One of the few Rockstar products nearly banned in the U.S.
Banning and heavily scrutinizing entertainment products has been a time-honored tradition ever since Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, and Doom were released in the early 1990s. Violence, gore, and in Night Trap’s case, violence against women. All of these follow on a legacy of learning too late that being devil may care about the contents of an entertainment product can lead to controversy and public outcry. Not all of these can be accurately predicted, but if I didn’t do my research on Jaws or Gremlins before taking my kids there, I’d really have only myself to blame if the kids have nightmares.
Never mind the boat, you’re gonna need to explain to the misses why Timmy doesn’t like sharks all of a sudden before sleeping on the couch tonight.
I rearranged my notes for this, and for once in two years, I’m glad I did
It’s been dog’s years since I rearranged my notes to get to topics I thought would take me longer to complete than normal. Work has had me begging for relief of some kind (more than I can get from a dakimakura or a viewing of my favorite anime):
I’ve brought up L.A. Noire before as an example of what went wrong with it on the developer’s side. To not repeat myself a third time, here’s the short version: Australian developer and programmer Brendan McNamara used his experiences working on the 2002 video game The Getaway to open his own studio in Sydney called Team Bondi with the goal of developing their only game L.A. Noire, based on old noir films from the 1940s and 50s. The problems that arose came from McNamara’s corrosive personality, crunch, and, according to ex-developers under his wing, explicit approval of sweatshop hours. Numerous people quit or got sick either physically or mentally of his open berating of “slackers” and loads of people who contributed to the project were omitted from the credits, especially if they didn’t see it to its May 2011 release. Keep in mind, Team Bondi started working on the game in 2004.
Over the course of nearly eight years, Team Bondi lost a lot of people and with a high turnover rate and new people not knowing what their predecessor was specifically working on, lots of stuff was scrapped. It wasn’t until Rockstar themselves made a personal investment in the game’s release, but by the time it released, it never broke even and Team Bondi’s assets were sold off in October 2011. The studio was said to have spent over $50 million on the game, making it one of the most expensive video games at the time, but it only made back less than half, even with all the marketing in the years prior to release.
After 12 years and a series of remasters and graphical upgrades especially on newer consoles, Rockstar clearly has a place in its heart for the game. As for what would’ve been different if more level heads were allowed to direct or manage the project, it’s difficult to say. Maybe someone could’ve reined in McNamara or fired him from his own studio for the toxic sludge he spewed from his mouth. Maybe the game would still be in development with graphics and physics engines changing over time. Maybe it’ll get cancelled and all we’ll have are numb, carpal tunnel afflicted hands to show for it. No one can say for certain at least not until we master interdimensional travel.
As for what should’ve made it into the game, it’s clear to see that some content was missing. Select characters seem to know the protagonist Cole Phelps without a proper introduction for the audience, especially on the game’s ad vice desk which handles drug crimes. Spoilers incoming, there’s also a subplot in the latter quarter of the game tying together (though haphazardly) the fate’s of the characters Cole Phelps, an ex-Marine who fought with him in the Pacific Jack Kelso, and a German immigrant jazz singer Elsa Lichtmann. Part of the subplot is meant to hint at Cole becoming smitten with Elsa and beginning a love affair with her despite him being married with children.
Following this revelation, his partner on the vice desk rats him out due to personal reasons (he lost out on a boxing match and Cole pretty much ruined the fun for him by promising one of the potential victims a ticket to catch a ferry from New York), and he’s demoted for adultery. The scandal makes the headlines and left with no one but Elsa, after a few cases on the arson desk, Cole looks into a personal conflict Elsa’s been looking into for a while: the most likely (read: confirmed) fraudulent death of her friend. This is where Kelso comes in as an investigator for the California Fire and Life insurance company. Elsa’s friend was a construction worker who was contracted in the development of new homes for returning G.I.’s but the house he was working on collapsed and killed him. It’s revealed from Kelso’s investigation that most of the houses were build with subpar wood and brickwork, some of it from shut down silent-era film sets.
I bring all this up because the adultery subplot comes in quite apropos of nothing. Call it subtlety or a hint at the rushed development cycle, but the closest we get to a build up of Cole’s and Elsa’s relationship is him visiting the club that she sings at most nights. The scenes where they get even somewhat intimate are rare and in the last few cases in the game. It also seems that much of Cole’s character development is absent. Throughout the patrolman cases and going to the traffic and homicide desks, he’s portrayed as levelheaded and quite straightlaced, even chiding fellow officers for not sticking to his personal definition of justice no matter how slight, though keeping to himself for some other officers’ personalities.
By the time he’s on the arson desk, he’s back to his old professional ways and he’s still the type to chase a victory, even with the power of slippery slopes, but I personally never saw him as the type of guy to think himself as a hypocrite, nor did I think that his preaching morality was in some way a shield for his own personal conduct. Some moments do stand out, but don’t have that much of an effect on the story, such as his pride in his own job as a cop while his first partner, Stefan Bekowsky, complains about aspects of his tenure on the traffic desk; or his taking the homicides more seriously on that desk while his partner there, Rusty, is busy drinking half the time, and several others.
Still, if the devs weren’t dodging an interpretive clock or a nasty boss, it could’ve seen a lower turnover rate and some of the original ideas that were cut could’ve been added back, if not in the game itself than as an expansion pack or DLC. The finer points of this implementation can be better explored elsewhere if they haven’t been already, but of the ideas that were scrapped, there were two crime desks that were abandoned: the fraud desk and the burglary desk.
According to McNamara himself, the desks were exactly as described: burglary dealing in thefts and robberies, stuff going missing, and all that entails; fraud would’ve dealt with scams, conmen, forgeries and everything in between. We don’t know who would’ve been the officer in charge of dispatching detectives to investigate these cases, but we have one clue as to who would’ve been partnered with Cole at least on the burglary department: a minor character named Harold Caldwell.
Caldwell was seen getting along famously with Cole. During the final case on the vice desk, he lends a hand to Cole and his vice desk partner, the sleazeball Roy Earle. Caldwell was suggested to have been Cole’s partner on the burglary desk which would’ve had around 11 cases to play, which is the closest explanation for how he has such a good chemistry with Cole at this point in the game. Because the game skips forward six months between the traffic and homicide desks, it’s suggested that the timeskip was supposed to be the burglary desk, but the reason for its omission comes down to formatting and storage.
The PS3 version has the benefit of a large capacity Blu-Ray disc, but there’s no equivalent feature for the Xbox 360 version. Having played it myself after getting it loaned to me by a friend, I remember the game case having a total of three discs. Leaving extra content in the game would’ve necessitated a fourth disc and to my knowledge, few, if any, games would’ve come with so many discs. Without the cut content, L.A. Noire clocked in at a 20 hour campaign depending on your playstyle, but with 11 more cases focused on burglary, who knows how many more hours and gigs would’ve been dedicated to the game?
As for the fraud desk, we know even less. All we have is speculation based on what probably would’ve counted as fraud in the late 1940s since this game was also released in a time before the Miranda rights afforded criminal suspects protection while in police custody along with a defense attorney. It might not be obvious playing it, but if you ever look at gameplay of L.A. Noire or play it yourself, you’ll notice that Cole never reads the suspects their rights. The landmark Miranda rights case was argued in Arizona in 1966, less than 20 years after the events of L.A. Noire, so a lot of what the LAPD could’ve been implied to play fast and loose with in 1947 would’ve largely ceased by then.
Regarding people involved in the fraud desk, that’s also not well known. Who would’ve been the dispatcher? Cole’s partner? Is there a desk that challenges Cole’s lawman philosophy and awaken him to the shades of gray in law enforcement? All of this is up for interpretation. McNamara claimed to have had some levels and concept art for the burglary at least, but I couldn’t find any screenshots of these to verify. Not that I’m calling McNamara a liar, but he was the only public face during the development of the game.
The attitudes and accounts of the disgraced ex-employees of Team Bondi (especially those who left before the game released) may suggest that McNamara had all the cards, so unless an artist or designer snuck away a copy of a potential level, this cut content exists as lost media. Instances of both still exist in the game, but you would only be able to see it in the game’s free roam mode, looking at fliers and ledgers and whatnot.
Would the cut content have made the game any better than what we got? Well, I doubt it would make as big an impact as expected, though it could still change a lot of things. Like what? Probably an in-depth look at how theft was prosecuted post-war or what defined fraud. The examples I listed above are clearly not exhaustive and people smarter and more experienced than me in those fields may have more to add to those, but those would be the more obvious ones to me as I’d never investigated a missing object in any capacity, nor have I investigated fraud. Certainly, Caldwell would join the list of partners Cole has had over the course of the game and likely one of the more respectable ones compared to Roy Earle who takes home loads of allegations of racism and misconduct, even for an America pre-integration.
For formatting and storage, if Team Bondi was able to commit as much as possible to leaving everything in undisturbed, then the game case may look more like a binder or folder with well over four discs dedicated to each case on the Xbox 360 and probably two or three Blu-Rays for the PS3. Subsequent re-releases for PCs would occupy more storage than can possibly fit on an unmodified computer. If I was a part of that alternate reality, I could easily see myself budgeting for more than one high capacity hard drive for just one game or even a series.
On that note, there’s also a part of me that sees this as being a series given the same treatment as the multiple expansions for The Sims franchise or Battlefield and Medal of Honor, which probably says a lot about how EA’s design philosophy compared to what was inherited from Team Bondi into the Rockstar family.
The only notable changes for later releases of L.A. Noire is the interrogation going from Truth, Doubt, and Lie to Good Cop, Bad Cop, and Accuse. All things considered, what counts as speculation for a different game solely exists in criticisms for what didn’t work or go far enough in the version we got. Then again, it takes a game with enough hard work going into it to spark debates and discussion years after the original developer went under and the closest thing we had to DLC or a sequel was seemingly shelved forever. This video by Real Pixels explains all the faults in L.A. Noire. Based on what I wrote, there’s a lot so take this as a brass tacks examination of L.A. Noire.
Channel: Real Pixels
Finally, is L.A. Noire even good? It clearly doesn’t live up to its purported expectations and as I’ve explained there’s a lot under the hood that’s missing or what’s left over isn’t perfectly aligned, but considering I’ve dedicated one post to the game and sections within two separate blog posts to the game, I have a relatively high opinion of the game, and so do others given how many people dream about there being a better version of L.A. Noire or even a Whore of the Orient.
We end 2023 with a YouTube recommendation for the channels Business Basics and Geopolitics Daily.
The twin channels cover news coverage and geopolitics across the world keeping viewers up to date on major issues that affect us directly or indirectly, typically from a consequences of conflict standpoint especially in the case of territorial disputes like those of Russia, Israel, and China among other places across the world. Both channels began as business and investment guides before the shift to global events, but do still offer tips and guides for business and investing.
Citizens of the internet will know that fake trailers make the rounds several years or so after a popular franchise entry is on the market. I recall looking at fake videos of what GTA V would look like shortly after announcement in the middle of 2012. Me and my friends were hyped for the latter half of that year and 2013 waiting for the game to come out and when it did, in a nutshell it broke records back to back.
A few weeks after initial release, GTA Online debuted and despite an initial hiccup for those who were there (I was one of them), Online alone probably counted for lifetime revenue for the game. The most expensive piece of media in history made back all of its money and then some. If Rockstar was feeling philanthropic, every employee could probably retire and have enough savings for their descendants.
Over the years, critics have popped up questioning Rockstar’s design philosophy and direction. GTA V was said to have a DLC that was functionally stolen by GTA Online, which has enough DLC on its own to be released as a standalone semi-RPG (an idea that Rockstar could capitalize on if done more honestly), and even after the release of the phenomenally made, if overdone Red Dead Redemption 2, players often defaulted to GTA. Answering to the money (read: gold) found in the criminal funhouse that GTA Online was and still is, Red Dead Online suffered as a result and some haven’t forgiven Rockstar for it.
Nevertheless, Rockstar’s reputation as a more patient company has paid off. Gone are the days where they were a small team of British programmers asset flipping successful titles with only a year in difference. Projects have gotten bigger and bigger since at least 2007 coming to fruition with the following year’s GTA IV.
I think I have a theory on why the games have taken a more contemporary approach as opposed to the older unnumbered titles like Vice City or Liberty City Stories, and that theory starts with “it’s easier to capture what is than thumb through records looking at what was.” Maybe there’ll come a day when I elaborate further, but today we’re talking about a very long, very awaited installment in the GTA franchise.
On December 1, Rockstar announced the trailer would release on December 5, at 9:00 AM but the full trailer was leaked 15 hours ahead of schedule, racking up a record breaking view-count in minutes.
Channel: Rockstar Games
The internet has been demanding a follow-up to GTA V for a number of reasons, the most popular of them being criticism over the gluttonous mass that is GTA Online. I can’t say with certainty if these are the same people who default to GTA Online, but if there is some of that overlap, then it’s true what they say about a view from a glasshouse.
So following up on GTAs IV and V, GTA VI is yet another entry into the contemporary setting of modern-day Miami/South Florida. After looking myself, commenters who are from or have been to Florida have applauded the downright authentic portrayal of life as a Florida man or woman. Exploration of the Everglades and Keys, run ins with alligators, regular folks putting bizarre twists on normal activities and other easter eggs to the unpredictable nature of Florida man. Here’s a fun game you can play: google your birthday and put Florida man in and see what comes up.
Unlike the portrayal of South Florida from Vice City, where it takes home the allegations of a copy of 1983’s Scarface with a few references to Miami Vice, this time the game incorporates pretty much any given report on life in Florida. Much of the in-game footage captured seems to be recorded on Rockstar’s as of yet released parody of TikTok. Allow me to repeat a similar soundbite when I say that the graphics have never looked so amazing. YongYea recorded a video on this the previous night speaking similarly about the graphics and there’s no hyperbole when I say that minor things like hair and clothing affected by the wind, or facial rendering right down to the muscles, or even the local wildlife all come alive in just the trailer.
As for the plot, I’m personally saving my viewing eyes for later trailers to follow in 2024 and ’25, but from what we’ve heard and seen, it’s heavily inspired by the 1930s outlaw pairing of Bonnie and Clyde.
Also a first for GTA is a female protagonist. Rather than make your own in Online (as I have), the female lead is named Lucia and the male lead is named Jason. Plot details are obviously scarce and I intend to keep myself surprised until release even though select details have leaked yonks ago. From what I can gather from the trailer, it begins not dissimilar from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean.
Think about it: young Florida woman begins in the prison system; Lucia herself most likely dodging worse versions of what Jolyne was forced to share a detention complex with during her own incarceration; a boyfriend with an equally sketchy history… and again without anymore information from that, I can’t say where else the story goes, but it clearly doesn’t take place in a prison, though the prison is likely to play a role in the story in some capacity. By the way, the initial comparisons weren’t lost on the JoJo community.
Credit: u/klydex210, r/ShitPostCrusaders
I honestly thought, as did others, that the release window would be, say, Q4 2024, but the trailer ends with a vague 2025 release window. As of writing this, in-depth analyses of the trailer are releasing on YouTube and more will follow with more trailers in 2024. All that time cooking up a five-course meal, so many people have been waiting for the main dish and it looks like whatever trailers are releasing next year and after until release will hold us all over as appetizers. I’m excited, but all throughout this post, I’ve been keeping a level and realistic outlook on this. As exciting as this reveal trailer was, I’ve learned from past mistakes and disappointments to wait for as much information to be made available. Remember Kratos’s words:
Credit: u/Shaho99, r/GodofWar
Open your mind to the possibilities and all that. Now have some analysis videos to hold you over until the next trailer.
Since this blog’s inception, its mission has been to provide interesting opinions, takes, predictions, and whatnot on different parts of entertainment. I think it’s safe to say that as of September 1, 2023, I’ve achieved that and then some, but most of the opinions expressed have ironically not been as personal as advertised. So to address that, I’m going to help expand the shortlist of video games I enjoy by bringing you all to a game that I can return to 100% of the time without fault.
Yes, unquestionably, the game that ropes me in like a pest in a snare is that of the hard-boiled ex-NYPD detective Max Payne. In a bit of a contrast to the video games I’ve talked about before, my introduction to MP was late. Very late, and at the end of the series’ ropes. It was an advert for the third game in Spring 2012 that caught my eye and a local brick and mortar game store near me had a sale on the other two video games.
I pulled a genius move and began with a first-time experience with the PS2 version of MP1, and interesting features of the game make it many times more memorable than anything put out by RockStar, Midway/NetherRealm, or any other developer from the era. I popped the disc into the console and got to playing the tutorial. Games these days have a nasty habit of holding your hand very tightly, so something like MP1 giving this much slack on the choke chain was a breath of fresh air for a start. If the tutorial is necessary, I say they adopt this model, or since we’re fast moving away from that era, we should bring it back.
The titular protagonist is as I described before, an ex-detective who accepts a transfer to the DEA after a tragedy breaks into his house and murders his family. That’s how the first game starts actually. There’s a part of me that simultaneously wants to recount the plot of the games, and avoid all spoilers and instead direct you to your online marketplace of choice so you can wish list it for a sale or pirate it if that’s not applicable, so to compromise we’ll summarize the main points of the games, introduce some of the characters, and layout some features that I’ve yet to see repeated anywhere else.
The first game begins with titular Max Payne talking to a colleague about a transfer to the DEA, which Max declines to stay close and safe with his family. Unfortunately, a tragedy barges in, murders his family, and purely for vengeance, he accepts the transfer into the DEA. It takes a few years but by the early winter of 2001, Max reaches the source of his pain. Buried deep within the wall of mobsters and junkies is a complicated plot spearheaded by a secret conspiracy that on reflection stands on par with something along the lines of 9/11, JFK, and moon landing conspiracies.
Set two years after the first game’s events, Max returns to the NYPD cleared of anything he did the last time with connections to powerful people. In this game, it’s learned that despite all their work and collaborating, the secret society that gets him out of dodge in this game isn’t the most loyal. They serve themselves first and the collaboration between themselves and Max was pure happenstance. The stars wouldn’t align that way again. Not to mention, another man who aided Max the first time was serving his own ends separate from the society.
Based on the characters you meet the first time around, you could probably take a bet or two on who would stick around and who would put a bullet in your head. Well, get ready to go broke because the circumstances flip like an overactive light switch. At times, it makes The Romance of the Three Kingdoms look like a schoolyard brawl, and Three Kingdoms is an appropriate comparison since most of the same enemies and then some come back for round two.
Now for something completely different. After almost a decade in hibernation, Max Payne 3 came to the shelves in 2012 and we’re far divorced from the setting of the first two games. Closing off the trilogy, MP3 gives us a protagonist with a severe drinking and painkiller dependency deep in Sao Paulo as a private contractor for an aristocratic family. Disaster follows Max like a wet dog and brings harm to the family he’s meant to protect.
A trophy wife gets abducted and Max has to fight tooth and nail to bring her back safe and sound. Following a bullet ridden trail through a river, Max investigates a favela, or Brazilian slum, for answers and finds out firsthand how cutthroat and unpredictable the arms trade can get. In the end, he learns that the family he’d been working for had been sold out by one of their own to corrupt officers and a militia involved in the human trafficking trade.
Yeah, the tone grew darker and darker with this final installment. Makes for some neat action, though.
The action tends to take a bigger focus than the story, as with most games. For the Max Payne series, the perfection lies in the shootdodging/bullet time mechanic.
Based on the video above, the way the mechanic works is that when Max dodges a hail of bullets, time slows down allowing the player to aim the weapon precisely at the enemies. Time stops when everyone is down or when the player lands on the other side of the room, whichever comes first.
Alternatively, there’s a manual slow-down that functions the same as the shootdodge, but without the dodging. Time just slows down and allows Max the freedom of movement to gun down everything from the dandelions on upwards. Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame makes a point as well for the mechanic being a double-edged sword. It’s mostly effective when every enemy is down. If any are missed, just pop back up, finish the job, and to the next area you go.
The manual slowing of time is marginally better since you can toggle it on command and execute a plan to eradicate everyone in sight. One flaw with this would be the weapons in the enemy’s arsenal. Generally, the enemy’s are armed with pistols, machine pistols, and shotguns, but occasionally the one special enemy has something like a rifle or a grenade launcher that can send you into orbit in three seconds flat. Without clairvoyance, you’re left with trial and error to solve this problem and you’d better hope you’re allotted enough time to grab enemy weapons and ammo because the bosses can take hits like Senator Armstrong in Metal Gear Rising.
Across the games, there’s been a healthy cast of characters. I’ve already explained the man whose name is on the box art and newspapers, but there’s more. Such as the female counterpart to, and potential love interest of Max Payne: Mona Sax.
Mona Sax is a gun for hire, found to be chasing many of the same enemies that are also after Max. What also sets her apart is that unlike the typical assassin seen in media like, for example, Agent 47, Mona is shown to have a sly personality. As for her contracts, for the most part, it’s all business. If the target is competing for the devil’s position in hell, then she’s guaranteed to set her sights on you, especially for the money. But if the target is someone she happens to like or tolerate, then I can bet money myself that she can fake the target’s death.
The love angle comes into swing in the second game, but the circumstances going on in the background complicate things tremendously. They still have a lot of the same enemies, but not all of them. Sometimes Max’s enemies are Mona’s convenient allies and vice versa.
A head of the Russian mob, Vladimir Lem is a convenient ally in the first game. When he’s first introduced, he can be seen from afar eyeing Max’s exploits undercover within the mob, so his actual introduction is a long-time coming. When he finally shows his face, he lives up to many of the mobster movie stereotypes of old.
His first lines are a Corleone-style proposal to help Max get to the truth while Max solves a problem for him. Fast-forward two years, and there was more to Vlad than he was willing let on. Just goes to show that this isn’t business where people trust easily.
Alfred Woden is the mysterious one-eyed man drip feeding Max information on those who caused his pain years ago. You’d think he’d give it to him within first contact, but the details of the game keep him in his position of trickle down note-taking. But once everything is revealed in full, it’s go time.
This all goes well until the second game where the whole concept of trust experiences another Ring of Fire tremor.
The only supporting character to appear in the third game, Raul Passos fits the role of helping to isolate both Max and the player from a familiar environment, even though the lore explains that the two were coworkers in the NYPD before. Passos was the one who helped Max relocate to Brazil to start working as a contractor for the family, but even with a helping hand, things go terribly wrong.
Unlike the others, Passos doesn’t have anything else under the hood that royally screws Max over. Well, there is (minor spoiler), but it’s handily resolved rather quickly. Passos doesn’t betray Max and makes it long enough to escape without any scratches. If you’re looking for more details on the games, the Wikipedia, associated wiki pages, and reviews from back then are all available. And of course if you can afford to do so, Steam or similar online game stores are at your disposal and to my knowledge, RockStar hasn’t delisted the game from Steam. But on the off chance they choose to do so in their infinite wisdom, there’s another way to experience the series for yourself:
Whether you play it or not, you likely know at least a few things about the Grand Theft Auto series: 1) it’s pretty much an organized crime simulator, 2) it’s violently comedic, 3) and the character Big Smoke exists to this day as a meme machine.
The more knowledgeable of you may also know some fun facts about the series as a whole, not the least of which involves the series’ humble beginnings. The concept of the game was under the working title of Race ‘n’ Chase with a release date set for sometime in 1997 by Scottish developers DMA Design. The original goal was top-down street racing with an added bonus of a police response that would become common for series like Midnight Club and Need for Speed.
The point of divergence for the concept was a tough-to-patch glitch. The police cars were extraordinarily relentless in pursuit of the player and most of the time, the devs couldn’t correct the issue, so instead they decided to team up with the madness and make it an action-adventure game retitled Grand Theft Auto. Across all the games, the skeleton of the objective is the same: the protagonist changes with each game, but they’re all tasked with completing a set of tasks for increasingly high payment with proportional risk to the player. As the games progress, the player unlocks new weapons, safe houses, locations, and in some cases clothing options. The police wanted level has influenced the game and others across the industry — the response is often proportional to the crime from mild disturbances having a single cop car investigating to high level crimes involving stand-ins for real life federal agencies like the FBI. Up until GTA V took away one of the stars, the military would be called for the highest wanted level of six stars all just to take you down. A look on YouTube may find you some compilation videos of the police partaking in the Darwin Awards, or interestingly analysis videos on the police in GTA games. My favorite comes from Game Theory where they experimented on whether real-life instances of brutality have been programmed into the game. In a serious tone, this is a debate best suited for a platform better equipped to make comment on it, so this is more of a comedic tone.
GTA and GTA 2 in 1999 were both 2D games despite the late 1990s being the era of the emerging 3D graphics market. Almost every developer was launching a video game with full 3D graphics with resounding success stories like Medal of Honor and GoldenEye 007 coupled with lackluster releases like Mortal Kombat 4 and what would’ve been Star Fox 2 if it came out on time.
One can argue that Grand Theft Auto III’s 2001 release was somewhat later than what was expected of games at the time as RockStar’s formula is to one-up itself with each new release and GTA III came swinging at the hip, guns ablaze. The graphics and mechanics at the time set the stage for a ginormous change all throughout the gaming industry and one of the first notable examples of GTA’s influence was the many clones, though I doubt the men in charge of RockStar cared all that much. Leslie Benzies and the Houser Bros., Sam and Dan, were busy making games and as shameless as some of the clones were, taking elements from a proven success story isn’t the end of the world. Other devs could do what they wanted while RockStar Games released, 2002’s GTA Vice City, 2004’s GTA San Andreas (which to this day is the reason the PS2 sold well over 150 million units), 2006’s Vice City Stories — one of two underrated GTA games that I talked about months ago on this blog, and one of the most expensive games at the time, 2008’s GTA IV.
Coupled with DLC content in the form of The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony expansions, GTA IV signified a change in the GTA series. The HD era was upon us and the next generation of consoles was its home. Better graphics, a more serious tone, new mechanics, and reimagined cities and locales. GTA IV’s Liberty City looked more like the Big Apple than its 3D rendition, and a lot of small details from older games have remained unchanged or were tweaked to fit the era.
As we all know, RockStar’s prize success story is that of GTA V in 2013, which reimagines Los Angeles and some surrounding areas in the HD universe, but before that, there was another HD game in the 2D style: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.
I was originally going to mention how much of a difference there is between this game and the two GTAs released before and after it, but every GTA game differs in some capacity so that would’ve been a useless metric for the game. The basic plot of this game involves Hong Kong immigrant Huang Lee who flies to Liberty City and is welcomed with violence. He arrived in the city to deliver a sword to his uncle Wu “Kenny” Lee, but things turned sideways when he was ambushed at the airport, so now he has to work to make up for the loss of the sword. Obviously, there’s more to this story and if you want to look at the series from beginning to end, The Professional, GTASeriesVideos (a RockStar fan channel), and Willzyyy are your best sources of gameplay on YouTube along with some other channels.
Now the plot is the standard, started at the bottom, now we’re here fare, but the most notable difference was that when it released in March of 2009, Nintendo allowed RockStar to publish it on the DS.
Yeah, the same company that heavily censored Mortal Kombat in the 1990s and lives and breathes by Super Mario and Kirby allowed a notoriously violent video game on one of their star handheld platforms. Granted, 2000s Nintendo was far removed from 1990s Nintendo. There was still the family-friendly image on the face of the company, but at this point Nintendo was letting the chains loosen a bit on the family friendly image by allowing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 to be played on the DS as well. It’s a large company with a large history, run by a council of suits and while there’s nothing detailing how this arrangement came to be in detail, the main connecting element is extensive use of the touchscreen function in some manner.
This might have been part of the deal to get certain types of games on the Nintendo DS: design it in a way that the touchscreen doesn’t go ignored, and while that works well for touch games like the Touchmaster series, third parties are hit and miss. From best use to worst use in my personal experience, it’s Chinatown Wars at best, Mortal Kombat in the middle, and Call of Duty at the worst. Or rather just awkward for that last one.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the rest of that deal included a lap dance of some sort. For Chinatown Wars, it might be a good example of a game whose mechanics are tied to the touchscreen, but not necessarily dependent on that feature. Certain minigames and combat sequences make good use of the feature and it flows naturally enough into gameplay that you won’t really notice it as much half the time. Don’t quote me on this, but I don’t think this was actually the first time a GTA game was on a Nintendo system. Prior to GTA III, there was GTA Advance available for the Game Boy, and once again, I doubt attempting to research that arrangement will net me anything interesting, unless I use a time machine or the wayback machine.
Some mechanics in Chinatown Wars that use the touchscreen include filling your own bottles of Molotov cocktails at the gas station; rigging stolen cars by way of screwdriver, hotwire, or PDA hacking (sidenote: this was most likely the last time in the modern era that PDAs would ever be important in any medium); assembling the sniper rifle for certain occasions, like a story mission; and controversially, drug dealing.
Grand Theft Auto belongs to a list of media properties that courts controversy like Casanova rounding third base for the fifth time in a week, and until recently, RockStar Games themselves have been known for their controversial money maker. Seasoned veterans of the series who skipped over this game may be curious why the drug dealing specifically was a sore point for critics to look at when the game was released. Well, another part of what makes the game different from the others was the player’s direct involvement in the drug dealing. For the most part, the protagonist is merely a glorified middleman who moves things from A to B, rarely having a role in the direct purchase or sale of such things save for cutscenes.
Chinatown Wars breaks away from that and allows the player to do so in their free time away from missions and sometimes as a prerequisite to activate a certain mission. Of course, it comes with its own set of risks. Sometimes the dealers — who come from multiple different gangs and factions — meet up in locations where a police camera is. The presence of the camera can help determine whether a deal is about to be busted, but its presence also raises the prices of a certain product. Minimizing the police response by destroying the cameras is also an option, but the price of the drugs bought or sold also takes a hit. This mechanic makes more use of the high risk, high rewards system that GTA is usually known for.
And I’m certain this is needless to say, but no, video game violence doesn’t lead to real life violence. There was one incident in 2003 when Alabama teen Devin Moore went on a rampage inspired by GTA Vice City that left three people dead and put him on death row where he still sits as of writing this, but if that were the metric used to judge games based on their content, then laws around video games in the US would closely resemble what Australia has on the books which was why GTA III was banned their for over twenty years.
This guy knows how it feels.
This is the part where after reviewing a game and listing its gameplay in detail, I’d encourage you to track down a copy and a working console to play it, or find an emulator to use, but unlike Warner Bros. who practically force us nostalgic types to emulate the 3D Mortal Kombat games, RockStar’s been a big fan of anniversary releases with GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas all getting updates every ten years to correspond with the games’ respective release dates, and GTA Chinatown Wars is the same being made available on smartphones as of late. There’s also a PSP version that adds another character, the opportunistic journalist Melanie Mallard as an extra character. To my knowledge, the smartphone versions are upgrades from the original DS version so, I guess it’s a matter of personal preference.
I had both versions available to me at the time and I personally recommend the PSP version for the extra character and extra music stations alone. Admittedly, there’s no voice lines in this games, except for the DS version where the game says a short dialogue line when the DS is closed and then opened, so the cutscenes are a bit like a visual novel or, since we have precedent, the cutscenes featured in 1988’s Ninja Gaiden on the NES.
As I said, gameplay videos exist on YouTube and however you experience the game is all up to you.
This topic has been in my notes for a few weeks, and up until recently I thought about first talking about what I love most about the racing game genre before listing off my personal best through worst. I should admit, though, that the games chosen for this were chosen partly for nostalgic reasons but also to see how well they hold up. My appreciation for racing games goes back to an old collection of Hot Wheels toys, funny enough.
There was almost no escaping these little cars. While the cars could be found in most pharmacies and dollar stores and in the bargain bin at select department stores, toy stores held the associated sets and tracks and all of them were awesome. Most often, these were battery-powered loops that propel the cars on assembled tracks that go in multiple different directions. I don’t care what anyone says; no matter your opinions on the 2008 Speed Racer movie, toy manufacturers nailed it when they gave us toys and cars based on the movie. Still got nothing on the LEGO sets, though.
I didn’t own the above set, by the way. These things were huge.
To connect the toy cars to the digital cars I raced around in on the TV, these two ran concurrent with each other. I used to collect loads of toy cars and spend a lot of time with racing games, though not to the same extent as the fighting and adventure games. Still, I spent a lot of time with racing games and so for my best through worst:
Best: Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix (2005)
Mid: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 (2002)
Worst: L.A. Rush (2005)
I think this post will get quite a bit long for each of these three, and before I expand on why I put these games where I put them in lieu of probably better options, this is a personal list that I know won’t walk the same stride as others’ personal lists, I have better memories with these games (emulated or otherwise), and for the game in the Worst category, there are objectively worse games like Crazy Bus or Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, but those were glorified tech demos that could be written off as a joke like Hong Kong 97. You’d have to put them on the same pedestal as actual games we celebrate or despise and that’s too much for those piles of crap. I don’t like to go for low-hanging fruit. Now for the list.
Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix
This version of the game specifically is what I remember best as the game I finished 100% many times over, and as a personal achievement, I managed to do it on the PS2 emulator with just the keyboard. Thank god for long fingers!
The third in the Midnight Club series it follows up from its predecessors with longer races, more challenges, bigger cities, secrets and easter eggs and more. Customization options and an open world to explore let the player get creative during a race. More than once while driving through the cities, I came across these routes to find secrets or prepare to the best of my ability for a race that would most likely take a certain route.
The Dub Edition tagline for the regular and remix versions for the game stem from the game’s partnership with the car magazine Dub, who spruce up a prize car from a tournament in their style to include the Dodge Magnum, the 2006 Dodge Charger, the Chrysler 300C, the Cadillac Escalade EXT and others. The game has three scaled-down, fictionalized versions of the U.S. cities of San Diego, Atlanta, and Detroit, and the remix version includes the Tokyo Challenge. All three cities are headed by a mechanic and his auto parts garage:
San Diego’s mechanic, Oscar, heads the Six-One-Nine Customs;
Atlanta’s garage is Apone Team Racing run by the garage’s namesake,
And Vince’s garage is in Detroit. No fancy name unfortunately.
For Tokyo, Speedway is the garage there.
As you progress through the career mode, you’re told over a type of transceiver or cell phone that a new racer is in the city ready to challenge you. Racers driving a certain type of car denote a car club they belong to and upon their defeat, they send word of you to the club who invites you to partake in their races for a prize across the three cities. Additionally, tournaments can be entered for prize cars, customized by Dub or open for customization at the garage.
The customization options are quite extensive. Most likely riding the wave of the Fast and Furious franchise, nearly every car can have extensive body work done to it, essentially turning a station wagon into a supercar and earning you even more speeding tickets because none of the cars you have are street legal anymore. Imagine explaining that to the traffic cops…
The car classes and types matter mainly to the car clubs stateside, but in the remix version with Tokyo included, there are class and car type specific tournaments, and the kicker is that you don’t necessarily have to finish the American races first before flying to Japan. The first tournament you’re offered will require a vehicle class not available until you’re 4/5 done with Detroit, but the way you unlock tournaments in Tokyo is that instead of challenging individual racers, street races which are represented by red dots in the States are represented by purple diamonds, three of which unlock the next tournament. So theoretically, you can complete some races in the US, head to Japan and complete a tournament there, then come back to the US with the prize car, rinse and repeat.
Then, there’s the soundtrack, which couldn’t be anymore mid-2000s. Hip hop artists, post-grunge bands, techno bands, electro-pop; as I recall, select genres went hand-in-hand with the underground racing scene as depicted in media. I have no idea if this was representative of the lifestyle back then, but if so then that’s pretty cool. It makes the replays all the more enjoyable to watch.
The car clubs have an extra feature for certain cars. Specific types can gain one of three abilities: Zone, Agro, and Roar. Zone is a type of Max Payne-like slow motion ability that allows the Tuner cars, Exotic cars, Sports Bikes and select Luxury Sedans to weave through traffic in slow mo. This ability is earned by driving as clean as possible through the city. Agro is applicable to the rest of the Sedans and SUVs and is a type of boost that allows the driver to slam through traffic at a breakneck pace, breaking necks with all the wreckage caused by ramming other cars off the streets. Driving into other cars and causing general damage is how you earn this ability. Roar is exclusive to Muscle Cars and Choppers and it sends a blast of wind to scatter heavy traffic out of the way. Drifting and power sliding unlocks this ability. All three can be used a total of five times, and going by my playthrough of each ability, they’re not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution when a race goes sideways. Zone helps you get through traffic, but it builds up as slow as its ability performs and a single crash can set the bar down as it accumulates. The draw of Agro ability is that you can send offending vehicles to the moon and the impact is literally diminished if you activate it on a free road. The same goes for Roar, but the consequences are doubly so if the vehicles don’t spread out how you hope. You have to think a bit more strategically before activating either of these three.
Lastly, there’s the secrets. The three U.S. cities have RockStar logos that net you extra customization options in the garage from more riders on bikes, to license plates to decals and more.
Above all, not only do I recommend it, I highly recommend you set up your controller if you go the emulation route. Contorting your fingers like miniature twister is better as a party trick than to play games. I write from experience.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2
My next words on this game specifically will surely sound a bit contradictory depending on how you see racing games. The customization options giving me a range of choices heavily influenced my rating of Midnight Club 3 despite me spending less time with it. Need for Speed has little in the way of customization, there’s no overarching plot to become a legendary racer in the underground street racing scene, and the options for cars and tracks is so limited that it’s nonexistent.
That being said, I’m still playing this game and the game modes on display do a lot to make up for what I thought was so perfect about MC3. Granted, NFS HP2 came out in Q4 2002 while MC3 was released around Spring 2005, so older racing games will feel like clean-picked skeletons compared to what would succeed them all, but judging games of this era by their own merits reveals that they’re less about style and more about substance. Midnight Club drips style, but Need for Speed before the EA corruption of the 2010s leaks substance.
Multiple game modes and challenges can be completed and the departure from other games is that there isn’t always an emphasis on getting perfect scores. Some challenges will still let you advance even if you finish in second place. As another divergent example from what’s expected of Midnight Club, transmission systems can be adjusted to suit the player depending on the car: automatic, manual, and semiautomatic transmission. The game is also designed more around skills than simply picking up and playing.
You know how Midnight Club has precise locations based on real-world cities, just scaled down massively from what residents of each would recognize of them (especially for 2005)? Well, the maps in Need for Speed are less precise and more like general amalgamations of a city in a given location. The Mediterranean coastline, the Pacific coast, Australia, the American Southwest, etc. The game also feels less like a smorgasbord of real-life cars and car concepts that with the benefit of hindsight didn’t always pan out.
This concept H3T, for instance, is different from what was sold in 2005 and ‘6, by the way. As a matter of fact, the car brands in NFS were less luxurious and well known and more specific to certain regions if not known to the wider car aficionado demographic. Opel, the now-defunct HSV, one of Ford’s foreign manufacturers, all feature in the game. The cars that you start off with tend to have a top speed of around 125 MPH with an average 0-60 acceleration rate of 5.3 seconds. The further down the line you advance, the top speed rounds to around 200 MPH with a shorter rate of acceleration. With the speeding cars comes new ways to maneuver around the tracks.
Speaking of the tracks, going back to a comment I made about the cars in MC3 losing street legality, they’d all be suited for a race track like how they’re all designed in this game. The tracks within NFS Hot Pursuit all have secret pathways and shortcuts to take but depending on the version you have it may be somewhat different. I emulated the PS2 version and pirated the PC version and the menu selection screens are all different; the PS2 version seemed to be the snazziest of all the available versions, whereas the PC, Xbox, and GameCube layouts are all the same.
Skills play a role in more than just driving and handling. The Hot Pursuit game modes where cops are placed at different points along the track can add an extra layer of difficulty to the challenge and you’ll normally only have that split-second to decide how to avoid them. NFS has a reset button for when you screw up during the race, but in my experience it there are less opportunities to use it during Hot Pursuit mode because the police will catch up to you and ticket you. So best to save those for when you’re out of sight of the police or outside Hot Pursuit mode.
The cops in this game are also aggressive. They’re not GTA-aggressive, but as I recall, in the PC version they’ll deploy helicopters the longer you resist. I know they also do that in the PS2 version though I rarely keep them around for that long to find out. This mode isn’t one sided though — there’s a mode to play as the cop and nab speeding racers as well.
I don’t know if this is true of all EA games from before or even now but their design philosophy, considering Medal of Honor, Need for Speed here, and Battlefield seemed to be based partly or wholly on gaining and refining skills than button-mashing throughout the whole play session. This isn’t a philosophy that’ll resonate with everyone and EA has since divorced themselves from this for darker desires in recent memory, but as I said with Midnight Club 3, find a way to play it and see the game for yourself. It might be too your taste if Midnight Club proves too flashy.
L.A. Rush:
This game is why this blog topic exists. It’s because I hate this game so much that I decided to write this week’s topic. Thing is, for years, I’d never had the words to illustrate my gripes with this game until recently. The YouTube channel BlueTag did the digging and the review on what this game has to offer because I knew damn well I wasn’t gonna put this tripe in my emulator, so here’s the corresponding video.
To spoil the video a bit, this game was developed by Midway Games’ British branch in Newcastle, the same Midway Games that flooded arcades from the 1980s until their 2010 bankruptcy, gave us Mortal Kombat and the subsequent ESRB rating system, and surprise sleepers like SpyHunter and Stranglehold. According to BlueTag, the finer details surrounding development are lost to history, but the game’s inner workings hint at a severe lack of communication between internal departments.
The physics engine is incredibly flimsy for a racing game let alone driving. Slip a finger on the accelerator and the car will hit the nearest wall at Mach 4, with reciprocal results. Forget tanks for cars that could take a beating; this game cinematically emphasizes the damage that comes with totaling the car when this happens.
Funny enough, the main protagonist is supposed to have a fleet of cars, but there’s only one that features prominently in the game at the beginning. L.A. Rush is another game sponsored by a major car promoter, this time MTV’s Pimp My Ride with Xzibit and Lil Jon in tow, but unlike Dub, Pimp My Ride doesn’t have much to offer. Or rather, the Dub team will let you win cars done by them where as PMR often upgrades your ride without you seeing the bodywork or messing around with it until it’s finished. You also stand to lose half your cash to a ride whose paintjob is a surprise until the end.
Speaking of money, you have to pay an entry fee to compete in a race and if you mess up and want to start over and do better, you can’t restart the race from the menu. You have to back out and come back in and pay the entry fee again. Like the other games, cops also play a role in this game but considering the consequences in the other games, this is simultaneously a worse and lax punishment at the same time: it’s lax because you bribe the cops to get them to back off, but it’s worse because you lose money on entry fees anyway so this is another way to lose your money.
Cutscenes meanwhile show the protagonist, whose name I never registered, I think his name was T or something, having already achieved street racer heaven. Then the bad guy shows up, promising to take your stuff which he does. After a few weeks, your cars are all confiscated including the jet black Hummer you rock up to the mansion in, leaving you with a suburban sedan that you have to use to get your cars back, often while under pursuit, and with the crappy physics and whatnot, this is more of a chore than anything.
As for the map, I’m not a native Angeleno, but I’ve heard from the Wikipedia article, that a section of L.A., namely the Valley was absent. Seems weird to put in, but in a racing game a map and layout can make or break a race if not the whole game and what I presume to be a notable location within the L.A. region was done a disservice by its omission. If this is the case, then whatever could’ve been done with the Valley may have killed further interest.
All things considered, if eight year old me was smart enough to see the problems with this back then it should be a warning to how unplayable a game could be, especially the PC port which I learned was worse off than the console version. If you have that Tibetan Buddhist level of patience, give it a go. If not, watch the gameplay and prepare yourself for outdated, cringey dialog, even for a game from the mid-2000s.
Before I move on to the YouTube recommendations, I want to mention a last minute game I also played on the PS2 back in the day, but have fewer moments with: Gran Turismo 4.
My memories with this are hazy as of now, but if I get the chance to emulate and play it, I’ll surely put my thoughts in, no questions asked.
Now for the channel recommendation: Rev says desu. This channel is a commentary channel on mostly anime and anime news and often features the wrong opinions to laugh at and lambast from some of the worst people to speak on a given matter on Twitter. Originally shortform in length, Rev has gotten around to longer videos for more to discuss. Wherever you start, if you like his content be sure to subscribe to him, he makes videos regularly.
Finishing off with the second round of underrated GTA games
Last week, I brought attention to the likes of GTA: Vice City Stories, one of two games that I think should receive a remake, flaws notwithstanding. Even a PC port if able, and I don’t mean by way of emulation as it’s been my only means of playing the game. By the way, I want to quickly update and say I found a mission that may be worse than Supply Lines in San Andreas. The second half of the mission Unfriendly Competition ramps up the difficulty right quick. The second half of this mission can fall off a bridge. Anyway, we’re moving onto Liberty City Stories.
Liberty City Stories is set in 1998, which is three years prior to the start of GTA III. So to outline the timeline of the 3D era: Vice City Stories starts in 1984; Vice City takes place two years later in the mid-spring of 1986; San Andreas begins in 1992; LCS takes place in March of 1998, and GTA III being set in the modern day at the time takes place in mid-Autumn of 2001, and the real-world politics of its real-world counterpart were felt during the development of the game with all the content that was cut.
As a side note, I want to make a post about the uncanny references to 9/11 prior to the actual 9/11. See for yourself, it’s unreal.
Anyway, LCS centers around the character of Antonio “Toni” Cipriani. After lying low for a few years on the orders of Don Salvatore Leone, Toni is called back to do more mob work and help the Leones put the city under mob influence, fighting gangsters, cartels, and the Sicilian Mob itself across the map.
If you ask me, forgetting this game and VCS doesn’t make a lot of sense. You could argue that since they both feature one-off characters and GTA III itself (whom Toni appears in) is the last game chronologically, the point remaking LCS and/or VCS wouldn’t be worth it. But I argue that one-off or not, Victor Vance from VCS and Toni Cipriani from LCS have both been influential even if it’s not all that felt in the games that they serve as prequels too.
No, no one really honors Toni in GTA III and Victor Vance doesn’t appear again, save for the intro to Vice City while other characters like Maria Latore and Phil Cassidy et al have more screen time and became mainstays, but this highlights further problems with prequels. The lack of foresight that can often accompany them. If RockStar thought ahead, they would’ve had Phil Cassidy age properly from gun nut (like his appearance in VC) to drunkard (as shown in VCS) to old man heavy weapons dealer (as seen in GTA III and LCS).
Further, LCS has inherited the water puddle death that made seafaring so nerve-wracking in GTA III and Vice City. The three cities repeatedly lampooned in the GTA series (LA, NYC, Miami) all have beaches, but if you splash a little bit of water on Claude, Tommy Vercetti, or Toni, straight to the hospital. Though, after 2002 and until IV in 2008, motorcycles would make a permanent appearance.
As a sidenote, RockStar got around the lack of motorcycles in GTA III by stating in-universe that a petition to get them off the streets of LC pulled through. So bikers were essentially outlawed. Personally, I grew up in the Bronx and having seen a fair share of bikers growing up, they don’t play a very large influence, but biker gangs in NYC would still show up from time to time.
Thankfully the absence is quickly remedied following 2002’s Vice City, though the 3D era games have showcased several design flaws of the time. In the case of Liberty City Stories, at first glance it was structurally similar to III and Vice City, just asset flipped and this time making use of the map in-game as opposed to hoping the player could memorize from the mini-map in III. But like those games, swimming was against the law. Bikes and bikers were given an appearance, but aircraft would still take a backseat until the pilotable helicopters after 2002.
But a move RockStar made that would change the face of GTA going forward would be non-silent protagonists. Claude in III literally nods and sets forward blasting. Without a single word of dialogue, Claude portrays himself to be one hell of a sociopath. Employers and allies who stay by his side are left alone, but give him a briefcase of cash and a target and he’ll pursue it to the ends of the earth. This serves as a vague spoiler, so those of you looking to emulate it should be on the lookout.
Speaking of III, Toni debuts as an employer in that game and trying my best not to spoil, the character models in both show a difference. Unlike what became of Phil Cassidy, more attention was at least paid to Toni’s model.
See the difference? I want to say RockStar doesn’t focus on progression all that much with characters from previous games quietly retiring or outright dying (Johnny Klebitz deserved better.), but within an established universe, and with the right amount of dedication, they can do good with a before and after. This isn’t related to anything plot wise between games, but at times in LCS Toni will be told that he’s remarkably, almost skeletally thin. In 1998, he was lightly mocked for being underweight, and over the next three years and change, he became overweight. A bit like Nikocado Avocado, except even with the extra pounds, Toni can still move around a lot faster.
Actually, if you’ve ever seen weightlifters, bodybuilders, or the most recent incarnation of Thor, packing on the weight helps plenty for those guys. Toni turned himself into an ox when you think about it. The way the GTA games are written gives away a sense of a Hollywood influence, and mobster movies get the most spotlight depending on the setting. Vice City combines aspects of shows like Miami Vice and any mobster movie set on the East Coast, and III and LCS both give me more New York Five Families vibes. Pick your favorite movie, but for me it’s Goodfellas, with a hint of Godfather, and maybe also Miller’s Crossing with these wise guys dedicating themselves to the mob from birth, the lot of them being mobster brats as kids.
That tends to be the case for both Tommy and Toni. For Toni, his mother doesn’t make a physical appearance, but more of a vocal appearance. Pushing him to step it up, bust his enemies’ teeth in, come back with at least five severed heads or don’t come back at all; admittedly, this feeds into stereotypes of both Sicilian parents and the Sicilian mob. I’m not Sicilian and I don’t know many Italians (save for the many pizzerias and Italian restaurants within walking distance of my apartment), so I can’t say how true to life this is for someone of Sicilian ancestry growing up. The Sicilian mob on the other hand gets a fair amount of media coverage in pop culture if not news outlets in and around Sicily and Southern Italy, and if Sicilian or Mediterranean-based journalists are worth their salt, the Sicilian mob isn’t one to trifled with.
Groups like Ndrangheta can and have done serious damage to people who’ve wronged them, and it’s far from pretty. Of course, works of fiction need to take liberties in case someone is dumb enough to imitate what happens in real life or for dramatic effect, but if RockStar pulled some stories from real-world headlines featuring the Sicilian mob in action, then perhaps it’s as close to accurate as can be short of interviewing an ex-mobster or watching an interview or documentary of such.
Toni Cipriani goes about doing much of what can be expected of a mobster with the strong-arming, enforcement, bribery, political meddling, malicious destruction and all that the mob was accused of doing or charged with. All this being said though, the asset taking and developing in the VC games and San Andreas are absent. On the one hand, it would fit with the narrative of the game, but it’s a bit unrealistic as several mobsters — real and fictional — operated front businesses to keep the police from sniffing around or at least bribe them with “get lost” money.
Grand Theft Auto is an ultimate in parody, but more realistic elements existed in movies and shows and funny enough JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind. Golden Wind takes place in 2001 in Naples and briefly explains that many capos and even the Don’s consigliere (advisor) may have a side business if not an umbrella’s worth of them, sometimes with evidence. Mr. Pericolo (pictured above) is an example of mobsters continually hiding their identities and getting one up on the law or their enemies.
Disguises and shell companies and whatnot don’t feature in LCS. This would probably take away from the video game aspect of the video game and probably feeds into a misconception that a mobster can’t have a side hustle, which I can’t really believe after what happened to Al Capone.
And if that were the case, then the misconception is broken by way of Tommy Vercetti himself gaining assets and collecting regular payments for the latter half of Vice City. Recall that he’s from Liberty City originally, and the game follows much of the plot of Scarface 1983.
For LCS, one of the hidden perks of being an asset flip of GTA III and Vice City is that some of the problems and mechanics in SA and VCS make a comeback. This being Liberty City, the radio stations from III are all intact, albeit with different music and radio shows to listen to (Chatterbox FM is a hidden gem), mobster characters from III show up along with a few one-off characters who don’t appear in III, this being post-VC, there’s more weapons variety and I think the game fixes a minor anachronism.
Gun nuts reading this will notice that ever since the M4A1 was made famous by the U.S. military overseas, RockStar put it in all the 3D games after III despite it not being manufactured until 1994 and probably being issued to the military a year and change after that. So it makes sense at least to have that as a rifle in a game set in 1998. The games set years prior to that should all have the M16, while III and LCS have the M4 model, though this being early 2000s internet, this is assuming the internet was fast 20 years ago.
Anyway, the dialogue doesn’t sound out of place for a piece of mobster media for the time, the characters’ are all felt (especially Mrs. Cipriani), Toni is an impactful protagonist despite the lack of muscle mass, and considering he’s one of two characters to show up in at least four games, it seems as though RockStar wasn’t ready to part ways with either Phil Cassidy or the character Donald Love until it was time to use that next-gen technology to make LC look more like NY than it did back then. Now, I know I said this was a two-parter, but there’s a third game that probably doesn’t receive as much attention that I also want to get around to. Whenever that’ll be, I’ll have to rewrite the schedule, but it’ll be covered down the line, so be on the lookout.
This week, I recommend a podcast. The Trash Taste podcast is hosted by three anitubers Garnt “Gigguk” Maneetapho, Joey “TheAnimeMan” Bizinger, and Connor “CDawgVA” Colquhoun. All three have their own YouTube and Twitch channels, but I’ll only link the podcast since it’ll have the links provided already. The Trash Taste Podcast markets itself as an anime podcast, but has overtime evolved to encompass more about life in Japan especially as a gaijin/non-Japanese. They also have an After Dark channel that livestreams on Twitch as well. The podcast has a Patreon page, and while the videos are recorded for the YouTube viewing audience, if you can’t find the time to sit down and watch, podcasting apps like Google Podcasts and Spotify have their episodes on audio only so there’s more than one way to support them.
Looking at a pair of GTA games that deserve as much honor as the others
Gamers of all strides know the gods of controversy at RockStar Games and their most famous series of all: Grand Theft Auto. Developed by Scotsmen in 1997 under what used to be DMA Design, the working title was changed from Race n Chase to that of a motor vehicle theft, even though the games have always featured way more than that.
It wouldn’t be until the game’s 3D era installments in the Fall of 2001 that set a precedent across the gaming industry. Being one of the games that perfects the 3D formula as other games were failing or meeting expectations prior to the turn of the millennium is one hell of an accolade. Future games continued to reinvent the wheel, with a voiced protagonist and ownable assets in Vice City (2002), RPG elements in San Andreas (2004), and by the HD era, the characters got grittier and more realistic with the GTA 4 and Episodes from Liberty City protagonists of Niko Bellic, the Yugoslav War vet, Johnny Klebitz, the biker, and Luis Lopez, the nightclub manager.
That being said, the 3D trilogy protags and the ones pictured above from the HD era, coupled with the three protags of GTA 5, are the most memorable ones which becomes extremely ironic for the GTA III protagonist: Claude, a silent protagonist who can best be described as an amoral psychopath even without dialogue.
But among the myriad of GTA characters, there’s a few that don’t get as much recognition from the 3D era from a pair of forgotten GTA games. This post will focus on the first of these — Vice City Stories — while next week’s post goes to the second in this two-parter: Liberty City Stories. Those titles almost give me the impression upon reflection that there were drafts for a San Andreas Stories that never came to light.
So what’s Vice City Stories about? It’s set in 1984, two years before Vice City’s protagonist Tommy Vercetti gets out of prison and heads to Vice City, Florida (no fake state this go around), and follows the protagonist Victor Vance. He starts as a corporal in the U.S. Army and is sent to do bullshit tasks for his NCO Sgt. Jerry Martinez. Martinez, though, is an outlier of shitbaggery with most of his tasks being especially illegal. And with Vance as the fall guy, he gets kicked out with a dishonorable discharge for being caught with pot and coming to base with a hooker in toe on Martinez’s orders.
I want to tangent for a bit. If you’ve been in the military, especially the Army, there’s a few things that almost don’t add up very well. It’s an inside joke that Army corporals are very ignored and shat on by higher ups. Specialists are often seen as belonging to a club known as the E-4 mafia. Tons of videos explain what that is, but to my understanding, the shitty details relegated to lower enlisted normally include those in pay grade E-1 to -4, though a Specialist with some time in service knows a few tricks of the trade to get around performing said shitty details. Again, videos can explain it better than an entertainment blog.
Also, there’s a sad reality about the U.S. military that senior noncoms are almost always looked over when they misbehave since they’ve shown to be such an asset for being in for so long at so high a rank, even if their direct leadership (first sergeants and sergeants major) is simply impressed that they can run two miles in under fifteen minutes. Part of that is a joke, but there’s some truth to it. Theoretically, a sergeant first class in the Army or a gunnery sergeant in the Marines can be a total asshole to everyone below him or her and probably face nonjudicial punishment because of something stupid. So it raised a few alarm bells for me that Martinez was a sergeant at the pay grade of E-5 and not E-7 or higher. He probably has more time in service but got passed over for different reasons (the 1980s U.S. Army was a vastly different beast), but who knows?
But enough about military politics. Other outlets can better bitch and moan about that. Back to the game. Following Vance facing the worst of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a few contacts made on the outside help Vic out and get him back on his feet. He explains to Sgt. Martinez that his purpose for joining the military was to provide for his family, though the game reveals how crap they all are with money, save for the one in his immediate family that really needs it, his sickly younger brother.
When you get an honorable discharge from the Army, ideally you have the best credentials because of how great it makes your resume look. Dishonorable discharge is a different story and Vic could generally be far, far worse than a dope peddler. Interestingly, halfway through the game he expresses discomfort for this part of the criminal underworld, sticking mainly with extortion, racketeering, and prostitution. Still morally questionable, but the character arc almost reminds me of Walter White in Breaking Bad, which is interesting as VCS was released about two years before Breaking Bad premiered on AMC in 2008.
I think I may have material for a future post. While I know what happens at the end of the game, having seen gameplay of it on YT, I’m refraining from major spoilers and looking at features lifted from other games. Swimming is here to stay and the era of “touch water equals death” was gone briefly until RockStar’s 2010 western game Red Dead Redemption brought it back because…
The asset ownership returns from San Andreas and Vice City and this time, Vic has a choice over what to turn a newly acquired building into. Rival gangs can attack your shit and if you don’t hustle, you pay out of pocket to fix it. There’s also side missions and upgrades to do and the fiscally conservative of you might sing your praises if the income outweighs the expenses. This was the case for me personally. You get your pay every day at 4:00 PM, and since I barely spent anything, my daily income brought me a fifth of the way to six figures, so paying to fix shit didn’t really faze me. A feature that also shaped GTA games in the future was bribes.
Whenever you get busted or wasted in game in this era, the authorities tending to you take away your guns, but in this game you can buy them all back. Then with GTA 4, only the police took your guns away. Mentioning the timeline in a non-spoilery way, the 3D era blends pretty well though there’s a few inconsistencies. Some characters disappeared from the timeline momentarily to show up in another game apropos of nothing. Sometimes characters aged incorrectly (see Phil Cassidy for more information). But putting aside developer oversight, the gangs within were mostly consistent, with X gang shown to be powerful in X game or Y gang disbanding because of actions in Y gang, etc., etc.
All of these would at least be grounds for a remake or remaster, or so I’d think, but III, VC, and SA get the most love as those were the three to be remade at least twice, first in the early 2010s to coincide with their respective ten year anniversaries, and again in 2021 to coincide with the 20 year anniversary of GTA III, though faceplanting at the first hurdle.
As well loved as these three games are, they scratch the surface of what the 3D games had to offer and leave a few things out of the narrative and timeline of the 3D era. You could piece together everything with just CJ, Tommy, and Claude and call it a day — many have done that — but personally, I like the extras included by these games inclusion. In fact, I’ll probably work on a timeline blog in the future. I’ve played these games a fair bit and I’ve got a solid grasp of the story.
I mentioned in the last post that for February, I would include YouTube channel recommendations. For February 3, 2023, I recommend the channel Tactical Bacon Productions. This channel covers video game content mainly focused on David Jaffe’s repertoire most famously Twisted Metal and God of War. The most common way to support him are through subscriptions and he does have a Patreon for which donations can be made. The link to his channel is below. If you want to hear more about Kratos or the games that were inspired (even heavily) by Twisted Metal, look no further.
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