Status Chovus Dec 12, 2024
Drunken bumper cars
Played as far as the 1st Vice City map and that was all I could tolerate. I always wanted to see how this awesome franchise started but I was not expecting this game to be so bad. Biggest problem early on was the lack of any in game map, and the arrows pointing in the general direction …
Drunken bumper cars
Played as far as the 1st Vice City map and that was all I could tolerate. I always wanted to see how this awesome franchise started but I was not expecting this game to be so bad. Biggest problem early on was the lack of any in game map, and the arrows pointing in the general direction did not help when there were different islands with bridges. I ended up using an online map with everything marked, and pressing select to tell me what neighborhood I was in. Navigation was doable but still no excuse to not have any in game map whatsoever. Then the driving was atrocious. I was constantly crashing into stuff. The overhead camera did not show far enough ahead to go too fast. Never in a GTA game have I so felt the need to go the speed limit and follow traffic laws! Then the camera jostled around like it was on a helicopter following the player, which would have made me motion sick if I was susceptible to that. And there were overhead things that blocked the view. It did not help that damaged vehicles did not drive straight and that turning felt too sensitive. I actually preferred to drive the big trucks because I was not constantly over steering and banging into stuff. I hated the driving, and that was supposed to be the main point of the game. The on foot controls were even worse, using D pad to rotate facing and X to go forward, as if he was a car. It was difficult to tell what way the guy was facing, which led to me walking right off into drowning multiple times. He also got stuck on stuff all the time and sometimes got into infinite loops trying to get into a vehicle that was slightly blocked. Combat was also bad with no lock on or reticule, and 1 hit deaths. Once I lay in ambush with a flamethrower to kill a guy only for him to touch me while on fire, catching me on fire and I somehow died before him. Wtf. Armor only gave 3 extra hp and vehicles did not last long under fire.
In Liberty City 1 I failed about half of the missions, usually because of bullshit time limits. I did not go out of my way for weapons, armor or powerups, but did regulary use pay and spray to lose the cops. Cops were extremely dangerous because it only took 1 touch to be busted. Though during 1 Vice City mission the cop hauled me out of the car only to be somehow killed by it running him over and me left shocked that I was still there. I had to use the map to find secret missions to get enough points for part 2. Here I did the same only I accidentally drove into water on the way to the ending mission, and that was my last life. Like the fuck I am replaying the level. It was dumb how the game only saved between maps and how game structure was more like an arcade game with no real penalty for failing missions other than having to grind more score. So I used cheats to unlock San Andreas and give me 99 lives. I beat the 1st SA but definitely spent more lives that I would have had without cheating. Missions that did not fail upon being wasted or busted were the best. The ending mission did not show where to go like in Liberty City, so I was confused and quit to the menu to use cheats to move to SA 2. Here I failed so many missions that I had to grind selling cars to the crane for more than half the target score, which was very boring. Again the end mission did not show an arrow but I figured out where to go using a walkthrough. I failed almost every mission in Vice City 1. I did 3 payphone areas but the game said there was more, however I called it here because I was not enjoying the game. There was an impressive amount of content but the lousy gameplay was not worth putting up with to see the crude story and ok or miss mission design. The music never worked, possibly having something to do with converting the game to PSP. I also could not get the London expansion to work. The rom site had them as separate games but trying to play London said to insert the base game disk. Merging them into the 1 eboot did not work either because the PSP did not recognize the prompt to switch disks. Don't think I am missing much. Hopefully 2 will be a significant improvement.
5.5/10
