat.


? My system.

Processor: AMD Duron 1.3 GHz
Memory: 704 MB
Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Graphics card: Leadtek GeForce 4 MX440
Soundcard: SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 Platinum
Direct X: 9.0

? Web Resources

Rockstar Games:
http://www.rockstargames.com/

Take Two:
http://www.take2games.com/

Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/

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