Grand Theft Auto III

You have got to see this sweet car-jumping, crazily illegal, car-chasing mania. Five sweet movies!

In February when I met with the folks who run DMA at their Leith, Scotland-based studio, I was surprised at how relaxed and sincere and humble they were. I suppose I shouldn't have been too stunned, because their games, I learned, are modeled very much on their own behavior. Their titles promote toying and humorous playfulness and an open, unending quality that few others do, and they're funny in quiet, subtle ways. DMA is not willing to make games that fit into pre-formed molds, and that's why its games, Grand Theft Auto 1 & 2, and Space Station: Silicon Valley, among them, are so widely well-liked.

And so it was with a sense of humor and quiet dignity that I experienced the company's newest game, Grand Theft Auto 3. At the studio there was a little conversation about Driver 2. I thought that Driver 2, with its horrible get-out-of-the-car action, poor control, and lack of craftsmanship, might have vexed DMA because Reflections was "first" to bring DMA's 2D idea into the third dimension. But when asked about it, the DMA guys just shrugged quietly and smiled. Perhaps that's because they hadn't had any beer yet. But more likely it's because the team is furiously toiling away at a completely new iteration of Grand Theft Auto, which looks to bring PlayStation 2 owners one of their biggest thrills yet.

The Living City
Grand Theft Auto 3 is the most wildly imaginative, darkly funny, and wonderfully playful games I have seen in many a year, and it has become one of the most impressive PlayStation 2 games I have seen in development. The game is due this September, and already it's up and running at an impressive playable state. As one would expect, being on a next generation system, Grand Theft Auto 3 is a three-dimensional game, with a massive city to explore, a garage bursting with vehicles to drive, and some of the best weapons a lowdown gang can buy. It's made the jump to 3D, all right, with a much closer third-person camera perspective, along with the traditional top-down look. But what was so striking about it wasn't that I finally had the chance to see it in 3D. Instead it was the incredible amount of fun I had playing before I'd even tried out a mission. Even at this early stage in the game Grand Theft Auto 3 just feels right.

The world of Grand Theft Auto 3 is totally bristling with life, so much so that it looks and feels like a real city that runs on its own, even after you turn off the console. People walk down the street and talk to each other. Businessman and women rush around in the morning and then stow themselves away at night when the prostitutes, thugs, and pimps take control of the city. The whole game runs on a diurnal-nocturnal system that takes place every half-hour (a half-hour in the game is equivalent to 24 hours realtime). Cars and trucks drive through the city obeying traffic lights, and fire trucks, ice cream trucks, and ambulances go about their business in everyday fashion.

Many of these actions, you're probably thinking to yourself, were a big part of the old GTA series. It's true, they were, but in an old, arcade-style, 2D world that could only be seen from the eyes of a distant, high-flying bird. The tiny little sprite people are now fully polygonal, highly detailed people that are closer because of the closer third-person perspective. The once famous variety of cars is now even more grand, but one-time 2D sprite vehicles are fully outfitted in clean 3D, complete with gleaming hoods, totally destructible chassis, and with the ability to reach unprecedented levels of speed. Hell, you can even pull off stunts with these puppies. Now, you're truly immersed in the GTA world, standing right on the gritty, brutal streets of Liberty City, faced with the knowledge that you're about to commit brutal acts of violence, anarchy, and total destruction, and all for the fun of it.

Flexible, Open Gameplay
In Grand Theft Auto 3, players take on the familiar role of a low-level thug who must work his way up the Mafioso ladder to achieve greatness. When starting off, you get to name the character whatever you like. Much like in the first two games, players take on "jobs," which upon completion, reward the player with new jobs, better weapons, more access to the city, and tougher challenges. Grand Theft Auto 3 also features the series' trademark openness, enabling players to take on whatever task they want to at any particular time. To truly "progress" through the game, however, you'll need to act upon some key missions to continue the storyline and open up the entire game. You could play the game without ever completing these "story-driven" missions, but if you chose to ignore these missions, you won't open up the second and third sections of the city, or ever complete the story itself.

One way in which Grand Theft Auto 3 lifts above its brethren is the way tasks are completed. The game starts out easy, subtly strolling you through the "how-to's," and your first mission is a simple, pick-up-the-floozies-and-deliver-them-to-specific-area deal. By playing deeper and deeper into game, the missions branch out widely and become more complex, even multi-tiered. For instance in one mission, your "partner" 8-Ball and you must go to the dockyards. There, you must take out the regiments of thugs on-board from a distance (using the sniper rifle), and then send 8-Ball out to the ship to plant bombs on it to ultimately destroy it.

Not surprisingly, sub-missions and mini-games are abundant throughout DMA's action-racing-style shooter. In some levels players need to chase baddies, while in others, the baddies chase them. As with GTA and GTA2 before it, players can take on any mission at almost any time, an element to the game that provides freedom and provokes exploration. Players can explore the entire city on foot or by vehicle, and they can use subways and elevated (L) trains to get from here to there. Another instance that conveys that Grand Theft Auto 3 is truly growing up, is that at least one mission requires your character to arrive at the train station at a specific time. You have to check your watch and catch this particular train at 6 am to get to another point to complete a second task. Miss the train, however, and you failed. Paying attention to the ongoing changes of night and day is often crucial, and quite spectacular, too.

Guns, Cars, and Helicopters
Like most folks who read this article, you've probably played a lot of games, both the light and whimsical kind, and the dark and realistic kind. Grand Theft Auto 3 is the latter. It's not for kids, let me just get that out of the way. Grand Theft Auto 3 is a dark, dark game that's about killing, destruction, and anarchy. Your missions require that you murder people, but you can kill them just for the fun of it, too. It's all part of the game's fun factor. And it's thrilling since you can't do this in real life (and you shouldn't), and because DMA has twisted these acts into black, playful humor. DMA cites movies such as the Warriors, The Getaway, and Scarface as just a few of their inspirations for Grand Theft Auto 3.

Liberty City is split into three parts, industrial, downtown, and suburban. Players commence in the worst part of the city, industrial, and work their way downtown and then through to suburbia. The different parts of the city vary from one another in the different cars that are driven, the kinds of people that live in them, and the kinds of businesses located there.

Every single vehicle in the game is drive-able. Players can hop into traditional sedans and minivans, as well as taxis, ambulances, ice cream trucks, police cars, cars that resemble Ferraris, Lotuses, and even perhaps water-based crafts such as ships and boats. There are 45 vehicles in all, with four to five variations of each -- quite a lot!

What's particularly cool about all of the vehicles in the game is that they are totally destructible. Each car is built with 17 sections that can take damage. And after each section takes on damage, it affects the way the vehicle drives. For example, after a few back-end collisions, you might notice that your trunk and its fenders are coming loose; and after a few side swipes, the doors might be smashed in, too, but you may still be able to drive. Howrever, if your engine is rammed, and the car starts to smoke, it means you're just about to loose the car altogether; it'll soon blow up. It's possible for a car to loose the chassis altogether, and just run on its frame, just like in Smugglers' Run. If you take a giant jump and the car rolls over and it's totally damaged, you can still get out. Your character will crawl out on his hands and knees, using a totally different animation than before.

No doubt there is fun to be had in Grand Theft Auto 3, and this version provides more ways to kill than ever before. Without any weapons at all, players can perform quite a bit of damage to others, including punching, kicking, kneeing (guys can be kneed in the balls), and my favorite, head butting, something I personally enjoy in my spare time. But when the going gets rough, bigger means of destruction are called upon, and TGA3 has a nice cache of weapons for gamers to get down to business. The weapon list includes a baseball bat, a machine gun, an Uzi, a shotgun, Molotov Cocktails, grenades, a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, and a good old-fashioned flame-thrower.

In the demo I played, using the missile launcher at a major street intersection was loads of fun. There, I blew the crap out of one car, and then several others crashed into it. I then blew them up, too. The scene I created was true anarchy in action. The grenades and Molotov Cocktails were easy to use too, but only if thrown from a distance. You can easily kill yourself if they explode close by. The missile launcher is extremely powerful, also, but it was the sniper rifle that got my blood running. Both weapons switch to first-person view, and the sniper rifle zooms in with wonderful accuracy. It put a smile on my face when I picked off several Mafioso types from a safe distance.

The Feel and the Control
The feel of the main character is right on. Players take control by using the left analog or the dpad. He can walk, spin around, run, sprint, shoot, fight, jump, open doors, and car-jack any vehicle using various buttons on the controller's right side. It's quite fun to see him sprinting, for example. He books down the street, and when stopped, he bends over panting. Yep, he gets tired, and needs rest.

What makes Grand Theft Auto 3 so amazing at this point in development, however, is how far along the little crucial aspects of the game are. One of the strange downfalls of 3D games is the lack of constraint, or rather, openness, when it comes to fighting and gunning. Grand Theft Auto 3 enables players to freely attack enemies, or to lock onto their opponent. By simply pressing R1, a visible target mechanism appears on screen and follows the opponent until he or she is shot dead, and by pressing another button the lock-on will automatically target the next opponent. The target is intelligently built, too, as it aims for the most powerful enemy first and then tracks the next powerful one, and so on.

Now here's something that's a definite improvement over GTA2 and is totally unique to Grand Theft Auto 3. If you throw five or so grenades in one spot, you'll cause such a big fire that the fire department comes. Actions of this severity earn you something unique to the game, a new level of notoriety. That's right, you become more important, and a little more lethal, to the cops, depending on the kind of crime you have broken. Each time a particularly violent or destructive act is performed a little badge-like star appears on the screen indicating that the player has just earned a new level of dangerousness. There are five levels in all, and each time one is earned the cops grow increasingly more lethal toward you. As you become more violent, the cops first grow in numbers, and then they invite Swat teams, the militia, and helicopter squads. Swarms of cops of all kinds will come looking for your ass! This is great to do once you're played the game through, and it promotes playing it through again in a different way.

While many people say that talking about the weather is boring, it's not quite so in Grand Theft Auto 3. Instead, it's rather stirring. Sure, the sun rises and sets every one-half hour, an aspect that I find neat unto itself, but there are different kinds of weather that affect you. When the clouds darken and rain begins to fall, players will see lightning and hear thunder. And if you decide to drive in the rain, you'd best be careful. Every car drives differently, and when it's raining, they slide and lose control, accordingly. It's like going from jogging on pavement, to jogging on an iced-over lake; it's damn slippery. The Grand Theft Auto 3 world changes weather all of the time and players shouldn't be surprised to experience sunny blue skies, heavy banks of fog, haze, and rainy, dark days and nights.

Let the Music Play On
Last but not least is the all-important aspect of music. One of the trademarks of Grand Theft Auto is the great variety of music blasting from the radios of each car. Each time you step into one, the radio plays a different tune, or set of tunes. It's no different in Grand Theft Auto 3. Each car you steal, carjack or accommodate plays a different station, be it country, rock, hip-hop, or techno. And as always, the radio stations are jam-packed with lippy DJs, fictitious commercials, and lots of cocky humor. The music I heard at DMA was remarkably similar to music I hear on the real radio, too.

More than half of the music is being created in-house at DMA, where three people work solely on creating and recording the music, DJs, and the commercials. The fourth musical staffer, the engineer, mixes the music and works the stations into the game. The music not created in-house will come from well-known pop musicians. It's still quite early for Rockstar to announce the licensed bands in the game, but there will be many, when the time is right. In all, more than 50-plus songs will appear in Grand Theft Auto 3.

In the sound effect department, there are lots of things to listen carefully to. As aforementioned, people walk though the streets at all times. They talk to one another, and they react to you with words. If you swing a bat at one, he or she might yell, or scream. If you decide to kill them, they will definitely grunt, holler, or scream. They say different things, depending on the severity of the actions. DMA is careful to mention that while some text boxes will definitely show up, there will be many, many talking scenes. For example, if you steal a taxi and you pick up a guy, he'll talk to you, or perhaps even offer you a task. And if you listen carefully while driving a car with the radio on through a tunnel, the music or voices reverberate accordingly.

Grand Theft Auto 3 is many months away, and while it looks good in my eyes, there are several more stages the game will pass through before it's done. The textures, which look simple now, will become more sophisticated. The graphic effects will become more realistic, the story-based scripting woven in, and the gameplay will be honed and play-tested until it's near perfect.

In the end, my visit to DMA was pretty damn cool. I saw the game as it was perhaps originally envisioned, a dramatic, 3D game that fully engages you with choices, total destruction, and the sneaking little tug on your shirtsleeve that begs the question, "what if I did it this way...?" Answering that question with wit (and a wee bit of violence) is what DMA is all about. If all goes right, and I believe it will, Grand Theft Auto 3 will become one of the most important games of the year.

Don't miss out on the dozens of features we already have written on Grand Theft Auto III, including:

Also, make sure to visit Grand Theft Auto III site, with maps of the cities, information on the characters, cars, and more.

--Douglass C. Perry