living city with other cars and pedestrians all going about their lives in a believable way,
the “rampage” mini-games, or the satirical nature of the game-fiction including the
highly amusing car radio.
Though in the film and literary world sequels are often looked down upon as a crass
way to cash in on a previous success, in gaming one needs to consider sequels a bit dif-
ferently. Games in general keep being played much longer than their linear media
counterparts; think about how many people still consider chess,Monopoly,orScrabble
to be their favorite board games and continue to play them year after year. With a sin-
gle-player story-based game, the game may be primarily fun because of its mechanics,
yet those mechanics are made meaningful and interesting because of the specific con-
tent of the game (whether the location, the selection of usable objects, or the missions
and storyline). Players may still enjoy the mechanics once they have worn out all the
content. Much as the tabletop RPGDungeons & Dragonsspawned endless scenario
packs one could play while using the same core rules, when players really love a com-
puter game they want to keep exploring its mechanics but with new and interesting
content. On the PC side this can often be accomplished with a mission pack. However,
due to the technical limitations of consoles, developers are often required to release an
entire new game just to provide more content for players to experience (such asGrand
Theft Auto: Vice City, which kept basically the same mechanics as its predecessor). At
the same time, a sequel gives designers the opportunity to polish and refine their game
mechanics, fixing what was glaringly broken and adding the features they regretted cut-
ting due to time constraints the first time around.
Finally, with gaming technology advancing as quickly as it does, games are able to
look radically better within the space of only a few years. In particular, with each gener-
ation of console hardware, players want to have new versions of their favorite games
that fully exploit the new technological capabilities of their new systems. Sometimes
the advance in technology is so significant that developers are able to rethink their
game and take it to a new level, as was the case withGrand Theft Auto III.When a
game’s fundamental experience can be improved as much as it was in that game, one
can hardly say that game sequels are purely exploitation.
A Living City.................................
Grand Theft Auto IIIis one of the few action-oriented games to present players with a
game-world that truly feels like it is alive. Unlike so many other games that have
claimed to be set in the real-world,GTA3made that world believable, blending in
exactly enough reality to allow players to suspend their disbelief. First and foremost,
the landscape ofGTA3allows players to navigate the city in any way they want. Players
can drive down any street or alley, over any bridge, through any park, up any set of
stairs that is wide enough, and even use ramps to make jumps over obstacles. There is
very little sense of being artificially constrained as is so often experienced in most
games, thus avoiding the sensation of, “The designers did not want me to go there so
there’s an invisible wall blocking my way.” InGTA3, players are confined by a limited
number of tall walls and fencing but more by the water that surrounds the island on
which the game is set. This consistency of world navigation is made possible by a car
physics simulation, which includes enough responsiveness to make the driving seem
Chapter 24: Game Analysis:Grand Theft Auto III 477