There are two things you need to know before you read much further. First, I am so eager to write about Grand Theft Auto: Vice City that I can't wait to finish the full story line before putting some of those thoughts down. I'm only 25% of the way through the game, according to the in-game stats, and I don't know how long it'll take me to finish to my satisfaction. Second, I'm going to discuss this game in detail and I'm not going to pull many punches for the sake of people that haven't played it. So if it's going to spoil the game for you to read the specifics of certain missions, the game's structure, and so forth, just stop reading now. Come back later when you've played the game and want to discuss it in detail.

I've had Vice City for over two weeks and I've squeezed in as much playing time as family and work and sleep will allow. At times I find myself completely sucked into the world, unwilling and unable to give it up for even the basic needs of sleep or food. Other times, I've shaken my head in disbelief at how poorly particular bit worked out. I can say up front that I've gotten a good bit of my $50 back in enjoyment already, and with lots and lots of things yet to do, the $50 will seem well spent in a few weeks when I'm nearing completion. At that point, I'll begin exploring just how deep the world really goes, searching out all the nuances and limits as I did in GTA3 for literally months.

Until then, however, GTA:VC presents me with a lot to talk about. First up is the main character and his friends.

Tommy Vercetti & Co.
Unlike GTA3's no-name, no-voice protagonist, Vice City's main character is the loud-mouthed Tommy Vercetti. After 15 years in prison refusing to squeal on the mob, Tommy's reward upon release is a trip to Vice City to start up a new operation for the family. The deal goes bad, he ends up out both a load of drugs and an equal load of money, and the family back in Liberty City expects him to make it up.

Voiced by Ray Liotta, Tommy is in many ways a better alter ego than GTA3's mute gangster. He speaks not only during the cut scenes, but also while out and about town, regularly reminding me that there is a specific character with a specific personality that I'm playing. The dialogue he's been given is that of a wise-cracking thug, always angry and condescending to the folks around him. From random people on the street that get in the way to the very top level drug lords, he lets everyone know how things would be run, were he in charge.

And, ultimately, that's where the game seems headed: putting Tommy in complete control of Vice City. Since the drug-deal-gone-bad, I've managed to eliminate the drug kingpin, Diaz, and take over his operations and his mansion. I've got control of some local business protection rackets, and I own a print works that's producing money for me with plates I ripped off from the local Triads. I've gained some rep with the Cubans in town after helping them disrupt some Haitian operations. I suspect that a few more jobs for the manager of a rock band and I'll even be a big shot in the entertainment world of Vice City. It's worth pointing out that this progression would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, with the tongue-tied tough guy from GTA3: in that sense, the gregarious alter ego works in this game. I can see, however, that if I didn't like Tommy's character as much as I do, that the whole package would lose some of its appeal. There might actually be advantages to the strong, silent type, as with Gordon Freeman in Half-life: the player can imagine for himself the actual details of the character.

Tommy also has a buddy, Lance Vance, voiced by Philip Michael Thomas, who helps run the business and who accompanies him on some missions. This relationship isn't nearly as successful or entertaining as I had initially hoped. There are some classic moments, like sneaking into the mall as cops, where the humourous dialogue could be straight out of a Lethal Weapon movie. But other times, the chemistry just isn't there, such as the time when Tommy rescues Lance from Diaz's goons. It is especially forced when Lance starts calling Tommy's cell phone raising hell over not being included in enough of the operations, hinting at his insecurity and paranoia. The plot is too thin and the relationship between Lance and Tommy is not developed enough for these conversations to make sense. Also, since there isn't going to be another opportunity to come back to this, the AI for Lance is awful. I've had to practically lead him around by the hand to get him to go various places. When you're in the middle of a gunfight, that's the last thing you want to happen.

Tommy isn't all mouth, especially when it comes to Colonel Cortez and his daughter Mercedes. At first, given the introduction in the first Cortez mission, I felt that Tommy and Mercedes would work out to be a romantically linked couple over the course of the game. Now, a full quarter through the game, and even more than halfway through the storyline, the one other run-in with Mercedes seems to point the other direction. What I perceived as a genuine build-up to a romantic interest has been wasted, leaving Mercedes looking a bit like a tramp and Tommy with no serious interest in her whatsoever. I'm willing to accept that I misread the game's intentions early on, but also I feel that a relationship would have presented an opportunity for a real maturation in this series. A strong, smart, sexy woman like Mercedes would have made a perfect complement to Tommy's roughneck approach to business. Still, Rockstar decided to go a different way with the story up to this point, and I may still be surprised at what happens near the end.

The other folks you encounter in the city all fit neatly into various stereotypes. You have Rosenberg, the nervous, strung out, scumbag lawyer. He gets to voice one of my favorite small touches in the game. When you've been busted and the scene fades to black, you occasionally hear him defending you from the authorities, saying "My client wasn't even in town that day, and you know it!". Cortez is the smooth, millionaire-with-a-yacht type, possibly from Central America. Diaz plays a despicable, diminutive drug lord, complete with a thick accent. Incidentally, the back of the manual shows Diaz with a couple of hot chicks known as "The Twins", yet they haven't shown up while I've played and now that Diaz is dead, I wonder if they didn't just get cut completely during development. The Cubans could be straight out of any Hollywood movie and Antie Poulet sounds like Miss Cleo of the Psychic Friends Hotline. Kent Paul is an annoying Brit waving his Britness around in front of Americans for effect, and the band Love Fist is a poor reproduction of Spinal Tap's brilliant take on bratty Brit bands. Avery Carrington is a rich, cutthroat tycoon with a Texas accent, and despite my aversion to bad Southern stereotypes, he doesn't bother me that much.

Putting aside the reliance on strong stereotypes for the moment, the variety of players in GTA:VC strikes me as a step up from GTA3. While the cultural hatred between factions persists, Tommy's mission is all about making money and gaining power. He is a businessman that will take advantage of opportunities that might involve racial hatreds, but the game hasn't involved me too much in gang-against-gang warfare. When the Triads have the plates for printing bills, my focus wasn't snuffing out gang members, it was on making cash. When Tommy finally gets the upper hand with Diaz, I didn't care about the revenge. Instead I wanted Diaz's place in the food chain.

In this sense, the game is just starting to work for me, in a way that GTA3 couldn't. The people around me are no longer masters that I eventually slough off, merely to work for another master. That's GTA3. Now, I play stooge to these guys only long enough to get the upper hand, and then I take over. Bit by bit, Tommy's power over the city grows and I feel more like it's my city. Contrast this with GTA3 and the way in which Shoreside Vale eventually opens up, but only at the expense of Chinatown and St. Mark's places that I can never visit safely again. I don't expect to play GTA3 much in those areas after I've finished them; in Vice City, I'm hoping that I'll enjoy playing in the end a lot more precisely because I own the city.

The Missions
The story of Tommy's rise to power moves forward through the completion of several dozen missions, much like those in GTA3. There are, however, some very important differences. First, a bit more nonlinearity have been introduced into the game's structure. You can complete missions for the Cubans, the Haitians, Kent Paul, Avery Carrington, and various other groups. These can often be done in a different order by each player, and there are certain turning points where new sets of missions become available. In GTA3, you may recall, most of the core missions had to be done in roughly the same order. Occasionally you would end up with a situation where you could work for Donald Love, Asuka, or possibly Ray, and those could be done in any order. But the number of bottlenecks, places where the game required you to do a handful of missions in linear fashion, seemed higher in GTA3. On the map in GTA:VC right now, I have icons showing that I can do work for the Cubans, Haitians, Kent Paul, Mitch Baker, and a guy who's calling a pay phone somewhere in town.

And that's not all I could be doing that would advance my rise to power. I could also be buying The Malibu (a club), a cab company, an ice cream company, a movie company, and the shipping docks. Given what happened when I bought the print works, I would expect each of those to open up a series of missions unique to that business. When you realize just how open the world can be, you realize that the free-roaming world of GTA3 was just a first step. Now Vice City truly makes a complete city available for you to take over piece by piece, in practically any order you choose.

While this part of the mission structure really appeals to me, it doesn't address a couple of problems in the missions themselves. In particular, we still have to repeat difficult missions from the very beginning until they're finished. As with GTA3, there are some difficult missions for which this game mechanic becomes tiresome and frustrating. I've pointed this out before, and I've given an example of how this kind of repetition could have been mitigated. Even without getting that fancy, missions like the stunt boat mission need not be so difficult to restart; why do I have to dock my boat, drive back to the Cuban cafe, get the mission again, and then drive back to the docks? A better solution would be to put the mission start point at the docks after it's been triggered once, and this would limit the frustration level. There do seem to be fewer timed missions, which is a welcome change, and thus they're a much slighter frustration. Yet, I wonder which of these really have to be timed. Some timed missions I completely understand, like saving Lance at the junkyard before he's tortured to death. Others, like delivering Mercedes to Love Fist before they have to go on stage at a concert seem just silly. Why not have the pay scale with how quickly you can get a timed mission done, with a clock that counts up instead of one that counts down?

There are, as in GTA3, the so-called "R3" missions, activated by clicking the R3 button on the PS2 controller while in special types of vehicles. In addition to the Vigilante, Taxi, and Paramedic missions of GTA3, I've also run into the Pizza Delivery missions. While riding your scooter around town, you make your deliveries by firing off pizzas the same way you'd do a drive-by shooting. This is pretty fun, but I haven't seen any rewards, other than a piddling amount of money, from getting up through level 7. The Vigilante missions seem more challenging, which I have to admit I really enjoy. When I managed to get a vice squad car (think Sonny and Crockett) and do Vigilante missions, it was great fun, and now that I understand how to use drive-by shooting to slow down a suspect's car, I think it's going to be a real joy to try to complete them. Still, the small evolution in the R3 missions is a welcome improvement.

The Vehicles
As you've probably already heard, we finally get to drive motorcycles in a 3D GTA game. Yay! This alone is almost worth the price of playing Vice City, and I have to agree with all the other reviews I've seen: the controls are perfect. It's thrilling to zip along the streets of Vice City on a PCJ 600, darting through the winding alleyways, leaning into the curves, popping wheelies to show off, and finally whipping to a stop at trip's end. Of course, the price for that fun is the occasional close encounter with a solid object that suddenly appears in the way, such as a car or wall. While not usually fatal, these are quite painful and can be downright frustrating when you've got a timed mission objective to achieve quickly.

I have complained greatly about the new handling of the cars in Vice City. While I have now become more accustomed to the new feel, I have not been convinced that the new system is an advance over the previous one. I now believe, after much more time behind the wheel, that more vehicles are prone to a drift type of handling, and that the skids that result from collisions are simply one of the easiest ways to demonstrate this. As such, a lighter touch is required for almost all vehicles, something I've adjusted to. Just be prepared, if you're coming from GTA3, to make a similar adjustment.

Instead of the crippled Dodo airplane, Rockstar saw fit to include real flying craft as a natural part of the game. I've already flown RC helicopters, RC planes, and found a full-sized helicopter on my mansion's rooftop helipad. From high above, the view is truly amazing, and worth learning the somewhat taxing controls of both the planes and the copters. As I've said before, I think the two analog sticks provide a better method of control than the method given in the manual and in the on-screen instructions, but be sure to try both. I think that flying planes and copters around is probably the part of exploration I'm most looking forward to, after I've finished the storyline.

Finally, we have boats. There are some special quirks about boats that I think deserve special criticism. The speedboats I've driven seem exceptionally difficult to handle, even compared to the slicker car handling and especially when compared to the tight bike handling. While every other vehicle has, undoubtedly, been made unrealistically easier to handle, the boats in Vice City actually seem slightly more difficult to handle than I would have wanted. This isn't to say that you can't eventually handle a boat like a man with big cajones (don't ask me, ask the Cubans), but after the loose handling of everything else, they feel unnaturally stiff each time you step up to the wheel. Furthermore, I still feel that getting into and out of boats is far more awkward than it needs to be. In one particular circumstance, I actually fell into the water several times, each time losing just a tiny bit of health, and then miraculously warped up onto the dock. Unfortunately, as I've complained before, the camera is prone to whipping around unhelpfully, and this was one such instance, so each time I warped up onto the dock, the camera put me such that the slightest movement forward put me right back into the drink. Fortunately, I realized that I needed to just let it warp me up and stop moving, and that ugly cycle stopped. Given that embarking and disembarking was similarly awkward in GTA3, I'd hoped that this would have been less difficult by now. Between this issue and the handling, I've had a lot less fun with boats than one might have expected.

The World of Vice City
Compared to Liberty City, Vice City's world is full of tiny details that really have raised my expectations for future games. Random citizens do get on and off mass transit busses that drive around town. There are trash bags sitting outside of stores and in alleyways. Diaz's mansion has a golf club sitting by the front door. There are more types of people walking the streets, and lots of very different looking areas of town. From the industrial docks to the high-rise downtown to the shacks of the slums to the sunny, shiny waterfront to the glare-covered crystal clear water of the bay with rocks visible far below, this is as fully realized a city as I've ever seen in a video game.

And, amazingly, the world seems to literally spool right off the disc and onto the screen. Starting from the sandy beach near the lighthouse on one end of the city, you can drive right past the waterfront hotels with pools and diving boards and past the mall and right up to a movie studio with a fully detailed movie set, including the little table on the side with cups of coffee and wires running across the floor to the lights and camera. There is only one load time in the large sense, going from the west island to the east one, or back. On a smaller scale, there is a shorter load time any time you enter a building with more than one room in it. These are completely bearable, but I have to admit that I'm still looking forward to the promised land of a completely dynamically world. They have to be close: I can't imagine that the lighthouse part of the world all the way up to the movie studio's coffee cups are all contained in the PS2 system's RAM all at one time.

As with GTA3, the radio stations play a part in making the world seem more alive. Unfortunately, I have not found a replacement station in this time period that I like as much as I liked K-Jah and Horace "The Pacifist" Walsh or Lazlow's Chatterbox. The best replacement for K-Jah is Wildstyle's pirate radio that has some decent material, but I don't find the DJ (whose name I don't know) to be nearly as entertaining. The chat radio station in Vice City is ok, but I think that some sense of subtlety was lost in the development of this new material. Whereas Chatterbox was just on the edge of being believable sometimes, I have found the guests on KCHAT to be a little too outrageous to make a successful parody. On the other hand, I haven't heard nearly all the material that the radio has to offer, so my perception may change over time. It did, after all, take me a good two months to realize just how brilliant K-Jah was.

One last little touch, that I think is really awesome, is the Good Citizen Bonus. If you happen to be on the street when a cop goes after a criminal (other than you, that is) you can hunt down the criminal yourself and get a $50 reward for your time. Sure, that's really a tiny bit of the game, but it's just that kind of detail that can make a game classic.

Bugs
I have run into a couple of bugs that I feel I should mention. First, I have had the game lock up once right after I failed a Rampage. I got completely schooled trying to take out some gang members down near a dock, and when the screen faded to white, it never came back. Waiting 5 minutes did nothing, and after that I tried opening and closing the drive, which has worked before on other games. No such luck here, and I lost a good half-hour of progress. (A half-hour can be significant when you're getting at most an hour or so a day to play the game.) Also, I've gotten a cop to chase me out of his car and then, when I got into the same, obviously empty car a few seconds later, had him reappear inside the car, push me out, and bust me without a chance to get away. Also, I'm not sure whether to call it a bug or not, but the arrow that shows your position on the map seems to be amazingly inaccurate at times. I've seen it be about a half-block off from where I really was, which can be confusing if you need to check the map during a frantic chase and you want to be sure of exactly where you are and where to go next. Finally, while I know it happened some in GTA3, I consider the "car vanishes when doing a cut scene" behaviour to be a bug. This has happened to me several times, and it frustrates me every time I have to deal with it, and I can't help but feel that it could be mitigated by the developers. Regardless, the bugs have been pretty minimal, and given the extra detail and sophistication that's gone into the engine since GTA3, I have to feel that's a decent accomplishment.

Almost Final Words
Vice City can't help but evoke the following question: Is it better than GTA3? As I hope I've managed to convey above, the answer is quite simply, Yes. A more important question, I believe, is whether it is better in ways that set it apart as an entirely new generation of game. I'm still struggling with that, to be honest. I think that there are parts of Vice City that smack of "fixing things that could have been in GTA3". Putting the motorcycles in, for example, is such an evolutionary step forward, as is the more nonlinear plot structure. Similarly, the story is a level above that in GTA3, even if it does too often feel a little amateur with the random phone calls from Lance, weak character development, and some inexplicable plot holes. (For example, why would Kent Paul be the one that knows that Lance has been taken to the city dump by Diaz's men?) Yet, it is hard to deny that the idea of taking over a city piece by piece and actually collecting money from businesses is a new dimension that holds some intriguing possibilities. Taken a step further, one can imagine a full turf war being waged, Civilization-like, over the course of future games. Graphically, the game is an evolutionary step, albeit a large one in some areas, over GTA3. Musically, the game is richer, but I think that it is possible that the biting humour of GTA3's talk radio will be better in the long run. In terms of sheer density of detail, Vice City seems to be nearing the point of a wholly new standard.

At this time, I'd have to say that I think that Vice City is worth full price for just about everyone. If you haven't played GTA3, then I think you'll find GTA:VC to be just as entertaining. If you have already played GTA3, then you're likely to be pining for a game that gives you a lot more of the same kind of thrill. Either way, you're set with Vice City. However, I do think that it sets my expectations for GTA4 even higher, and I'm not sure that I'll be as patient if it is merely one more incremental evolution over the basic framework in GTA3.

In a few weeks, when I'm much further along in the game, I hope to revisit this game and write an final word on it. Remember: I'm only 25% of the way through!