Everything's been so crazy these days that neither Kohler nor I have had the time to finish Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, released for Nintendo DS on March 17.
But we've been talking about how superb Chinatown Wars is, so we wanted to write a quick post encouraging all grown-up Nintendo DS owners to check it out.
Chris Baker: No DS title since The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has done a better job of rescaling and rethinking an ambitious console franchise for the handheld's two screens. The pleasures of a Grand Theft Auto game — performing a variety of missions for rival crime lords, rising through the ranks of the underworld, roaming an open city and happening upon adventures and challenges in unexpected places — are all still here.
But Rockstar Games has also managed to organically integrate the DS' touchscreen into the experience in ways that continually surprised me, from the first moment in the opening mission when your car crashes into the river and you have to tap on the touchscreen to bust out a window before it sinks.
The game looks very much like the classic Grand Theft Auto 2, with a top-down camera perspective showing a bird's-eye view of simple
3-D environments and automobiles. But the game also incorporates some features that made last year's Grand Theft Auto 4 so much more enjoyable than the PlayStation 2 versions.
You can tap the touchscreen to pull up a GPS system and set waypoints that show you how to get to your safehouse, or to a drug dealer who's eager to buy your stash of heroin. You can tap on your PDA and call up e-mails informing you about missions, jobs and weapons on sale at AmmuNation. These features, coupled with more compact missions, make for a smooth and frustration-free handheld gaming experience.
The real pleasure is the raft of new mini-games that utilize the touchscreen. Stealing a car becomes a Wario Ware-like exercise that requires you to jam a screwdriver into the ignition or twist wires together to get the car running.
Before you commit arson, you need to use your stylus to fashion Molotov cocktails, filling bottles with gasoline before picking up rags and stuffing them into the mouth of the bottle. The last mission I played had me defusing bombs by slicing the correct wire. I also had a hard time driving past a convenience score, because it was so fun to buy a stick of lottery tickets and use my stylus to scratch and win.
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Chris Kohler:__ I haven't played as much Chinatown Wars as Baker, but from the very beginning I was struck by just how polished and complex the game is — it is as triple-A an experience as I have ever seen on the Nintendo DS.
I didn't expect to see the GPS system, nor the option that lets you display it on both the top and the bottom screens if you don't want to have to glance up and down to see where you're headed. I was also surprised by the e-mails that keep you on track and the fact that, when you fail a mission, you can just press Select to jump back to the start. All these things made Grand Theft Auto 4 much more fun, and having them on this portable version is not something I expected.
There's even a "steering assist" option that helps you drive your tiny car on the tiny streets with the Nintendo DS' digital pad. You can turn this off if you want to be challenged, but isn't the point to go tearing around the streets like a madman, not having to fight the controls?
The in-game help system, which you can see in action in the screen at right, further helps players along, creating a much smoother experience.
It's difficult to imagine Rockstar developers walking into the Nintendo DS booth at E3 2004 and envisioning that they would ever create something like this on the hardware. I say this not only because of the power and features of DS but also because of the demographics — would a Mature-rated game have made sense then?
I'm curious to see if Wii's install base and demographic reach ever gets to the point where Rockstar decides it, too, needs an exclusive Grand Theft Auto.
Images courtesy Rockstar
See Also:- *Grand Theft Auto: *A History of Violence
