Portable Gaming Revolution

Which will quite possibly be the most popular game for the PSP, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories made its debut on October 25th in the U.S. If you’ve ever played a Grand Theft Auto game you’ll be right at home. This installment clocks in at about three years before the previous game, Grand Theft Auto III. In the story from Grand Theft Auto III, you had certain missions given to you by Toni Cipriani. If you remember, he was part of the Leone mafia and had certain “issues” with his mom, who was never seen, yet clearly heard.

In Liberty City Stories, you’re the emotionally abused Toni Cipriani… minus the gut. You have just come back into town and you need to work at getting back your respect in the Leone family that you’ve lost from being away. Toni’s main goal is to rise through the Mafia ranks and become Salvatore’s right-hand man. You came at just the right time because the massive gang inspired slaughter-fest that is to ensue is sure to make you feel right at home.

Overall the game feels like Grand Theft Auto III with a facelift. It’s like they took the basic GTA III and incorporated various enhancements that became available in Vice City. Unless you’re nit-picking and inspecting the environment for graphical flaws and sub-PS2 textures you’re not going to notice that this is a portable game. At first I began to examine every aspect of the environment, looking for differences that would separate it from its console predecessors. After a few missions I found myself seriously thinking I was playing a PS2 with a control all in one, aside from the obvious drops in frame rate every so often.

The obvious lack of buttons on the PSP does hinder the movement and fluid reaction that was once available on its console counterparts, but nevertheless it somewhat overcomes these complications in a way that gives you the most functionality possible with the most familiar layout. Basically, doing anything that requires quick change of buttons becomes somewhat jammed together. Specifically the use of the analog and directional pad together. You’ll find out what I’m talking about if you ever find yourself surrounded by some people that don’t exactly like you. That isn’t a rare thing in the GTA series.

An extremely important part of creating an immersive gaming experience is the sound. The quality of the game’s sound is just like it was in the previous versions. While walking around you will hear some very funny things and some very disturbing ones as well. All part of the GTA universe. Something that we’ve all come to expect, especially from the radio stations. This game doesn’t disappoint on this aspect either. All the funny, crazy, down-right awkward moments heard on the radio stations of before GTAs have made their way into your hands. Heard all the programs and want to hear something else? (Although that will take a while with all the stations and all the programs that each station has) Rockstar had the excellent idea of including the very useful and extremely appreciated custom tracks. By use of the memory stick you’ll be able to put audio of your liking and use this in place of the radio stations. The odd thing is that when you begin the game you’ll notice that the custom tracks option is unavailable. First off, you can’t simply put mp3s on your memory stick and use them. Rockstar released a program appropriately named “Rockstar Custom Tracks” that you must use in order to make your chosen audio useable in LCS. The downside is that the audio must derive from a CD. Be it a commercial CD or a home burned CD. The upside to this is that this program compresses these audios A LOT! I used the program and turned an entire CD that was about 76 minutes into a file that LCS uses that was only 32 MB! Although you can only use the audio in LCS, it does save a lot more space than mp3.

Going from GTA on the console and then to the PSP seems like a smooth transition with some bumps in the road. Obviously they couldn’t put every single aspect of the series that made it such a success. Like I said before it’s more of a fusion between GTA III and Vice City. I was disappointed at the fact that they left a lot of features out from San Andreas, but then again San Andreas was put on a dual layer DVD and LCS is on a UMD. For those who don’t know what I’m getting at, a dual layer dvd can hold up to 9.4 GB of space whereas a umd can only hold about 1.8 GB. As you can see, there is a big difference.

Anyway, the gameplay is what you would expect from the GTA series, which is good because you’re not playing it on the PS2, you’re playing it on your PSP. Without doing any of the side missions you should bank about nine to eleven hours playing through the story. Yet for some reason the missions are more of a chore than what they used to be and are more “single minded”. A lot of the missions are just straight forward like chasing down someone and killing them. End of mission. Leaves something to be desired, right when you expect the twists and turns the missions usually hand you when you thought you were done in the other GTA games this one is more straight to the point. It’s good in one way because you might be trying to finish one last mission on the go, since the PSP was meant to be on the go. Yet on the other hand when you’re not everywhere at once you want something to feel like it took some work to do. A sense of accomplishment, if you will. Granted, I am very thankful that Rockstar had the portability in mind, after all, it is on the playstation portable, right?

Load times. They killed me in the other GTA games. I could literally turn the PS2 on, go get something to drink, be back and it still not have loaded. Again, Rockstar had the portability in mind. The load times are about a second or two! All I have to say about that is, SWEET! The only other time the game had to load was when going to and from one of the three islands. Also goes under the sweet pile.
Overall the accomplishment of getting a PS2 title and putting it on the PSP without much compromise is an amazing achievement. GTA LCS has more things to do in a portable game than should be allowed. The replay value is no different from the other installments. Once you beat the main story, you still have an entire city that is waiting for you to completely sink your teeth into. This game is one for the collection stack or rack, whatever the case may be.