Portable Grand Theft Auto III | Size: 228 MB
Grand Theft Auto III The basic appeal of GTAIII is the ageless fascination with using firecrackers to blow up model cars, staging horrific toy-train wrecks, and lighting plastic army men on fire. It sets you down in the middle of a detailed clockwork world, presents you with a physics model and a wide variety of interesting objects to interact with, and then gives you the freedom to smash them into each other and enjoy the resulting mayhem. Within this metasandbox mode, you’re also presented with a series of missions, which tell the ongoing story of your life of crime among the game’s cast of unsavory characters.
While these 73 missions provide a proper plot and a beginning, middle, and end to the game, you can attempt them at your leisure. In between the missions, you’re free to do whatever you want, either on foot or in any number of vehicles, most of which you can relinquish from their owners at the touch of a button. Other than the always satisfying manufacture of general chaos, there are plenty of more-structured tasks to undertake. For instance, if you steal a cab, you can begin accepting fares in what amounts to a nearly complete re-creation of Crazy Taxi. Police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances also each have timed subgames associated with them. In addition, there are 20 mass-destruction challenges (called “rampages”), 100 hidden packages to find, and 20 cinematic super jumps hidden throughout the city. Completing these side tasks grants you various bonuses, ranging from access to extra weapons to cash bonuses.
The real star of the game, however, is the environment itself–a corrupt municipality called Liberty City. Scotland-based developer DMA Design (recently renamed Rockstar North) has done an amazing job of creating a living city dense with detail. The streets are busy with both pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Time passes, the sun rises and sets, and different weather patterns move in and out. And unlike in most games, you can actually drive to the skyscrapers on the horizon several miles away. What’s more amazing is that the huge city is presented as a virtually seamless world. There is a short one-to-two-second loading time (down from the PlayStation 2′s five to seven seconds) between the city’s three districts, but otherwise the only breaks for loading occur momentarily before mission cutscenes.
Mob bosses need favors, crooked cops need help, the street gangs want you dead; so to compensate you’ll have to rob, steal, and kill in order to stay alive, while using your resources to track down the woman who betrayed you and earn your rightful revenge. But that’s all in a day’s work in Rockstar Games’ ambitious PS2 sequel, Grand Theft Auto III. Developed by DMA Design, GTA3 is the first installment of the series to utilize a fully three-dimensional living city with open environments and non-linear gameplay. Additional features include a cast of hundreds of different characters, more than 50 types of vehicles, three hours of professionally recorded music, and a huge array of deadly street weapons.
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