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Eddie F III
United States
North Catasauqua
Pennsylvania
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Here is a review I wrote back in December 2006 for a small handheld site I used to run called handheldheadquarters.com.
GTA Liberty City Stories
Introduction
The Grand Theft Auto franchise is one of the most notorious and widely known in gaming. If you are a gamer, soccer mom, senator or the Dhali Lama, you have heard of Rockstar’s violent depiction of mob and gang warfare. Now you can take this infamous franchise with you wherever you go on your PSP. Rockstar has published Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (GTA:LCS), which serves as a prequel to Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3). GTA:LCS takes place in 1998, just three years prior to GTA3. You play as Cipriani, who is coming back to Liberty City after being on the lam. He had to disappear for a while after offing a fellow mobster as a favor for Don Salvatore Leone. The grateful Salvatore puts him straight back to work.
Liberty City is similar, in most regards, to the PS2 GTA games. There are some minor changes due to the timeline of the story and, of course, the hardware that is used to run GTA:LCS. As for the story and the city, some local establishments are named differently and owned by different people. The street maps are similar, but the PSP version is scaled down a little bit. So, any GTA3 players who memorized the streets of Liberty City will have no problem finding their way around. One of the bigger map differences is the way the islands are linked together. There are no underground tunnels in GTA:LCS. Liberty City is still using a ferryboat system and above ground bridges. One of the storylines of GTA:LCS involves an ongoing strike of the ferry workers. So get ready to bash some union heads together.
Gameplay
GTA:LCS plays out like every GTA we have known and played before. You start off at the bottom of the organized crime barrel, and work your way up the ranks, performing jobs for heads of families and local business owners. Get ready to cause friction between rival families and even within your own family. Even your own birth mom is hiring hitmen to send you to sleep with the fishes. It’s a rough world out there; are you up for this cutthroat industry?
If you ever played a GTA title, you know the missions. You could be delivering items, transporting bosses, killing competition and shaking down local businesses. You also have your typical side missions, such as street races, taxicab missions and your firefighter/police/ambulance missions. There are also car salesman missions, where you need to impress would be buyers. You also have, hidden all over the city, your unique jumps, hidden packages and rampages. Rampages were always my favorite. Nothing beats trying to slice 25 gang members with a katana sword in two minutes. There are a wide variety of things to do in the city that will stray you away from the main storyline.
There are plenty of weapons at your disposal to wreak havoc on the community. You have your well-loved classics like shotguns, Molotov cocktails and rocket launchers. There are also new ones to play with, like a chisel, a hockey stick and a few more. Weapons can be bought at various weapon shops and found all over the city. Weapons also show up at your safe houses. The type of weapon that appears in your safe house depends on how many hidden packages you have found.
Vehicles are in abundance as well in Liberty City. There’s everything from cars and boats, to helicopters and motorcycles. However, you won’t find bicycles like you would in GTA: San Andreas, which is a shame. Nothing beats doing a drive-by on a BMX bike. Something else you won’t find in GTA:LCS is the chop shop that allowed you to customize your cars like you could in San Andreas. That’s not a big negative on the game, but it is something that would have been nice to include. You can still store your favorite vehicles inside the garages of your safe houses.
Once you’re inside any of the vehicles, you will be graced with another favorite component of the GTA games: the radio stations. Yes, even the PSP version has numerous preset stations that cover all music genres and talk radio. Even my favorite K-JAH reggae station from San Andreas can be found. You can swiftly change the stations with only a slight hiccup to the gameplay. Around halfway through the game, there is a mission that will unlock the usage of custom soundtracks. So, get your memory stick ready to play your own audio library. The radio stations are another reason on why the UMD needs to constantly spin, and why it goes through the battery faster.
Graphically, GTA:LCS looks similar to GTA3 on the PS2. Hardcore gamers will notice a difference in the way that the game was rendered. Rockstar has been using Renderware ever since GTA3. However, for this version, they were using an in-house rendering application to better utilize the PSP’s graphic engine and resolution. The draw distance is a lot better on the PSP, and has very minimal fog. You also won’t see any lengthy load times when you hop islands. Such improvements require the UMD disc to spin almost constantly, so this game will go through battery life faster than other PSP games. The cars even improved their reflections from the San Andreas title. In fact, they have improved on all aspects from every GTA title.
Extras
Extras in a Grand Theft Auto game? You bet. I already covered all the side missions and customized soundtracks earlier. There are also unlockable outfits for Cipriani to wear around the town. You will need to wear certain outfits to perform some missions.
Let’s now focus on the multiplayer action that takes place all over the city. First off, multiplayer is only ad-hoc and not supported via Internet connectivity. Yes, it would have been great to have this ability. However, I think you will have an easier time finding fellow PSP gamers with GTA:LCS than you will with Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition. You will need to unlock multiplayer games through the regular story line. They will not be playable from the get go. All gamers will need to have a copy of GTA:LCS, but only one person needs to have the game style unlocked. There are seven different games that can support up to 6 players. “Liberty City Survivor” is a deathmatch style game. “Protection Racket” involves two teams, where one team tries to destroy the other’s base. “Get Stretch” is similar to capture the flag, where you try to steal cars from each other’s base. “The Hit List” will mark one player as the target. The object is to survive the longest. Once that mark is killed, a new player will be marked. “Street Rage” is a race through checkpoints. You can use any method, including killing each other, to win the race. “The Wedding List” is a free for all, where teams need to collect certain cars and deliver them to shipping crates. Ever see the movie Gone in 60 Seconds? The last game is called “Tanks for the Memories,” which is like a king of the hill, but involves a tank.
Conclusion
Hands down, this is the best PSP game out there. It utilizes almost everything the PSP hardware has to offer. If only you could save gameplay movies like in San Andreas (Xbox version). Something else from the last GTA game that is missing here is the ability to increase your character’s attributes; but that’s minor. It’s hard to run out of things to do in this title. So far, I have found days worth of action, and I am not even half way through the main story line. The only problem I have with this game is the ability to swim. Can’t Italians swim? I’m part Italian and I can swim very well.
This title gets my recommendation for a must have PSP title. If you love GTA, or if you just want to aggravate your mother, it’s got something for everybody. Now, please excuse me while I unleash some frustration on some innocent bystanders. See, it also serves as a stress management tool.
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