Genre : Sandbox
Publisher: Rockstar
Players: 1-2
Retail Price: $35
Availability: Nintendo DS
My first introduction to the GTA series was at a friend’s house, playing the second installment on the original Playstation. We had great fun lining up cars and then sending a rocket into the middle and doing other similarly nefarious acts. So it stood as I approached GTA: Chinatown Wars: I was familiar, but not intimately so, with the franchise’s top-down heritage, and as I’ve recently pondered whether the new direction GTA IV is taking leaves room for the random acts of carnage of yore, I was hopeful that this semi-throwback could provide the violent counterpart to Niko and Johnny’s story-driven dramas.
There is a story to Chinatown Wars, of course: you’re Huang Lee, spoiled son of a recently deceased gangster, who has to travel to Liberty City to give his father’s sword to the new boss. Upon your arrival, though, you’re ambushed, have the sword stolen and are left for dead in a sinking car. Due to the DS’ limitations, the dialogue in the game is entirely textual, and the radio stations are limited to some fairly bland instrumentals. After a night or two, I gave up on playing with headphones on and don’t consider myself to have missed much. If you’re looking for GTA IV on a handheld, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.
Just because this isn’t like your last journey to Liberty City doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable in other ways, though. Rockstar did a good job of realizing what they could and couldn’t do, and designed the game accordingly. The touch screen is used frequently from the get go, where you have to smash through the windshield of your sinking car in order to escape. There are minigames throughout, like assembling your sniper rifle (which carried with it a strange air of tension, for me at least), placing bugs on cars and filling up bottles to assemble as Molotov cocktails. The last I referred to as the Drunk Guy Peeing Game, as you have to aim an inconsistently vigorous stream of gasoline into the neck of a bottle, and I imagine that the ground would be similar to that of Mister Goodbar on a Saturday night.
You’ll also need to use the touch screen when you break into parked cars. Sometimes you’ll be able to drive off easily, but otherwise you’ll need to get around a security system by hotwiring it, connecting your PDA to hack the unlock code or using brute force to start it with a screwdriver. At first I wasn’t sure if these were fun or tedious, but as I progressed I appreciated them for what they were: interesting little diversions that reinforced the fact that you were doing something you shouldn’t be. They also affect gameplay: since they took time to perform, I found out firsthand that it’s best to only jack already moving cars in the middle of a police chase.
Police chases were one of the few aspects of the game I thought were lackluster. Like much of Chinatown Wars, they’ve been tweaked slightly, and I can appreciate the changes but am not sure they always work. When you cause the cops to be less than thrilled with you, as always you get a star rating that increases as you piss them off more. Now, though, you’re able to destroy the cars by ramming into them, and if you can take out enough then your star rating inexplicably goes down. I guess the thinking is ‘less to chase you with’ over ‘motherfu- you destroyed our cars!’ but the end result is that I found it easier to escape from a four star situation than I should have.
The missions you encounter have more of a retro-GTA feel to them, which is an artsy way of saying ‘people make you blow stuff up and kill people.’ There’s also a 33% chance that an STD or cross dressing will be mentioned. This is more of an absurd, cartoony violent game than recent GTAs, which again is what I think it needed to be. Throughout the story you’ll find yourself playing for both sides and being double crossed by anyone with the slightest inclination. The main story took me a little less than eight hours to complete, which included a few replays of some missions. There would be times when I’d fail repeatedly, turn the game off to take a break, and complete the mission easily as soon as I started it up again. My in-game PDA told me I was only 51% done by the time I finished the story, but I assume the other 49% was in buying the rest of the safehouses, completing odd missions for people on the street and performing stunts, none of which I really felt the need to do.
I also would have to find some more drug dealers, which was probably the most surprisingly enjoyable part of the game. The concept of ferrying illicit substances back and forth while avoiding the police brought to mind a stupid TI-83 game that made the rounds in high school, but the Chinatown Wars version was oddly addictive (see what I did there?). It also made me realize that real life conversations can be taken out of context, and so you shouldn’t say things like ‘Yeah, I’ve been selling a lot of drugs… the cops caught me with four bags of heroin, though’ when you’re leaving your house. There are six types of drugs, and dealers will buy and sell some or all of them. The different gangs each have a drug that they’ll buy or sell higher, and dealers periodically want to offload something for a good price or are so desperate for it that they’ll pay anything, so there’s a lot of money to be made if you don’t mind driving all over Liberty City.
You’ll suffer the occasional loss, as getting busted will cause the cops to confiscate whatever you’re carrying, but you can stash drugs back at a safehouse (where they will be accessible from all of your other locations). To make things more interesting, you can hijack rival gangs’ vans, take them to a secluded location and search them for drugs. It was satisfying to find a cache of coke that I could then turn around and sell for thousands of dollars in profit. Dealers seemed more willing to buy and sell early in the game and towards the end, almost as though Rockstar wanted me to have enough money to work with and then pushed me into the story. With some careful dealing I was able to collect almost $100,000, which meant that any safehouse or ammo delivery I wanted could have been mine.
Chinatown Wars is undeniably a Grand Theft Auto game, but provides the juvenile yang to GTA IV’s somber drama ying. It’s not perfect in many ways, but the occasional frustrating control or obscured view is redeemed by the rest of the experience. There was nothing that really caught my eye as magical, a ‘holy crap I have to tell someone that just happened!’ moment. Even so, the game delivers a solid experience in a portable format, and once you’ve reach the end of Huang’s story there’s plenty of ne’er-do-welling to be found. If blowing crap up and running a drug trade is your idea of fun — and why wouldn’t it be? — then it’s easy to overlook whatever downsides the game presents.
