and there are plenty of distinctive landmarks for players to use to get their bearings. An
innovative and useful HUD map shows players the nearby streets and smoothly zooms
in and out based on the player’s current velocity, making navigating the unfamiliar city
much easier. And since the game’s core mechanics and light physics implementation
make driving a vehicle so enjoyable, players are more than willing to put in the time it
takes to learn their way around since they can have such fun doing so.
More than any other action adventure title,Grand Theft Auto IIIis a game that
causes players to tell each other tales of the amazing chase sequence they had with the
police or all the improvisation they used to pull off a mission. Personally, I remember
one mission where I had to kill a rival mob boss who ended up chasing me in his
armored Mafia Sentinel vehicle. Our showdown had raged across various parts of the
city, and my car had sustained so much damage that it was on fire and I had to abandon it.
My enemy was still on my tail, and without a vehicle I was a sitting duck. I remember
we were fighting near a gas station when I ditched the car, and a thug was barreling at
me when I jumped over a low wall that he then smashed into. Suddenly his car had sus-
tained more damage than I’d managed to inflict by ramming him with my now-dead
vehicle. He wasn’t out of commission yet though, and he drove around the wall to try to
run me over again, but this time I ducked behind a gas pump, which he proceeded to
ram into. I managed to pull off a number of these matador-like maneuvers until his car
finally exploded from all the damage it sustained, and I passed the mission. It was defi-
nitely an “I couldn’t do that again if I tried” moment. I had passed the mission, the goal
of which was completely predetermined, but the way in which I accomplished it
involved a method I had come up with on the fly. I had pulled it off in a way the game’s
designers were unlikely to have anticipated. As a result of my involvement in the
authorship of the scenario, it is one of the most memorable experiences I have ever had
in a video game. These are the type of scenarios that well-implemented systems-based
game design makes possible.
Storytelling .................................
Amidst all the emergent gameplay and interesting choices,Grand Theft Auto IIIalso
manages to tell a compelling story. The bulk of this storytelling happens in cut-scenes,
but it is interesting to note how short and to the point they are. The opening of the game
manages to convey a lot of information — the player character’s involvement in a bank
robbery, the girlfriend who betrayed him and leaves him for dead, the trial that sends
him to jail, the main character’s subsequent involvement in a prison transport break
that leaves him a fugitive from the law — all in approximately two minutes. The
cut-scenes that come at the start of each mission are even shorter and to the point. The
fact that the game is exceedingly well written and has top-notch voice acting certainly
helps to make the reliance on cut-scenes more forgivable.
But the game tells its story through more than just the cut-scenes, with the believ-
ability of Liberty City perfectly supporting the game-fiction. Players are sent on
missions to various neighborhoods that show the diverse types of life that exist in the
city, with the types of cars driving around and the pedestrians walking the sidewalks
matching the flavor of the neighborhoods appropriately, all contributing to a remarkably
consistent world. The radio stations players can tune into while driving any of the
Chapter 24: Game Analysis:Grand Theft Auto III 481