Grand Theft Auto III

THE BAD:
Textures often take a couple of seconds too late to draw, when driving a fast car.

SUMMARY:
Grand Theft Auto franchise, a series marred by controversies for its violent content right from the day of its instigation, has been perhaps one of the most successful series ever to have been made. Though heavily criticized by the non-gaming community, it has been blessed with one of the most frenetic fan-following in gaming history. GTA lll is the first Grand Theft Auto game made in 3d. Being a new-comer to the series, here’s my take on the most controversial game franchise. GTA lll for the PC is a direct port of the Playstation 2 version, with a couple of new features thrown in for pc gamers. However, these new features are few, but who wants more when you have a great game to play!!! GTA lll, in fact the series itself, is all about breaking the law and fulfilling your wants through committing crimes. It is one of the most violent games of its time, and it still is. In this game, you will have to kill, rob, kidnap, rig cars with bombs, do jobs for other gang bosses, stalk and kill innocent by-standers, crush cars, run-over pedestrians while being chased by police cars and choppers, and much-much more. The list of things that you can do in this game is endless. This game will leave you with one of the most memorable and crude gaming experience of your life. In this game, you play the character of a young small-time thug who gets betrayed by his girl friend during a bank robbery job. They sentence you to a jail term and transport you in a van, when it gets attacked by another gang who want to free one of theirs. You too, as a result, escape but with a new accomplice. This thug takes you to another, and one-by-one, you meet new gang bosses. Each of them has some jobs for you. And slowly, you hit big time in the crime-infested province of Liberty City. The city itself is divided into three islands connected through bridges, underground subways, and the likes. These islands are Portland District, Staunton Island & Shoreside Vale. You start off in one of the islands while the others are locked. You unlock the other islands one-by-one by completing the missions of the story mode of your current place of business. These missions themselves are of a wide variety ensuring that you never get bored of doing them. The game-play of GTA lll is simply amazing, and is of a diverse nature. It involves a lot of running, gunning, driving vehicles such as cars and steamboats, and in certain missions, even flying!!! There is so much to do in this game, and you won’t be able to stop until you’re done with all of them. Three huge islands, with many bosses and still more jobs to be done for them. You will be required to kidnap others for bosses, murder, rob, retrieve files from the police, snipe other bosses, race, blow up cars and shops, bully pedestrians and shop-owners, kill witnesses, carjack, hijack, escape on a steamboat, and these are just a few of the many exciting things that you can do in this game. Besides the main story mode, the game also has many side-missions for you. You can carjack any cars, trucks, ambulances, etc. that you see on the road. When you get into a taxi, ambulance, police car, or a fire-truck, you can press a button to start the special side-missions. This involves saving people by driving ailing people to the hospital in your ambulance, nabbing gangsters as a policeman, driving passengers in your taxi to earn money, controlling fire in the city through your fire-truck. Besides these special vehicle missions, there are still more things to be done in the game. There are many places where you can perform Unique Jumps, collect hidden packages, supply cars to the import-export garage, blow up specific gang-cars through remote-controlled mini-car bombs, do off-road missions (drive through checkpoints within time limit), and do Rampages-destroying a minimum amount of something or somebody. All of these non-story mode missions unlock something for you. Most of these side-missions are extremely enjoyable and fun to do. After all, how cool is it to drive a remote controlled mini-car bomb under a real car on the road and pressing the trigger at the exact moment??? Boom!!! The city’s very own pedestrian also provide loads of fun to the game-play too. You can simply shoot or run-over them for money and weapons or simply for the fun of it!!! You can hear their funny one-liners and if you roam around the place, you can even see and hear a few of them exchanging abuses and punches. They even, at times, involve themselves in shoot-outs. The game-play also has a unique feature of the star-system. When and if you create enough carnage by shooting innocent people or blowing up shops and cars, your star rating goes up. You can get up to six stars at any given time. Even showing guns to cops get you a star. With each star comes a whole baggage of troubles for you. The police won’t give a damn when you have one or two stars. But with each additional star, they will increase their forces to bring you down. The police will come after you with full force & all its heavy vehicles when you get to six stars. It will block the roads for you with its bigger vehicles and try their best to take you down. Just to have them following you at full force is more than enough for an adrenaline rush!!! But you can get the stars down by grabbing bribes which are littered all over the city. The game also has another unique feature. You can never die in the game. Whenever you go down in combat or when the police capture you, you simply re-spawn in front of the hospital or the police station, your health regenerated to the maximum. But, you lose all the weapons that you would have accumulated before. You can also find health packs littered all over the city, if you’re running low on health. The weapons in this game, too, are varied. You can shoot people with the not so powerful weapons such as pistols, snipe them, blow them up with grenades or launchers, or burn them with Molotov. This game even has a Flame-thrower, which has been fading rapidly in today’s shooters. The flame-thrower has been implemented well into the scheme of things, and is not there just for show. It has been made into an integral part for the success of certain missions, and looks really nice and violent!!! Overall though, the game has regular range that can be found in most shooters, barring the flame-thrower. The cars are of a varied nature ranging from normal cars to racing cars to government vehicles such as police cars-all six of them, ambulance, fire-trucks, bus, etc. All the vehicles in this game range from slow to fast, small to big, weak to powerful, etc. The game has only one flyable vehicle, Dodo, which is extremely difficult to master. It throws a different kind of challenge to the game-play. All the vehicles in this game look & feel really good. The control system of this game isn’t much of a problem, and you won’t find it very hard to get into the game. The driving part will take a bit of getting used, and you will after a couple of petty missions, get the hang of it alright. The features are nicely implemented into this port of a Playstation 2 game. You can also change the control set up for the game to any keys you want to. The graphics in this game, though out-dated by today’s standards, look nice and detailed. The city looks populated and detailed. It has everything that a city’s supposed to have, from hospitals to police stations to import-export harbor to shops, saloons, residents, many-many buildings, subways, railways, metro, and the rests. And all of it looks detailed and real!!! The city even has its own sex clubs and parlors!!! Most of the features of the city have been made interactive through missions that you are asked to do. The city always looks buzzing with activities, but goes into sleep at night, just like the real world. It’s a beauty to behold, the sunrise and sunset in this game!!! Weapons, weapon-reloading animation, the explosions, the lightning & weather effect, and the solid car designing, all lend themselves to creating some nice atmosphere in the game and make the game-play a lot more fun. But, the game has some serious graphical issues. When driving a fast car, the textures often take a few seconds too late to draw properly, which causes you to fail a few timed missions. It causes some serious irritation to the player, as it’s not too nice to look at either. The character models, too, are not up to the mark. Some of the characters look a bit too crude and bland. They are not all that well detailed, and are far from realistic. Overall, the graphics are good and bolster the atmosphere of the game. The sound department of this game scores highly, the developers have done an amazing job with it. The city is alive with the daily buzz of a city life. Liberty City feels so vibrant that you just marvel at the genius of the developers. The pedestrians will hurl funny or abusive one-liners at you if you get in their way. The sound of gun-shots, grenades, blowing up of cars, screeches of cars, sounds of thunder & lightning, etc., all lend an aura of realism to the game. The voice-acting of the game is also top-notch. The voice-over actors have done a commendable job of portraying the emotions of anger, happiness, malice, etc. in a realistic manner. The music of the game has been done with a view of the hectic life-style of a city life. It blends well with the atmosphere of the game. The game even has its own radio FM channels!!! You can listen to nine different radio channels while driving any vehicles in the game. And each of the channels caters to different music genres, which have been nicely coordinated. One of the channels has funny commercials, and it plays hosts to a daily talk show, where callers from different walk of life call and talk to the host. This talk show is funny as hell, and you really marvel at the idiocy of the citizens of Liberty City. Besides, there is also a MP3 channel, where you can listen to any MP3 file in your computer. This feature alone gives this game’s music a limitless opportunity to bowl you over. This game also has a statistics table, which gives you an extremely detailed analysis of everything that you have done in the game. It also gives you an idea of everything that is still left for you to do. This game is really long, and it can easily take you over a month-and-a-half to beat 100%. Besides, one of the mods lets you play this game online, against other players. But, very few people play it online now-a-days. Still, this game’s worth every penny of its price, which is not much these days. Overall, I think the game is incredibly fun and addictive. One should definitely give it a go for its diverse game-play and the dark humour of the game. Come on people, it’s really easy on the pockets in this day and age!!! Story: 8 Gameplay: 10 Graphics: 8 Sound: 10 Replayability: 9 Final Score_-_- 8