The same basic control adjustments made in the previous game to make up for the lack of a right analog stick on the PSP are made here. Still, you get a good chunk of time with each of them.įunctionally, Vice City Stories plays very much as Liberty City Stories did. Lance plays a huge role in the story, but the others aren't quite as prominently featured as they were in the first game. Vic's mildly crazy brother Lance, the alcoholic gun nut Phil Cassidy, the balls-obsessed Cuban gang leader Umberto Robina, and the foul-mouthed Ricardo Diaz (voiced by Phillip Michael Thomas, Gary Busey, Danny Trejo, and Luis Guzman, respectively) are all back. While Liberty City Stories was almost devoid of memorable characters, Vice City Stories digs up a few favorites from the original Vice City, and introduces a couple of new ones as well. As time passes, the game settles into the typical progression of GTA missions and oddball characters. He mostly comes off as a hypocritical idiot.įor what it's worth, though, once you get through about the first hour of the game, you'll probably be inclined to stop questioning why Vic is doing what he's doing and just go with it. Vice City Stories tries to present Vic as a guy who doesn't want to get into that stuff, yet he freely and frequently does throughout the entire game. They weren't boy scouts-they were gangsters, killers, and dope dealers. GTA heroes are never heroes, exactly, but the trick in the past has been that there's been no attempt to play those characters up as sympathetic. He just says, "I'll go get it" (referring to owed money stashed inside one of the apartments) and goes in guns blazing. If you're someone who doesn't want to do anything illegal, and your boss starts asking you to pick up hookers and hide drugs for him, are you going to just gripe about it and then do it anyway? Not to mention that Vic seems completely willing to run into an apartment complex and start wasting Mexicans without even being ordered specifically to do so. From the get-go, Vic talks about how uncomfortable he is with illegal activities, and yet he does every single illicit thing Martinez asks him to do. The trouble here is that the setup for getting Vic into this mess is beyond flimsy.
Of course, any veteran of this series won't be shocked one bit by missions like these. But within the first few minutes of the game, you'll find yourself inexplicably picking up drugs for Martinez, killing Mexican gang members, and chauffeuring prostitutes. We find out that Vic has joined the military to make some money to support his family, specifically his sick brother. Upon meeting his commanding officer-a borderline psychotic named Jerry Martinez-things start going wrong. When the game begins, he's just joined the army, and he gets off the transport truck at a military base in Vice City. You play as Vic Vance, the brother of central Vice City character Lance Vance. Vice City Stories is, again, a prequel, taking place a couple of years prior to the original game. It was a bizarre, convoluted, and completely entertaining tale, filled with ridiculous and profane characters, as well as lots of biting satire on the most superficial of decades. Modeled after '80s-era Miami, GTA: Vice City told a Scarface-inspired tale of Tommy Vercetti, a shunned mobster who found himself sifting through the aftermath of a cocaine deal gone wrong, and subsequently ended up building a major criminal empire throughout the city. Vice City Stories returns to the pastel- and neon-colored excesses of the 1980s and Vice City. Return to the soft neon glow of Vice City in GTA: Vice City Stories. Still, if you want to roam around a large city, shooting up the place and driving like a crazy person, few games on the PSP let you do that as well as this one does. The story's still pretty subpar, though, and as much as this is very much Grand Theft Auto, certain conventions of the series are starting to feel a bit antiquated. Vice City Stories improves upon some of the flaws found in the first game, not the least of which is improved length and direction, as well as a great deal more personality. Enter Vice City Stories, the newly released PSP GTA game that follows a similar side-story formula.
With Liberty City Stories, Rockstar successfully translated its open-ended world of crime to a handheld system, though not without a few missteps.
Rockstar's juggernaut Grand Theft Auto series debuted on the PlayStation Portable late last year in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, a side-story prequel to the events that took place in Grand Theft Auto III for the PlayStation 2.