The Past and times of Yore: Grand Theft Auto 3, the new chapter
Release Date: October 26th 2001 Genre: Action/Adventure Publisher: Rockstar Games Developer: DMA Design/Rockstar North Platform: Playstation 2, PC, XBOX, Android, OSX Players: 1 Classification:M
Well this is it, probably the most influential and
groundbreaking of the Grand Theft Auto games to date, Grand Theft Auto 3 one of
the most popular games for the PS2 and one of my favourite games ever. As many
of you might know Grand Theft
Auto 5 has come out recently on PC which I am now avidly playing, so I
thought it would be a good time to review the first of the series to pioneer
the 3D aspect and one of my favourite games of all time. Having first played
the original GTA and GTA2 It took me awhile to
get GTA3 as we didn’t end up getting a Playstation 2 for awhile and I was stuck
playing Driver 2. Not that
it was a bad thing of course it’s just most of my friends had PS2’s so I was
kind caught out and even when we had sleepovers/parties etc we did that whole
“pass the controller around” thing playing GTA3 on the PS2 which I understand
now why it’s good to do it that way because especially at parties you want to
sort of have a go then chillout not be playing constantly. But I had brought my
PS1 specifically with all these multiplayer games and all these controllers
(and the multitap) and it seemed like a bit of a waste but anyway that’s what
happened.
Our antihero, the then-nameless thug
We eventually got a PS3 and GTA3 was the first game we got
I’m pretty sure, I think I’ve played it through about 6 times now including the
one on my Asus Nexus 7 tablet though I didn’t make this a an Android
and his Nexus post because I’ve only played it once on that and besides
it’s really for Tablet games only. I suppose I don’t really need to explain
this but in the beginning the original Grand Theft Auto was a top-down birds
eye view style game which I loved but was kind of redundant with no ability to
save and was pretty damn hard in some cases especially when you could die with
a one hit kill and couldn’t really aim your gun. GTA2 made this a bit better
with the same top down view but much better graphics and lighting inc the option to play the game at night. It also had a better weapon selection and of
course saving ability.
Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2
But this was nothing compared to what happened next, GTA3
on the PS2 brought true 3D, bird’s eye no longer. I can still remember the
wonder we all had when it came out, it just looked so damn good, and even
without ragdoll physics, running over pedestrians, stealing and smashing cars,
shooting people, blowing stuff up and all the things you do in the game had
never felt better. This was one of the games I loved playing for the first time
as it had one of those start-from-nothing starts that I love so much though it
can be argued that you never really amount to much anyway but we’ll get into
that later. Other things I loved about most of the starting area was just
randomly exploring and experimenting with the world and mechanics which is what
made GTA great. While not being the first this game was one of the earliest and
most popular sandbox for its time and the series was part of the reason for the
massive success of the Playstation 2 console.
"My Stallion!"
So let’s get into it shall we, the story of GTA3 begins with
you being betrayed by your “love” Catalina
which most people will remember from the events of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas which
apparently happened before the events of GTA3. I’ll sidetrack a bit here to
explain about GTA’s protagonist who you play, he is basically a no-name thug
who was betrayed and jailed and escapes then works his way back up also never
speaks for some reason. We didn’t really question this as we were having too
much fun to care until San Andreas where we find that he is actually mute and
when the 10th Anniversary edition of the game came out that his name
was “Claude”, but we didn’t know this back then and it didn’t really matter.
Claude is betrayed by Catalina
After the betrayal you are travelling in a prison van when the bridge gets blown
up in a prison break attempt by the Columbian Cartel in which you
and your prison friend 8-ball are able to escape. You then basically go on a
crime wave of various different jobs for a Variety of gangs inc the Mafia, Diablos, Yardies and Yakuza plus a range of other singular
characters, the game had a much deeper and cinematic storyline then the
previous games as there was actually full cutscenes and you also had a much
bigger sense of presence being much closer to the action so basically any of
your actions had much more weight to them, especially killing people which went
from comical to slightly less comical but was still confronting at the time
leading to various controversies.
Fist fighting (this shot is taken on the Android version of the game hence the action buttons on the bottom right)
The main weight of
the story is you getting revenge on Catalina for her betrayal as she is the
main antagonist of the story though you do make more enemies as you go along.
This game does not have the previous “Respect” system that GTA2 had you
basically do various missions for the different gangs with the end result of
some attacking you on sight though unlike the previous game you cannot simply
gain the respect back by attacking either gang making it much more dangerous to
go back to old areas meaning that it was advisable to do nay alternate or
collection quests before doing the story missions.
The game map is loosely
based on New York City, starting on the Portland (Industrial/Brooklyn) district
you gradually make your way through Staunton Island (Business/Manhattan) to
Shoreside Vale (Residential/Staten Island) by doing the main story missions. This was the first of the GTA games to be on a single map and feature blocked
access preventing you from gaining access to other areas, this is done by
various methods inc: bridges being blown up or under repair, tunnels being
blocked off and preventing the protagonist from being able to swim thus
drowning if they fall into water. The map was notably bigger and obviously not
split into 3 different levels/cities as per previous games though there was a
short loading time when you switched islands.
Map of the City from the game case, you can see most characters displayed around it.
The world was
plenty big enough back then and there also seemed to be a little more nature
areas then before though the main thing was the change to 3D and all of the
experimentation that came with it. The graphics though nothing by today’s
standards with polygonal faces and round balls for hands but back then it was
pretty damn good, sure there’s was a bit of clipping and tearing as there were
a fair few buildings and objects that the camera could clip through and there
were some instances where the camera got a bit annoyingbut for the most part it was ok, it was
everything you could want in acity
really, lots of people, lots of cars, lots of cops :P the level of details was
pretty good.
The world was essentially fully working.
This was the first GTA on console and the PS2 controller worked
absolutely fine, controlling your character was basically just like an RPG with
one stick moving and the other stick to look around you soon got used to
walking, running and jumping around, stealing cars, punching people and it all
looking so much better in 3D. Although there was no ragdoll it was still fund
to see the physics engine in motion with full 3D rendered models as you just
didn’t get this in the previous two games. The aiming system though much better
than the original two games did have drawbacks as it was relatively hard to
free-aim at things and using weapons like the Sniper rifle were quite difficult
which is why nowadays I usually play GTA games on PC with a PS3 style
controller for backup.
Guns could now be aimed and you automatically followed your target when locked on.
As this was a GTA
game there of course the weapons
which contained basically all you needed inc a Baseball bat, Pistol, Molotov
Cocktail, Uzi, Shotgun, AK-47, Grenades, M16, Flamethrower, Sniper Rifle Rocket
Launcher. With most of which utilizing the “lock-on” feature by pressing one of
the shoulder buttons of the PS2 controller whereas the others were either
thrown or used scoped aiming, this helped immensely with aiming as basically
before you just pointed yourself in the right direction and hopefully didn’t
get shot firstor just sprayed your
bullets though it did look kind of funny when using a one-handed weapon while
running around and shooting as you bent your arm in all sorts of directions.
But for the most part the combat was good, it was fun punching random people or
smacking them with the baseball bat and blowing people up or setting them on
fire, the weapons had a very punchy feel inc the Shotgun (obviously) an the
Sniper Rifle.
Doing this was very satisfying the first time.
I liked most of the weapons but my favourites were probably the
AK-47 with its raw rattatat sound and animation, the M16 which was scope aimed
for some reason (despite not having a scope) and was ridiculously powerful, it
could explode a car in a second and made mince meat out of anyone who got it
the way, both of the weapons could be fired straight and level without aiming
too which made the great for multiple targets. The Flamethrower was another of
my favourites due to the fact that it just looked so good, the particle
animation was still way better than the ones in Vice city and San Andreas.
Fwooosh! it's burning time
This wouldn’t be a
Grand Theft Auto game of course without the cars, driving was heaps more fun
too due to the obvious fact that you could actually see the road ahead of you
this time, though interestingly enough you could actually switch back to using
the top down view if you wanted too though I don’t know why you would as you
couldn’t see anything when under a roof or bridge and the Portland area had the
railway line on the top most of the time. One of my favourite pastimes was doing
doughnuts on grassy areas using the Stallion
which was also one of my favourite cars, driving using the controller was quite
simple you just used the triangle button to get in (or jack the car) accelerate
with X, brake with square and the to shoulder button to handbrake, then there
was the extra things like looking behind and to either side to do drive by
shooting. Drive by shooting was a feature actually introduced in Grand Theft Auto: London, 1961 by
way of a power-up but was not freely available to do at any time in most cars
until GTA3 though only if you have the Uzi
equipped as this was the only weapon that could do drive-by shooting.
Drive by from "in-car" view
That
wasn’t the only thing though, in the new 3D Universe (which the Playstation 2
era games were called) you could now roll and flip your car all over the place
and in addition to this many Unique Jumps were placed around the city which were
pretty awesome as you knew they were triggered by the slow-mo where you could
watch yourself win (or fail) with style. Similar to GTA2 there were no
motorcycles available in the game but the amount of cars was enough as with
previous games you had a whole range of vehicles to choose from cars, trucks,
emergency vehicles, gang cars and of course a solitary plane (sortof).
The Dodo, probably the most popular vehicle in GTA3 and one of the GTA's most iconic vehicles in the series
GTA3 was the first of the
series to have proper emergency vehicle and taxi missions. No longer do you
just get into a Taxi and a random pedestrian just gets in and gives you money
to take him wherever you want to go, this time around you can actually take
fares, ferry people to the hospital and even be a Vigilante with various
rewards such as cars, health and bribe pickups. These missions were kind of fun
but very hard in a way too, especially getting top the highest level with them,
the Taxi missions were only 100 fares so was pretty easy as you didn’t have to
use the same car. The Police and Paramedic ones were incredibly hard as if you
crashed your Ambulance it was game over, the Vigilante missions gave you 20
seconds out of your Police car to either shoot the criminals or find a new one
but often there was none to be found and keeping yourself and your car intact
was no mean feat especially when some criminals were armed with shotguns.
Sometimes it's good to actually help people.
This also wouldn’t be a GTA game without the sound and
music, yes the radio
was back again and in full force this time with a variety of different radio
stations inc the first ever (and possibly the most popular) talk radio station Chatterbox FM and was possibly
the first appearance from Lazlow who has been in every GTA game since. The Radio
stations unfortunately still were not updated with more popular music instead
compromising of various lesser-known bands and music which was actually written
and performed for the game itself. The lesser-known music was probably used as
the licences for more popular and well-known modern music was either
unavailable or too expensive however I was very fond of the Double Clef
FM radio station which had a truly spectacular version of La Donna E Mobile
and a great selection of other classics as well (damn I’m even sounding like Merryweather) and there was
also rap, techno, pop/rock, 70/80s, drum’n’bass and Reggae stations. This
wasn’t too bad as a lot of the music was pretty catchy and is remembered today
and when Vice city came out GTA started having proper popular tracks in the
radio. Each gang car had their own favourite Radio station too, such as Double Clef
FM with the Mafia Sentinel
La donna รจ mobile!
The sound and sound effects were pretty much what you would expect, I
liked all the gun noises and explosions though there really isn’t much to say
as it sounded fine to me. The biggest addition of course was the dialogue as
the previous two games had basically none at all except for the cutscenes, the
game was now almost fully voiced (funnily enough except for the protagonist)
and even the pedestrians say random things as you walk by and react when you
steal cars attack other etc. I spent a few times fighting the police and it was
fun to hear the banter of the two in the helicopter saying things like “stop
police!” “just shoot him!” “I can see my house from here!”
Tony Cipriani, The Mafia Capo
Speaking of the Police they are back in force for this game, you have up to 6 wanted stars as per usual, the cops in this game are pretty annoying as you can't really have much fun without getting at least a 1 star wanted level as their pretty touchy. As with GTA2 the police have a similar level of escalation going from casual to serious to all out with a helicopter and roadblocks, then to SWAT Vans then to the FBI with fast cars and machine guns then finally to the Army with M16's Trucks and Tanks. I've only got to this stage a few times but you don't last long.
5-0 in force
Gangs
make a return for GTA3 though are not the main forefront for the game as in
GTA2 they are involve a large part of the story missions, other gangs and
random missions not in the storyline are accessed through answering ringing
payphones in various areas, they do still patrol their territory and have their
own vehicles moving around which you can make use of, the most prominent threat
they create is that when you pass certain points in the storyline a different
gang becomes hostile to you (for example the Triads after you blow up their
factory) this makes travelling in that area difficult and trying to do extra
missions such as Hidden Packages, Unique Jumps
andTaxi and Emergency Vehicle missions
extra hard as you are constantly being attacked and pulled out of your car.
Speaking of which there is variety of extra activates and missions you can now
do in addition to the Taxi and Emergency vehicle missions which I have detailed
below:
Blow up gang cars in the Remote control car missions.
Ah the elusive hidden packages, spent a bit of time getting these
I tried several times to get the %100 but failed at %98
twice I think, after that the GTA games just got bigger so I didn’t even
bother, the extra activities were a great addition to the series as they gave
you something else to do as well as all of the random things. Other things I
liked was all the easter eggs you could find inc one really strange one where
you can drive through this old rail tunnel and find a bunch of bums with Molotov cocktails. But anyway GTA3 was
one of my all time favourite games and although I got to it late (as with most
games) I played the absolute hell out of it, I think I’ve finished it at least
6 times now, several of those going for %100 completion which was time
consuming even then. The game was not free from controversy of course being banned
in Australia (due to prostitution and bashing of hookers etc) shortly after
release but of course that only increased the popularity.
Te "Liberator" mission
So the graphics may be outdated and the features may be
small compared to the newer games, but all would agree this was one of the
greatest and most groundbreaking games to come out of the 21st
century so far and has turned a already popular series into a massive one.
No comments:
Post a Comment