Review (PC)

Normally, when I sit down to review a universally exalted, expensively marketed, mainstream game, I am chomping at the bit to lay forth evidence that it is, in fact, *NOT* the Holy Panacea. I conduct a sustained training regimen to strengthen my resistance to marketing and advertising efforts, and when I hear the phrase "Best Game Ever", it is as a war cry of my enemies - those who wish to subvert my favorite hobby and defile its chaste pursuit of escapist entertainment, distilling the game development process down to its basest elements in pursuit of an alchemic recipe for minting money. I choose to answer this war cry by perforating the fragile bubble they form around their carefully marketed money magnets, exposing their normalcy, revealing their all too familiar flaws to the light of day, promoting recognition that such high-profile games are not necessarily better than and are often worse than other offerings of their ilk. Remember - every dollar spent marketing a game is a dollar NOT spent developing the game. Every day that passes closer to a marketing mandated release date increases the developer's pressure to just "get it done" rather than "get it right".

But what has all this zealotrous ranting to do with GTA3? Obviously, GTA3 is an obnoxiously successful game. I'll spare you the anxiety and skip straight to the verdict: GTA3 is not the Holy Panacea of gaming. But that shouldn't surprise you anymore than it didn't surprise me. Normally, I'd dive right into telling you why - and I'll get to that - but the more interesting phenomenon here (for me) is that in this particular case, the conclusion has actually left me feeling a bit sad.

I think I felt sad because part of me wanted GTA3 to be as good as the hype, because it has become an ambassador of sorts, for the industry. Any game that ruffles the panties of the entire bible-thumping right-wing conservative establishment (which, ironically, encompasses the gun-rights lobbyists) earns my respect. And because it has become such a lightning rod for criticism of the video game industry, I wanted it to be a sterling example of game design and implementation, qualities which could act as a shield of sorts against the criticisms levied against it, and by proxy against the entire industry.

Note, part of me (a majority in fact) thinks that the people who have gotten themselves worked into a fervor over the content in GTA3 are certifiable fucking morons. The only difference between GTA3 and most other games (particularly action games) is that GTA3 is designed so that I actually don't *have* to shoot people. Sure, there are objectives in the game that can't be accomplished without some fatalities, but there's actually quite a bit to do in the game that has absolutely no killing requirements whatsoever. I can't say the same thing about the Quakes or Unreal Tournaments or Rainbow Sixes or Ghost Recons. Hell, I can't even say that about most role-playing games, which typically measure your progress as proportional to the bulk quantity of living organisms that you've slaughtered. And don't forget most strategy games, which generally associate victory with total genocidal elimination of your enemies.

If I were to plot GTA3 on some imaginary violence spectrum, it wouldn't be at the top, which I find to be fascinatingly ironic, considering how vehemently it has been decried by the vehement anti-violence decriers. How is it that these people who would burn Rockstar at the stake and preemptively convict everyone who plays GTA3 as a felon essentially give a free pass to most of the rest of the industry's offerings?

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I think these decriers are remiss in their decrying, and should point their glass hose of condemnation at the entire industry. I suspect some wish to do exactly that, and are wise enough to pick their battles, singling out GTA3 because of its financial success. Even so, I feel that for most of the history of video gaming, the inherent violence level has been fairly static (in terms of percentage, not quantity). If anything, games are trending towards more accurate consequences for actions. In GTA3, if I run over pedestrians, they get killed. The game is rated M, so what's the problem? Why aren't these people ranting to Congress about violence in movies that are rated R? I look at GTA3, see a fairly normal game with an above average degree of player freedom, and am hard-pressed to conclude about the game's detractors anything other than that they are simply stupid and/or purblind. I wish they would stop wasting my government's time.

But enough with the stupidity. The peevish arguments about the game's contents are so pointless as to be immediately tiresome. I bother to mention them only because it feels a bit irresponsible to discuss GTA3 without some sort of official statement regarding the game's scandalousness.

So - what of the game itself, as a game? Eh, like I said, it's not the holy grail, and it didn't knock my socks off. Like most games I play, the experience was a mix of fun and frustration, with the ratio favoring on average the former, though with peaks of the latter that stressed my tolerance nearly to the breaking point. Like many Best Games Ever I've played, which originate on a console, I came away mostly feeling like console gamers should play more PC games to help calibrate their impressions. I won't say that PC games are on the average better, just that they seem to cover a broader range of the entertainment spectrum.

Good

• Accessibility. GTA3 is very pick-up-and-playable. Testimonial: my (mostly non-gamer) girlfriend saw me running down pimps and diablos, decided it looked like good clean carnage fun, and had me install it on her computer. She's completed about a half dozen of the missions, but mostly likes beating up the pimps and taking their money (who doesn't?). The other night, though, she played for a bit and then quit, saying, "it's too cerebral". Cerebral! Take that, Jack Thompson! The point though, is that someone totally unfamiliar with 3D games (1st person, 3rd person, or otherwise) can sit down and get comfortable in the game world within a few minutes. Note that videogame journalists love to bitch about how developers/publishers have a habit of ruining perfectly good franchises by forcing them to transition to a 3D engine. Well, GTA3, as the name indicates, is the third iteration of the series, and clearly the most successful, so it makes for a nice statistical counter-example.

• The ability to play custom mp3's on the radio. Sure, the radio stations are fun and satirically flavored, but once you've heard the jokes, like most jokes, they lose their luster. Thus, since the game totally outdistances the radio content, it's imperative that you provide your own music.

• The voice acting is terrific. Sure, some of the actors are big names, and kudos to Rockstar for having enough clout to bring them in, but frankly I couldn't care less about who did it so long as it's decent, and it is. Plus, the writing is top shelf as well. Granted, there's not much of it, but not for a moment did I think I was around anyone other than good quality organized criminals.

Bad

• The aim-mode is only available with a few select weapons, when it should be available all the time. Furthermore, when in aim-mode, your normal movement keys change your view instead of continuing to control your movement which is what they are god damned supposed to do.

• Someone, anyone, please explain to me why scrolling the mousewheel in one direction cycles the radio stations one way, but scrolling the mousewheel the other direction does nothing? And if you say, "because in the console version you only had a single button to cycle radio stations," I will punch you.

• After progressing past certain missions, you've alienated a few factions in the game, which causes their members to immediately attack you on sight. I have no problem with this - I did things that made me some enemies, and enemies are the spice of life. However, when those enemies are capable of causing the vehicle I'm driving to burst instantaneously into flames, it makes it very very difficult to navigate certain locales. Even worse, it makes it nigh impossible to complete certain subsequent missions that require you to navigate those locales in vehicles not of your choosing. The mission that brought this to a head was one of the El Burro missions that I'd neglected until fairly late into the game. But I happened to be on Portland, and took the mission that required me to drive a minivan around town picking up parcels of porn. This is a very tightly timed mission with a scripted route over which I have no control. The route goes through Salvatore's territory, and his thugs (once you've done the first Asuka mission) will tear into you like nobody's business. Seriously, they are sufficiently armed that they can blow up nearly any vehicle you can acquire with about two hits - which as you might imagine makes it difficult to drive past them in a slow, wobbly minivan while you're trying to pick up porn. Even without this specific frustration, the lethality of the environment removed my prerogative to just tool around Liberty City. Player freedom indeed.

• You can't swim. And I mean at all. I nearly lumped this in with the 'Ugly' list, but that was already looking bloated. The inability to swim ties in directly with the experimentation penalties I discuss below. I suspect the decision to kill you instantly when you're in the water was motivated by either a) preventing you from swimming to an island that you weren't yet supposed to be able to access or b) laziness. Since they had to solve the access problem another way, because you get to drive boats around, that makes (b) more likely. Either way, it sucks. Not because I am prevented from swimming around, but rather because I'm punished disproportionately whenever I should happen to drive or fall into the water. Say I'm minding my own business trying to complete one of the offroad challenges, only to accidentally put my SUV in the drink. Well, since I can't get out and swim the five feet to shore, I'm forced to either lose all of my weapon cache or fire up the ol' save game. And when accidents like this can happen in the blink of an eye (falling into the pond is a more frequent risk than you might imagine) I'm compelled to save early, save often, and load all the time.

• Avatar customization is pathetic. Out of the box, you get your choice of thug #1 or thug #2. This lack of variety is confusing since it's not like the character ever really interacts in any way with anyone else. As far as I can tell, there's not a single line of spoken dialogue by the protagonist in the whole game, so they could have let you play as a wookie and it wouldn't have imposed upon them any additional content requirements other than the model and the skin. Weak. 100 demerits for Rockstar.

Ugly

• Experimentation penalties. For all the hubbub about the game 'encouraging exploration', I found it to be quite the contrary. Sure, the opportunities to explore and experiment are frequent, but if the penalty for doing so is severe, I would actually call that discouraging. And make no mistake that the penalty is in fact very severe. The way the game penalizes the player is probably my biggest gripe with it. Put simply, when you die, you lose everything in your possession. Now, this is fairly typical for games, and the rationale behind this design decision is that the player will, when faced with this penalty, elect to load a saved game. However, it is quite clear that GTA3 very much wants the player to NOT rely on saved games except to preserve mission progress in between play sessions -- i.e. to rely on saves as a coarse grain progress store instead of a fine grain safety net.

  Other than emptying your arsenal upon death, the game essentially lets you pick up where you left off whenever/however you screwed up. Doesn't sound so bad. However, since many missions require decent firepower, if not a specific weapon outright, you're obligated to either re-acquire your arsenal either through loading a saved game, or journeying to the gun shop - except that the gun shop only offers a small selection of weapons at any given time, and I may be mistaken, but I believe some weapons aren't offered for sale ever! So, if you find yourself in possession of a fairly decent arsenal, only to die, it is to your distinct advantage to just load the saved game, in direct opposition to how the designers "want" you to play. This discrepancy was brought into stark relief for me when I was playing GTA3 in the presence of a (gamer) friend, and when I died from some vehicular accident (most likely involving water), I leapt into the game menu to load my save. My friend questioned why I was loading when I died, since, he reasoned, the game would resurrect me at my safe house within seconds anyway. "Because I've lost all my guns," I replied. "So. Just go buy some more," he offered. I explained that it would take nearly an order of magnitude longer to re-acquire the guns than it would to load the save game, and since either loading or resurrecting would put me at exactly the same place physically anyway, why not load the game. And that doesn't even take into account the fact that in all likelihood I would not be able to re-acquire my arsenal anyway. I had a flame-thrower for crying out loud, and I'd yet to see one of those on sale! Furthermore, my save nearly always had me with 100% armor, which may or may not be in the gun store, and if it isn't that means even more precious gaming minutes spent wandering around trying to find one of the few goddamn locations where the armor star is stashed, which is made frustratingly difficult because they aren't marked on the worthless map, even after I've discovered them.

  And to be sure I tie this rant back into the original topic of experimentation, this death penalty issue doesn't just come up when you die while attempting a mission - which some might argue is a condition that deserves some player penalty. Rather, the death penalty factors in when attempting to enjoy any of the side items on the game's menu. Say you just want to fool around with the unique jumps. Inevitably you'll not be able to get out of your inverted vehicle in time and die in the explosion. Poof - no more weapons. Or maybe you see a nice ramp over a body of water and want to go Evel Knievel on it. Well, pick the wrong car for the attempt and you'll end up in the drink and shortly thereafter dead (remember that you can't swim). Or perhaps you want to play Crazi Taxi or Ambulance driver or Vigilante or Fire Fighter or any of the extra-curricular activities the game has to offer, all perfectly innocuous until you meet with some accidental death stripping you of all of your hard-earned implements of destruction. If you've been putzing around in the game for awhile before the unfortunate event, you might have found some secret packages, or set a few statistical records, etc.. Now you're faced with losing either that progress or the accumulated progress represented by your weapon cache. A game that was really putting player freedom on the pedestal wouldn't force that choice, and would let you play in the sandbox without fear of reprisal. GTA3 does not.

  In summary, I think the game erred very badly when it offered on one hand the very alluring notion of not having to resort to the saves constantly, and on the other hand leaving no real choice but to do so anyway.

• The map. This is hands-down the most immediate and chronic frustration with the game - the inadequacy of the on-screen map. I say 'on-screen', implying that there is more than one map at the player's disposal when in fact there is not. The tiny, nearly feature-free map inset in the HUD is the only way of learning and navigating around what are mostly homogeneous areas. One of the worst consequences of this little worthless map is that you are almost compelled to initially fail at many of the missions, because time-limits are used liberally, and when you learn where an objective point is simply by chasing a directional blip indicator on the HUD, you invariably do so very inefficiently at least once, resulting in mission failure.

  In addition to its size and detail inadequacies, the map also invites waves of frustration by marking virtually nothing. If you're in a mission, you can expect the map to show you nothing more than perhaps some targets or a waypoint. If you're not on a mission, you'll get the miserly offering of an icon for your safe house, and if you're lucky the gun shop and/or some other static landmark (and most of the time those don't show up either, as though I'm supposed to remember where the goddamn weapon shop is after having visited it twice). Don't ever look to the map for any indication of where those precious stars are located, or the armor or health items. Or the rampages or adrenalines either, for that matter. Note, I'm not griping that the game doesn't tell me where to find them initially, rather that once I've discovered them, the map should aid me in my quest to memorize the locations of these things as I play. Instead, the game leaves you out in the cold, displaying for you a nearly featureless patch of the map so small as to consist of barely more than the section of street that you're on, which ironically is actually the least valuable thing you'd wish to see. Certainly the player develops an increasing familiarity with the game locations as time passes, but even when the player is intimately familiar with the city, a large scale map would prove invaluable when plotting strategies for executing different missions. And a nice, detailed, large-scale map is precisely what the player needs most in the early game.

  Seriously, if you think I'm making this shit up, cycle through the screenshots and tell me how fucking useful those little map images look.

• In hindsight, my biggest gripe with the game isn't the death penalty or the map. It's the miserably, intolerably, ridiculously small radius of object persistence. Here's the single most common experience I had in GTA3, the one that essentially defined the game for me: driving down a street and seeing something (person/car/whatever), and then turning around in order to interact with it only to discover that it had mysteriously disappeared because it had moved outside of the persistence bubble surrounding the player. And when I say that this radius is small, I mean obnoxiously small, to the point that the city seemed less like a city than like a roving bubble of cars and people popping into and out of existence spontaneously. Again, if you attempt to explain this by saying that the game originated on the console and that the console doesn't have much memory, I will punch you. This nearly ruined the game for me. When a game hangs its hat on the ability to let you, as the player, do as you please, but then prevents you from turning your car around to lay the smack down on some gangster pimp who pops a cap at you as you drive down the street, the game has failed and you can't blame the console for that. And besides, I'm not playing on the console, I'm playing on a PC with 1GB of RAM! The game would have been infinitely better off with fewer pedestrians and cars, but which ACTUALLY EXIST OUTSIDE OF A 50 METER BUBBLE, than with the increased ped/car density that proves ultimately to be nothing more than noise. Frustrating noise.

• One last ugly - and this one makes me steaming mad because it is so ridiculously easy to fix. The stats are only visible as a rolling list, like the credits of a movie. This is simply terrible, a UI flaw so severe it makes me nauseated. The stats are compelling - it's incredibly interesting to note how many vehicles I've wrecked or my shooting accuracy or how many kgs of explosive I've used. To have this cornucopia of data only available as an uncontrollable quickly scrolling list of data is inexcusable. Those lines of data are no different than the lines of items in the game's multitude of menus. I can scroll up and down the menus, so why the hell can't I scroll up and down the stats? Terrible. Reprehensible. 1 million demerits for Rockstar. Kudos for tracking the stats in the first place, though.

• I lied - there's one more thing that's ultra-annoying. You can't skip past mid-mission cutscenes. Thankfully you can skip the initial mission briefings, otherwise I would have flung the CD off of the freeway overpass. But many missions have one or more mid-mission scenes where you lose camera control and are exposed to a conversation or action scene. There's nothing wrong with the cutscenes, mind you, but you *will* fail missions, and fail them frequently. The twelfth time you have to endure a conversation between some loser and a drug dealer, when you just want to mash the fucking spacebar and get on with the mission, you'll suffer -2 to sanity.

Beautiful

• The vehicle physics are just right. Not too hard, not too soft. All of the vehicles handle differently, and you're rewarded as you progress through the game with the availability of increasingly powerful sports cars. Driving is enjoyable and a skill that you can legitimately improve.

• Help tips that use your custom key mappings! Until this becomes the norm -- and it is inexcusable that it isn't -- I'm tempted to continue to log this in the Beautiful category, though I feel a bit surly for doing so, since what I really want to do is notch it up as Ugly anytime it isn't done. How a developer can simultaneously do the right thing with help tips, but miss something as obnoxious as the uncontrollable scrolling statistics is beyond me.

• Ok, here's where I give GTA3 some props. It might not be deep or complex, but GTA3 does just drop you in a city and says 'Have fun!'. In this sense, it is more of a game than most "games". GTA3 sets up a few rules for you and then just lets you play, like you probably haven't played since you had your fisher price toys scattered around the back yard. Since I've had GTA3 installed, it's icon has been what draws my mouse the strongest when I just sit down, feel like wasting some time playing something, but am not sure what. The barrier to entry in GTA3 is so low; you can be doing something immediately, and not stop doing it until you decide to quit playing. Many games confront you with a play session that may take multiple hours before you log some real fun, or chart significant progress. That doesn't make them necessarily better or worse than GTA3 or something like it, it just means that if I've got 30 minutes to kill, GTA3 casts a fairly strong spell because I know that I can have fun in those 30 minutes, and then quit. The downside to this is that because the gameplay in GTA3 is so immediate, I found that I had a play session threshold of no more than a few hours. It's a lot like a console fighting game. This might also be partly because I've been sticking pretty closely to the missions, and after a few hours of those, my frustration level has accumulated to the extent that I need to get away and do something else. If I just get in the game and screw around, I don't necessarily play longer, but I do come away from the session with a lot less frustration. GTA3 is precisely the kind of thing that you play when you're at a LAN party and servers aren't going because people are busy installing stuff or there's a lull while everyone grabs some food. Even just 5 or 10 minutes in GTA3 can be fruitful.

Summary

I have an idea for how GTA3 could have been better. Regarding the missions - some of them I very much enjoyed, like assassinations, and really anything that didn't have a time limit. Other missions I found myself intermittently enjoying, depending on the mood I was in. The problem is that the game doles out the missions sequentially, in direct contrast to how you're allowed to play the rest of the game. That wouldn't be a problem if the missions themselves didn't encompass gameplay opportunities that you can't get any other way. Sure, at any given time you may have as many as three potential employers from which to choose jobs, but other times you'll be down to one, leaving you with essentially no choice but to take whatever is being offered. Furthermore, once you've reached the end of the campaign, whether you were enjoying the missions or not, they're gone. What I would have liked to have seen was the game offer up the missions categorically, essentially all the time. Perhaps the campaign could force you to complete any given type of mission a small number of times before it allows you to sign up for that kind of mission again anytime you want. For example, wouldn't it be cool to be able to take a Paparazzi Purge mission whenever you want? In the same way that anytime I jack a cop car, I can turn on the vigilante mission, I'd like for the game to have registered landmarks that become associated with specific mission types, or simply have mission icons appear randomly as you drive around the city. For example, the El Burro phonebooth could, once you're done with the El Burro missions, become the hot spot for getting an assassination job or a flamethrower mission, etc.. This seems like precisely what GTA3 is trying to do anyway, provide you with a sandbox and a number of different things to do in it. I see no reason why (at least some of) the odd jobs throughout the campaign can't have been generalized enough to become additional permanently available indulgences, allowing the game to further cater to your whim.

Is GTA3 fun? As always, that's entirely up to you. And certainly to a greater degree than most games, it depends on how you *decide* to play it. Take it on your own terms and you'll have a good time with it. Missions getting frustrating? Screw 'em. Just drive around town and look for secret packages, or find a good unique jump spot and start hurling cars in the air, or whatever. Don't be afraid of using the cheat codes below, either. GTA3 is at its worst when you let it dictate how you spend your time in the game. It's necessary to slog through the story missions in order to open up the entire city, but I didn't really start to enjoy GTA3 until I realized that the missions could and should be ignored at my leisure just like everything else, and allowed myself to indulge in both them and the other activities that the game offers at my own pace.