GTA Vice City DVD

And while you'll spend plenty of time walking amongst these encounters, the real heart of the game is stealing cars and driving from crime to crime. The list of cars available in the game is far too long for us to examine each of them in turn but some general comments should give you a good impression of what to expect. You'll find lots of small sporty cars and lots of large family sedans and wagons with plenty of gradations in between.

Vice City itself is a fully developed island town that lives and breathes like few other game settings before it. Cars drive up and down the streets, boats ply the water ways, news copters zip by overhead and everywhere you turn the citizens of Vice City are going about their business. The crooks, cops and citizens of the city are all capable of a level of dynamic behaviors. But even if you're not shooting at them, they still have agendas. You'll see rival gangs fighting each other in the streets and traffic accidents escalating in to fist fights.

The game takes place in the 1980s, before the events in GTA3. You play as Tommy Vercetti, a gangster who's just finished a 15-year stint in prison. Once he's out his bosses send him down to Florida's Vice City as the point man for some new operations. Once there Tommy teams up with a shifty lawyer (think Fredo) and the two begin plans for a big drug score. Once the drugs and the money disappear, Tommy finds himself fighting to discover who's cheated him while fending off the existing criminal elements of Vice City. As you might imagine, this type of scenario does involve a fair bit of violence. What you might not expect is how the game can walk a line between humor and horror while presenting all this material.

The story is much stronger this time around with a fully-fleshed out protagonist. The missions themselves are often longer and sometimes involve more kinds of gameplay than before. Buildings play a bigger role as well as the game permits players not only to enter structures but also buy them, opening up a new range of missions and rewards. Add to that more weapons, vehicles and a host of other surprises and you'll see that Vice City raises the bar for the series. The only downside is that the overall design of the game doesn't have the same impact that the previous game did. Hey, if it ain't broke...

An Action/Adventure game. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The game of fast cars and ruthless criminals packs. By Rockstar.