Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
So, apparently Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars ended up performing rather poorly, selling just shy of 89,000 units during its March release month.
I bought GTA:CW about a month ago, finishing the main storyline last Tuesday, and found it to be the best portable game I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. As I’ve been telling other gamers I know, GTA:CW is an extremely good reason to buy a Nintendo DS if you don’t already have one. Given the technical constraints of the DS hardware1, GTA:CW is a testament (and indeed, a monument) to the ability of dedicated programmers to push a platform to its very limits without noticeably sacrificing elements in the game to achieve their goal.
Stylistically, the game is reminiscient of the original Grand Theft Auto, although the camera takes a more angled view of the world than the strictly top-down camera from the earlier game. Objects in the game are modelled in 3D, using a cel-shaded appearance which works very well with the overall presentation. Larger objects, such as buildings, eschew the cel-shading for detailed textures, with attention paid to cosmetic details such as having separate day/night textures. The engine is prone to stuttering when there’s a lot happening on the screen, such as when you’re racing away from half the Liberty City Police Department, but, fortunately, not so much that it renders the game unplayable.
GTA:CW is a vast game, being set in the same city as its big brother, Grand Theft Auto IV, with the exception of one of the islands. I’ve been playing GTA:CW almost every day since I bought it, and I’m still discovering new side missions and events. Barring that, there’s excellent replay value in the game, since every mission is replayable. Additionally, the game tracks the time taken to complete a replayed mission, awarding you gold, silver, or bronze medals depending on how quickly you get the job done. When this is combined with Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and the Rockstar Games Social Club2, you can synchronise your statistics so that you can compare your performance with that of other GTA:CW players3.
Granted, some of the side events are all variations on a theme (Rampages, for instance, differ only in their location, the score to beat, and the weapon given), but it’s all stepping stones to reaching a 100% completion statistic, as well as seeing just how high a score you can set for the rest of the world (effectively) to try and beat, giving a clear incentive to the player to actually bother with the events in the first place. There is effectively no gameplay incentive to do these tasks, since the monetary reward is miniscule when compared to the vast amounts of money to be made from the drug-trading minigame. However, there is a clear player incentive, in which a challenge is set to beat, firstly, the target score set by the game, and afterwards, the record score set by the player themselves.
Contrast this with the tasks given to you in the Space stage of Spore, where you’re invariably performing a repetition of a limited set of tasks, differing in certain parameters, such as the world(s) to visit. While there is a gameplay incentive to raise your standing with an alien race, to obtain money, or to obtain Missionista badges to unlock new technologies, the player incentive is somewhat lacking. Once player incentive is largely removed from a task, it becomes less of a challenge to the player, and it becomes a grind. Whether it is an experience grind, a money grind, or any other kind of grind (I’m a poet and I didn’t know it), the fact remains: it stays a grind. There’s a reason the word “grind” is used somewhat derisively in this context.
I’ve read several comments from other people about GTA:CW where they’d complained about the control scheme for the game. Now, I’m a lefty (which actually does make a difference at times), and I can play the game without too much trouble. Sometimes it will happen that my stylus hand obscures part of the screen which would normally have been visible for a right-handed person, but not so much that it messes with the gameplay. By and large, I find that it works quite well. There are some times when you feel like you could use a third hand to interact with the touch screen while you’re both steering and accelerating (already a two-handed operation: one hand on the directional pad and the other on the B/X buttons to accelerate/brake), but I found that it adds to the intensity of an already hectic car chase (for example), without increasing the difficulty to an impossible level.
Another nice touch (I’m just full of these bad puns, aren’t I?) this game has, when used in conjuction with the online element, is that once you finish the game, you can “download” missions from the Social Club, effectively extending the lifetime of the game. I’ve already completed two of these extension missions, but there’s currently a mission (set?), “Mr Wong’s Laundromat”, advertised on the Social Club as “coming soon”, so hopefully I’ll be able to add a few more to that list soon.
Let’s hope the sales of this game have picked up in April, or will pick up in the future, so that other developers can see that there is actually a market for these games on the DS platform.
Verdict: Buy a DS and buy this game!
[1] Two ARM processors, an ARM9 and an ARM7 clocked at 67MHz and 33MHz, respectively, making it roughly on par with the venerable (and, at the time, popular!) Intel 80486. The ARM9 processor is used for most processing, including 3D graphics, while the ARM7 provides functionality such as audio, Wi-Fi, and is the sole processor used when playing Game Boy Advance games (clocked down to 16MHz). In terms of volatile memory, the DS has 4MB of built-in RAM. A reverse-engineered technical specification of the DS, though, notes that careless use of the ARM9 could result in an apparent clock speed of only 8MHz!
[2] The Social Club website is just terribly slow, in my experience. Makes it a bit frustrating to use.
[3] My GTA:CW friend code is 506998942103, for anyone who wants to add me!
Tags: Games, grand theft auto, nintendo ds