Fun with cars

Okay, I understand why GTA: Vice City should be considered a great game. It’s interactive, it’s detailed, it’s non-linear, it’s got an all star cast, it’s entertaining for hours without even doing any missions, but did anyone else here find the gameplay and camera control horrendous? I think Simpsons: Hit and Run had much better of both and it came out before this!

When you’re driving things are fine, but as soon as you head out on foot it becomes really annoying. Tommy only seems to move in up, down, left, right directions despite using an analog controller. His jumping is pathetic and you can’t control the camera while running so it’s really hard to see what’s going on. It makes the game a lot less engaging for me because I never feel like I’m in control. Half the time I can’t even see who I’m shooting at or who’s shooting at me.

Another annoyance is the save system. It uses a safe point that half the time is on the other side of the city so if you happen to accidentally run over a cop on your way to save and get busted, you either have to buy all your weapons again or redo the mission. I had finally completed a mission where I gun down a bunch of thugs with an awesome assault rifle and then chase down some baddy on a motorbike only to accidentally pick up a fallen motorcycle outside my safe point in front of a cop who instantly busted me. Now I’ve lost all my weapons.

Thirdly, the graphics on the Xbox look like ass. Everything is choppy and drab looking. Has anyone here played both the PC and console versions of this? I’d be interested to hear how they differ. I might opt to borrow the PC version instead.

So far I’m having the most fun just experiencing a world populated by idiots. I enjoy parking cars in their paths and watching how they attempt to get around them. Some will just sit there indefinitely while others crash into them as if they weren’t there. When I go on a killing spree at the mall, the cops seem unable to come after me effectively. I can hear them outside crashing their cars into the building in an attempt to bring the structure down around me, but few make it on foot to where I am. People repeatedly run into walls when I approach them with a chainsaw. It reminds me of playing Black and White where the structured game wasn’t fun but you spent hours watching the random acts the AI decided to perform. It’s fascinating in a scientific experiment sort of way.

My favorite thing right now is crashing my car into the backs of motorcycles and watching how far I can catapult the driver.