Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories

This is the fifth GTA game I've played on the PS2 using the same engine, and I have to admit I'm pretty glad to admit it's the last. A new GTA game used to be an event, and the new games were always impressive in their scope and what they added to the series. But the gameplay has gotten tiring, and these ports of PSP titles don't do much to stay fresh. A lot of the allure of the "Stories" PSP games is that you get to play GTA on a portable system. When you put the same game on PS2, that allure is gone. Liberty City Stories had the same problem, but it wasn't as long, and so it didn't wear out its welcome as much as this does. There's nothing that really makes Vice City Stories inferior to LCS, it just feels even more played out. The city is familiar and Lance Vance is as irritating as ever. He's seriously one of the worst game characters in existence. He has no redeeming qualities. He's an idiot, not funny, and doesn't help. All he usually does to a mission is make it harder than it needs to be. His brother, the guy you play is, is better, but not by much. As a person he's not unlikable, but his motivations are a little messed up and it's hard to care knowing he's going to die in a couple years. That's a big problem with both Stories games - finding the will to try when half the characters you're protecting are going to get killed anyway. The biggest problem was right in the game - an extremely frustrating mission, the entire point of which is to save someone, which results in that character dying anyway. Gee, great.

VCS does offer some stuff the original game doesn't. Helpful additions like swimming, trip skip, being able to buy back confiscated weapons, et cetera make the experience less frustrating. Despite some shitty characters, the story is pretty decent and well-written, the radio stations are still hilarious, and they're filled with lots of great 80's songs. Visually, it's improved a bit, with nice draw distances and lighting, plus the blur effect they introduced in San Andreas that happens when you're going extremely fast. The load times are much better than the original games, but I wish they could have taken out the load between parts of the city. If they can stream all of San Andreas, they should be able to stream all of Vice City. There are some creative missions, but as usual, as it goes on it all devolves into a lot of shooting and exploding. The targeting continues to be terrible, and it's just disgusting to see the final battles always playing out with you sprinting away a little bit to protect yourself and just holding down target and fire. I can't wait for Grand Theft Auto IV, which looks to be more realistic, and hopefully will have a decent combat system. VCS is annoying sometimes, but it's definitely not a bad game for $20.