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Rockstar Games ports a PSP title to the PS2. With Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Rockstar Games succeeded in bringing the console experience to a handheld. It even managed to reenergize the PSP. While Liberty City Stories was very impressive for a handheld, its transition to the PS2 highlights some of its shortfalls.
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories takes place in Grand Theft Auto III’s Liberty City. This means that you’ll have access to all three of the islands that made up the PS2 (and PC and Xbox) versions of the game complete with every single sidewalk, alleyway and structure present. In the game you play as the Leone’s family Toni Cipriani. Since the game takes place a few years before Grand Theft Auto III, this is when Toni was just starting up, taking on lowly missions before becoming the big-time mobster he was in that game. In typical Rockstar fashion, the story is excellently directed and voiced.
The gameplay should be familiar to Grand Theft Auto fans. The game features a massive environment that you can interact with, whether this means that you’ll steal cars, beat up on citizens, or cause havoc to attract the police’s attention. If you want to continue the story, you’ll participate in a series of missions. The missions are given to you by people you meet in the game who usually want to help themselves and hire you to make sure it happens. When you meet this person, their name will appear on the map so you can go back to them for more missions or take missions from another person since the game is fairly nonlinear. The actual missions are pretty varied. They range from excellent to mediocre and from one goal to three goals per mission. You’ll usually have to kill a number of people, participate in some vehicle activities, and stuff of the sort. There are some weirder missions, too, like helping a lunatic become mayor or killing off celebrities. You’ll also get to use boats and motorcycles in the game to accomplish your goals.
The game’s missions take about ten minutes to complete but each includes about two minutes of loading and about five more minutes of transportation to get to the actual mission. This is a bit annoying when you die since you’ll have to travel all the way back, unless you want to take the taxi and lose your armor and weapons. The game includes three safe houses to save your game in, which is a bit disappointing after the countless save houses that San Andreas included. That said the actual transportation for the game’s countless vehicles is very smooth. The game includes cars, motorcycles, and boats and more specifically, ambulances, trucks, vans, big rigs and armored vehicles, among many others. They all handle very distinctly and very well.
LCS’s gameplay mechanics benefit from the transition from PSP to PlayStation 2. The targeting system benefits from the second analog stick which allows you to more effortlessly control the camera. The auto targeting system works pretty well for the most part, although it will sometimes target people who you don’t want to target, causing you to lose precious time. This is further complicated since the game doesn’t let you move around when shooting unless you’re carrying a light gun.
On PSP, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories included a complete offline wireless multiplayer mode, a first for the series. Unfortunately, the multiplayer mode was stripped away for the PS2 version.
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories really pushed the PSP. You will still find the entire Liberty City with the same level of detail as was found on PSP. The same applies to the character and vehicle models. However, when you’re blowing these graphics up to a TV screen, you can see some of the shortcomings of Liberty City Stories. It doesn’t look as good as the made-for-consoles Grand Theft Autos. The jump to PS2 has helped some technical aspects as the framerate seems more stable now, the draw distance was increased, and there are more civilians onscreen than there were before. The loading is quicker, as well, and you don’t have to worry about the game draining battery.
The game’s audio is still very impressive. As I mentioned above, all of the dialogue is excellently written and superbly acted. This really helps push the story along and immerses the player. The sound effects are standard GTA fare but sound convincing nonetheless. As expected, the soundtrack is where the audio truly shines. There are a number of stations, each with seven or so licensed tracks spanning boy bands, rock, hip hop and talk among others. Each station also features a DJ that really brings life to the game. In addition, the radio stations will occasionally play news bulletins that detail your recent actions.
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories has a number of mishaps and annoyances, some of them which are borderline frustration. On the PlayStation Portable this was forgiven because GTA: LCS brought a console-like Grand Theft Auto experience to the handheld. These problems are less excusable on the PS2 especially compared to the recent games in the series. However, if you haven’t played Liberty City Stories, you’ll find enough good in the game to justify the $20 price tag.
-- Adam Nunez & -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Jul 1, 2006
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