Grand Theft Auto III

In a recent session of Grand Theft Auto III, I noticed that whenever you let go of the movement keys while sprinting, Claude will come to an abrupt jerky stop. After further experimentation, I learned that he will do this regardless of which direction you move him in. You can do weird pivots in any direction. And I wondered, “How did I not notice this before?” I have played GTA3 more than any other video game I can think of, poured probably around two hundred hours into it, and I only recently learned that by rapid-tapping a movement key with ‘shift’ held down, you can pivot in any direction. It has no tactical value, no flash, no inherent benefits as far as I can yet tell, but after learning this weird movement, I immediately busted out into a wild rampage, throwing bombs at cars, running across the street to punch drug dealers in the face and take their guns, jumping on top of cars, and stutter-hopping up and down the subway stairs, firing at cops and gang members on my way out and across the city. And, of course, pivoting while rapidly moving and hitting the mouse wheel to wildly change perspectives during firefights. I suddenly became aware of just how violent and absurd my key-tapping was as I threw in random movement-based stops and starts, stealing and crashing cars while skid-turning with the emergency breaks across streets, driving away from the cops and doing drive-bys on the Liberty City drug cartel, and tossing grenades around the center of Staunton Island to the sounds and rhythms of Hüsker Dü blaring through my headphones, pounding on the keyboard like Jerry Lee Lewis on a grand piano. I didn’t even look at the screen a lot of the time, I was bobbing my head up and down to the music, but it didn’t matter. GTA3’s Liberty City is pretty much burned in my brain at this point and I can pull off a pretty long and effective rampage without paying much attention anymore. I know where all the police bribes and pay n’ sprays are anyway if things get out of hand. But usually it’s just more fun to die comically in a ridiculous last stand.

Grand Theft Auto III is a game I suppose I can’t really review with a clean perspective, it’s pretty much just become a staple for me. There are lots of arguments to be made against it - that other video games have improved the formula, expanded the concept, tweaked the controls, added more stuff to do, provided better characters and stories (much better really, I can’t argue with that) and when you factor in the sheer number of open world games with so much more depth to their setting such as Morrowind, Pathologic, and even future GTA titles, it’s a bit hard to argue that GTA3 is still a truly remarkable game. Yet it’s my favorite open world game, possibly my favorite video game in general, and certainly the one I come back to the most. And the reason, in large part, is due to just how beautifully designed the setting is, not just aesthetically (though the cloudy grey, urban sprawl certainly resonates with me), but with regards to player action. The actual city makes no damn sense. There are architecturally purposeless ramps scattered across the islands, unnaturally built grassy hills, and you can drive right off the onramp to the Shoreside Vale Bridge and onto a building with an assault rifle and body armor because rather than a low, vertical concrete fence, the edges are smoothed and just slightly curved. It’s an arcadey way to design a video game world and one that’s not too uncommon, but it all feels so intricate in GTA3, mostly because of just how small the actual city is.

It may take some time on a first playthrough to notice all the ramps in Portland, but once you do, if you’ve been playing long enough, you may suddenly realize that they can all be chained in just two to three minutes if you’ve got a fast car. And they’re not even close to each other when taking in the relative size of the whole island! Now combine that knowledge with all those alleyways you’ve driven through, those slanted off-road vaguely ramp-like hills. Where do some of those tree-covered areas go? Hey, you can cut across from the ‘Supa Save’ to the police station. And look behind that store, the tunnel leads right to the bomb shop railyard. That’s on the whole other side of the island. Eventually, you’ve grabbed an arsenal of weapons scattered across the city, fired at a cop car for the umpteenth time and one day you notice you know exactly how to evade them anywhere on the island, how long it takes to wait for a cop to leave his car when you try to steal it, and adapted quick-paced hit-and-run tactics to keep the action going while you dip in and out of missions, driving challenges, and hitting the rampage tokens. And it’s not just each island individually. You can cross between them so quickly. Say you’re a whole two minutes from the Staunton Bridge. Well, then you’re probably one minute from the car tunnel, and that takes you to another part of Staunton Island. Keep going down the tunnel and you hit the airport and Shoreside Vale. There’s one mission late in the game where you have to smash into “espresso” (drugs) stands placed all across the entire game map, all three islands. You only get nine minutes to do this, they only show up on the radar when you’re already close to them, and it’s completely doable. It’s so brilliant, you can just drive around anywhere and everywhere, shotgun Yakuza and Mafia members, get in a car chase with the police, and end the whole thing with a steady collection of police bribe tokens, and it can all be done in five minutes.

And then there are the dumb keyboard tricks I alluded to in the first paragraph. Rapid-tap between the ‘a’ and ‘d’ keys and Claude will move his legs in an impossible-looking dance-step that looks unnatural and hilarious. Jump and quickly spin the mouse while midair and watch as he holds his position while doing a 360 degree turn. Back-jump over a cliff with the middle mouse button held down, its great trust me. There’s more, but what’s more important is there’s a personalized visual style and rhythmic sensation you can create with how you play the controls that goes beyond weird, glitchy-looking antics. I like to drive in first-person despite how clunky it gets because watching my car wreck over a cliff while pursued by police officers and gliding off a ramp to a Glenn Branca guitar crescendo (pick whatever music you want, you’ll likely tire of the in-game radio after a while) just looks so satisfying that way. But it’s so easy to switch perspectives whenever you want. One button click zooms out to a bird’s eye view, a persistent center-frame shot, and a cinematic mode that feels so satisfying when you finally learn how to drive while using it properly. While on foot, you can use this same camera control to switch between a third-person and isometric angle and more by moving the mouse around in angles that gaze up at the skyscrapers, down from the heavens, and of course to aim, that’s what it’s there for. Yeah, moving the camera around freely is pretty much a prerequisite in most 3D games, so this is nothing new, but just think about those images for a second to all the chaotic scenarios you can create. The grey clouds, piercing sunlight, towering buildings, and hails of gunfire, they all pass by in a haze outside your car window, and the grenades you lob onto the city streets, and the way you can drive head-on into a subway tram on a car you broke onto the tracks with. GTA3 is a rhythm more than anything else and once you get it down, it’s an incredibly cathartic experience.

When the game starts, most of the early missions are extremely simple - drive here, get this, drive back, get money, repeat. It sounds boring when you say it out loud, but the way the cars feel are just so good and no other GTA game has managed to replicate it since. The cars feel so immediately gratifying and accessible, with just enough distinction between vehicles that you soon develop favorites for each situation. Yeah, the Banshee has great turning and speed, but sometimes I want the weight and slow drifting of a Yakuza Stinger. You spend these early missions just feeling the cars, learning the tricks, and navigating traffic. One of the most fulfilling parts of the game is successfully learning how to dodge traffic at top speeds, learning to drift at the right times to pull off 90 degree turns just before hitting a wall and not stopping, and just keeping the flow. And driving feels so smooth and immediate in this game that it’s fun at all skill levels. For one step in getting 100% completion, you have to drop off 100 passengers total in a taxi. It sounds tedious, but just put in some time between story missions, rampages, and car collecting, and you can keep the flow of action going at all times. You can incorporate all these elements at any time, which keeps even the most tedious portions from actually feeling so. And driving people around in a taxi is a great early way to learn to navigate traffic and get a feel for the city.

There are some hang-ups I have with how the game starts out however. Each island is unlocked sequentially, as are wanted level caps, and access to certain cars and weapons. I understand why it could be important to keep the player restricted from certain parts of a game while they’re still learning, but it feels unnecessary in GTA3. This system is also in place to keep the story paced properly, with jobs being done for different gangs, who inhabit different parts of the city, along a pretty linear plot progression. The problem is, I don’t think GTA3 benefits from a linear story. You get betrayed by your girlfriend during a bank robbery and spend most of the game doing jobs for gangs as the opportunities arise, until you eventually track her down and get revenge on her. It’s not that interesting and not much more than a facilitator for gameplay than something that stands well on its own. I think it would have been a lot better if they allowed you to choose specific gangs to join and allowed you work opportunities for all of them early on so that you could have more varied missions across the whole map throughout the game, as well as be able to develop a personal flavoring with how you engage the criminal underworld in Liberty City and make different allies and enemies as you decide which missions to prioritize. Oddly, elements like this were present in GTA2, so it kind of surprises me they were abandoned for a linear story in a game with such a nonlinear world. This can be somewhat ramified with an open city/missions mod, but it’s not perfect.

Once you’ve got past the early segments of the game, things open considerably. When you get to Staunton Island, the missions become more hectic, faster cars become available and a degree of creative crime spree possibilities opens up. Once you’ve got the controls down, you can feel the keyboard move beneath your fingers differently to accommodate the game. Try doing the paramedic missions early on - that thing will tip over, run over waiting passengers, and you’ll wonder how exactly you’re expected to spend so many levels dropping off patients without any room for error. These days, I can do the paramedic missions whenever without much thought. You move rhythmically and delicately along the WASD keys and eventually understand the vehicle properly. This happens with everything in the game, across all vehicles and on-foot movement and gunplay. The gameplay intersects seamlessly and you can go from driving, shooting, sprinting, and using explosives within seconds. Becoming well-adjusted to a video game is a given, it’s present in almost every game out there. But in GTA3, how you apply that is totally up in the air.

I don’t know how long or how much of a game most people usually play before establishing a firm opinion on it, but I feel there’s so many ways a person can feel about GTA3 depending on how much time they invest and what they like to focus on. I’ve mentioned music quite a bit in my review because it frames a big part of the way I play GTA3 these days. It might be a bit unfair to mention that the works of other artists are largely what augments the experience, but GTA3 is perfect for creating captivating aural experiences. I play GTA3 like a damn instrument, an improvisational tool to smash my keyboard with absurd movements, taking risky driving maneuvers, and starting and stopping gang wars across the city, fleeing from cops to fast music running through my ears while doing missions and side objectives. Playing GTA3 is almost like a dance, it’s a game where you can incorporate movement in specific personalized ways and go nuts at your desk just conjuring wild crime narratives off the fly to punk, metal, or whatever strikes you, I personally like to play this game to fast, fun, sometimes aggressive music to complement the experience. It’s probably super dorky, but it works so well. It’s a great way to listen to music and feel the energy when you’re too tired to go on a walk or dance around your room like a nut. And, at first, it’s not too viable because you still have to focus on learning the game, the controls, and the world of Liberty City, but once you’ve got all that down you can just go crazy and pull off weird crime sprees like it’s nothing, dancing around your desk while banging on the keys. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had playing a video game, any video game. But that’s just my way of playing and it’s what frames my entertainment of GTA3 these days. The great thing about this game is that it allows for such fun styles of play simply by providing a game world and controls that suit fast, fun gameplay you can experiment in ways that cultivate a style and meaning to the player that’s somewhat personalized. I’ve played GTA3 as a straight crime story, I’ve played it as a quick, fast rampage collect-a-thon, and I’ve even played it slow and methodically, trying to beat those super difficult off-road vehicle missions. No matter how you want to play, GTA3 has such a good core system and setting that you can adjust to whatever you might be feeling at the time.

Maybe that all isn’t enough to convince you that GTA3 is a great game, and I’m sure you probably have your own favorite choice of video game that, after hours and hours of playing, you can just go nuts on. But even having played most 3D Rockstar-developed sandbox titles to date, a myriad of open world action games, and other fast-paced driving games on PC, this is still the one that just feels the most fluid, has the most fun world to play in and the best mission structure to suit my preferred playstyle. You could say it’s nostalgia and I admit, I do have a lot of fun memories with this game having played it for so long, but it’s worth noting this wasn’t the first, or even second GTA game I ever bought (Vice City and San Andreas were, respectively), and I’ve actually had most of my favorite moments in the series playing GTA Vice City, 4, and 5 with friends, while GTA3 is almost always a solo experience for me. Regardless, it’s the one I can come back to at any time, just wind down after a long day, and lose myself in. It’s far from being the deepest, most stimulating, or thought-provoking game I’ve ever played, but when I look back on which video game I feel somehow most connected with, it’s this one, if only because it’s world and mechanics might as well be etched into my brain at this point.

Grand Theft Auto III is without a doubt one of the supreme masterpieces of gaming, and will probably stay the best of the 21st century for a long time to come.

There had been open world games before it, and GTA may have not technically done much to top them, but the sense of scale the game granted itself, an entire city with no moral repercussions, was breathtaking. Grand Theft Auto was a better crime movie than any crime movie and a better hip hop album than any hip hop album.

The drastic increase in privileges the game gave you left a huge impact on the industry. In just a few short years audiences started turning up their nose if a game didn’t let you drive halfway across a major metropolis, kill a hooker in your stolen taxi, and drive the body back home. The torrent of controversy surrounding the game only made it sexier, and like a shocking piece of modern art, Grand Theft Auto disgusted and inspired players around the globe.

Some of the most disturbingly bad level design in gaming history. Terrible. Just awful.

An absolute, all-time masterpiece in gaming that changed absolutely everything forever. Enough said.

The radio station, trick car runs, murdering pedestrians. It don't get better, it's the inner id of mankind let loose and it's terrific.

Mass chaos let wild and the Italian gangster story. Just got the trilogy and I'm going to play this again fosho.

Just the opening bridge scene brings back all the sweet old memories, glad I lived at this time in humanity to play this game at the right time. Hallelujah!

Nobody didn't love this game unless their pants are too tight, probably one of the greatest games in the last thirty years (with the other ones, of course).

Since the dawn of humanity, our society has always needed a scapegoat as a source of blame for the corruption of our young. Television on the whole was claimed to rot the minds of children since its inception in the mid 20th century, and the rebellious spirit of rock-and-roll soon after proved to be another nightmare for the halcyon post-war America that we desperately attempted to uphold. However, these ridiculous moral panics were but historical footnotes of the early information age by the time I was born, so I obviously didn’t experience them first hand. However, the video games I played as a child were always a point of concern for my general welfare as an impressionable youth. Even then, I still wasn’t privy to the genesis point of the video game controversy when hundreds of soccer moms fainted at Little Timmy performing button combinations to unsheathe one’s spinal cord from their bodies in Mortal Kombat. No, my initial exposure to the anti-video game pandemonium was early in the sixth generation of gaming in the early 2000s when this little game hit the shelves: Grand Theft Auto III. Not since sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll has a three word combination struck fear in the hearts of the perennially bored housewives and prudish, geriatric politicians of America. Considering how vocal the outcry was against this game, it seemed as if these authoritative figures would rather their children be influenced to become a degenerate hedonist rather than mirror the realm of murder and chaos found in Grand Theft Auto. Ever since the media conveniently discovered that the Columbine shooters were fans of games like Doom and Quake, attributing the exposure of video game violence to the foibles of adolescence became second nature to the stodgy older generations. Releasing Grand Theft Auto III two years later felt as if an encore of that horrific event was directly on the horizon. My own mother grounded me for two weeks in the fourth grade for watching a friend of mine drive around in this game for five minutes before school one day, as if simply being exposed to the game for such a short time would affect my ethical fiber like radiation poisoning. (I swear, that’s all I watched him do). The Grand Theft Auto epidemic was an irritating reality for gamers such as I, but I’m sure the then-small fry game developer Rockstar Studios were eternally grateful for all of the inadvertent press.

But everyone would be remiss if they didn’t experience Grand Theft Auto III back then, for the franchises third entry during the PS2’s infancy was a groundbreaking milestone in gaming history. Grand Theft Auto III’s titanic splash didn’t just provoke the wrath of parents and politicians: it ignited a revolutionary new wave of game design by popularizing the open-world genre and indelibly laying out the rules and regulations for all other developers to follow. Realistic polygons were only a surface-level aspect of the transition to the third dimension in the former generation that started it. After the initial period of setting the foundation, game developers were seriously expanding the possibilities of a 3D environment to radical proportions. The non-linear sandbox design popularized in the levels of fellow 3D trendsetter Super Mario 64 were enlarged to proportions that they could be reminiscent of environments from the real world, eliminating the problem of empty, ethereal graphical space found in the levels of game from the previous generation. In fact, GTA III coalesced its areas so seamlessly that using the term levels out of the beginner’s book of the gaming lexicon now seemed inappropriate to assign. A staggering evolution in game design was taking place, and GTA III contributions to this growth and change served as the substance behind the game’s bloodshed and mayhem. However, one would have had to experience GTA III in the short window of time of its initial release to appreciate what it did. Not only did the series sprout two sequels on the PS2 soon after that eclipsed its impact, but hundreds of imitators naturally emerged after seeing the tangibility of its content and design that translated to great success. In a way, GTA III is the Super Mario 64 of the sixth generation of gaming: an early innovator that skates by in retrospect because of its influence despite its myriad of glaring flaws.

A portion of GTA III’s appeal can be attributed to its cinematic flair. The franchise's influences stem directly from tons of crime fiction from other entertainment mediums, ranging from HBO’s television staple The Sopranos, heist films such as Heat and Reservoir Dogs, to the acclaimed filmography of Martin Scorsese. GTA III’s opening cutscene displays a bank robbery unfolding, with three culprits making their quick getaway. The female criminal at the scene of the crime, Catalina, leaves her boyfriend and fellow bank job accomplice Claude to die by shooting him point-blank while escaping the scene. Claude miraculously survives, but is the sole perpetrator apprehended and taken to justice. After being sentenced to ten years in prison, the Colombian Cartel seize the armored van he’s being transported in, and the hostage takeover gives him and another prisoner “8 Ball” an opportune moment to escape custody. While the cinematic splendor on display here doesn’t rival the arthouse ambitions of, say, Hideo Kojima, the exhilaration of the bank robbery to introduce the game is an effective enough hook to intrigue the player immediately and set a precedent for the game’s chaotic tone.

Claude Speed, a name that is totally on his birth certificate and not the fabricated persona of a criminal/D-list porn star, is GTA III’s protagonist and the vehicle for the player committing a bloody holocaust in the city streets. Interestingly enough, in a game that presents its story cinematically, Claude is another example of a silent protagonist seen so many times. Rockstar would learn their lesson soon after but here on GTA’s open-world debut, interacting with anything and anyone with a character that doesn’t make a peep feels completely unnatural. The silent protagonist trope should be reserved for platforming characters who only focus on tight gameplay and customizable avatars in RPGs. Through a certain perspective, Claude maybe works as a silent protagonist to immerse the player in the biblical chaos they can commit without any injected personability getting in the way. This was the developers intentions, right? No, they severely fucked this up.

The core of GTA III’s heightened non-linearity is to facilitate a sense of freedom, to unbound the shackles of video game discipline and order, allowing the player to run wild and let their hair down, or so to speak. One realization that dons over the player is that once Claude arrives at his safe house is that the rate of gameplay doesn’t halt when the player isn’t engaging in tasks that the game assigns them. The brilliance of GTA III’s design philosophy is that the player could potentially spend hours playing the game without even progressing the story with one mission, and it’s also likely that the player wouldn’t grow weary of their deregulated merriment. Playing a game with rules on the playground as a kid is all fine and dandy, but the free reign of using everything at your disposal on the slightest impulse tends to feel more joyous, no? The player is given the opportunity to perform acts of the game’s namesake and ride their stolen property around with a sense of recklessness like they’re in The Italian Job. Claude can engage in spontaneous fisticuffs with the unassuming pedestrians that roam the streets, or take the morbid route of ending their insignificant lives by the blast of his roulette of firearms. As one can expect, all this debauchery will alert the attention of the Liberty City Police Force, who will proceed to hunt you down like a pack of wild dogs. The alert level coincides with how tenacious their efforts will be in ousting your malignant presence from the streets, escalating to them sicing an attack helicopter and an army-grade tank on you if you refuse to comply. One may argue that the police penalty is a buzzkill to the adrenaline-fueled fun that game fosters, but where would the thrill of committing crimes be without the looming consequence of legal blowback? Then again, the player is never forced to enact anything that would warrant this heavy rate of firepower unless they choose to.

Whether or not the player wishes to lay waste to Liberty City on their own time, I implore the player to at least frolic around to learn the layout of the game’s map. The most egregious aspect of GTA III’s rudimentary open-world design is the lack of a map. I don’t care if the game exemplifies the fetal stage of the open-world genre: no amount of reflective hindsight excuses omitting this essential feature from the game. The circular radar located in the bottom left corner of the screen only indicates the safe house and mission icons, but not the locations of the Pay-N-Spray garages or the Ammu-Nation stores. The reason why both of these stores are as imperative to find is because if Claude gets arrested or gunned down, he respawns outside of either a hospital or the police station with only the clothes on his back. The cause for both of these unfortunate outcomes is usually attributed to the police horde raining their fury down upon Claude or being unequipped to deal with the various gang factions infecting Liberty City. Not to mention, the player will constantly be subject to lethal carbeques because every vehicle in the game is as durable as paper mache. Eluding the police via changing the color of the car and stacking one’s arsenal to rival the gangbangers is the only possible way to survive the harsh streets of Liberty City, and obscuring these destinations from view on the radar makes the game unnecessarily more irritating. All the player has as a reference to where anything could be is a northern mark like a compass, but who do I look like? Magellan?

Learning the layout of GTA III’s map is an especially grueling escapade because the urban jungle the player is forced to commit to memory is rather drab. Liberty City is obviously a fictional American city because it doesn’t share the name with one from the real world. However, its similarities with The Big Apple almost veer into the uncanny valley. Like real world New York City, Liberty City is divided into three islands that act as distinct burroughs that the player has access to as the story progresses. One may argue that imposing barriers between the burroughs negates a true open-world environment, but each individual island can stand on its own merits with its breadth. The starting island of Portland vaguely resembles both New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens due to its hilly elevation and persistent presence of the metro station. Staunton Island is a comparatively more flashy, bourgeois metropolitan area like Manhattan. Shoreside Island ostensibly depicts the suburban sprawl of Newark, New Jersey. While the three islands are certainly inspired, they all lack a kind of urban pomp. Unique geographical features such as Portland’s Chinatown district, Staunton’s central park, and Shoreside’s dam give them enough distinction, but none of these sites pop and sparkle with that city magic. Many of these features feel slapdashed onto the map, obligations of what usually composes the city streets of America without any of the grand allure that makes spots like these enticing in real life. Around all these underwhelming “landmarks” are the typical tall buildings and cluttered streets that simply trace the bare minimum of urbanity. If New York was as generic as it is depicted here, I highly doubt it would be the most populated city in the country.

Eventually, the player’s pension for senseless, unmitigated destruction will conflict with the fact that crime costs money. Maximizing the scope of a mindless murdering spree requires at least a fair amount of cash to purchase weapons, and the arcade-style method of ebbing away vehicles to the point of exploding and gaining a sum of money isn’t enough to finance all of the manic fun the player could be having. Naturally, the only way of earning a substantial income in GTA III is putting Claude to work. Claude could steal a taxi and siphon the fare money from the poor Indian guy he’s co-opting the business from but really, the more organic way of earning income in the game is completing the story missions. Essentially, GTA III’s story missions are odd jobs assigned by Liberty City’s finest: the higher ups of the city’s crime syndicate. Claude becomes everyone’s glorified errand boy in his mission to get to Catalina, maintaining his pure chaotic neutral position between the Italian mafia, the Yakuza, and the Jamaican Yardies strictly for his own benefit. These tasks range from escort missions via car, assassinations, property damage, etc. By completing these various missions, the player will be more than compensated for their troubles so they can make bigger bloodbaths on the streets.

Being that these jobs are assigned by the disgusting criminal toe scum beneath the feet of the city, almost every mission given to Claude is dangerous, deplorable, and highly illegal. Because of this thrilling combination of circumstances, GTA III’s missions tend to be quite challenging. The tasks are fairly short and straightforward, but the game goes the extra mile to grief the player with additional circumstances. If you’re too afraid to cause any sizable conflict on the streets for fear of facing the lashing of the law, get used to it. A pattern anyone who plays the game will notice is that the harder missions involve Liberty City’s boys in blue strong arming Claude with everything they’ve got while the mission is still underway. Some notably bothersome moments involving the police abruptly exercising their authority during missions are running over a man in a seemingly impervious body cast in “Plaster Blaster” or bumping a car over and over to drop paraphernalia in “Evidence Dash.” The only way to elude the rampaging police force is to visit a Pay-N-Spray to throw off your scent, which is why obscuring their view on the map is cruel and unusual. Actually, I’ll kindly accept any vehicular mission over any that involve weapon combat with gang members. Getting up close and personal with a posse of armed malcontents in missions like “Arms Shortage” and “Grand Theft Aero” assures that their barrage of whizzing bullets will tear through Claude like tissue paper. Preparing beforehand by acquiring body armor will only make a marginal difference in defense, for its material is evidently made of bubble wrap and the targeting system for the guns is not exactly smooth or accurate. The sniper rifle is your best friend in this game, and not only during the often maligned “Bomb Da Base: Act II” mission. Time is of the essence when committing a criminal offense, so many of the missions are given a strict time limit to complete. I’m convinced the developers meticulously formulated the perfect time to keep the player on edge during these missions and scrape out of that time by the skin of their teeth. Even if you outsmart the constraints of the city-spanning mission “Espresso 2 Go!,” you’ll still only ram into all nine espresso stands across Liberty City with under a minute left. The Asuka mission acronym “S.A.M.” is arguably the most frustrating mission in the game because it combines every excruciating element listed above. To top everything off, the missions in GTA III must be completed without any mistakes, for there are no checkpoints to bail the player out when they make a mistake or die. GTA III is a ruthless test of trial and error, and whether or not the game offers a fair, reasonable challenge is up to contention.

Performing the missions and furthering the story is also the only way to meet GTA III’s number of supporting characters. GTA III cast exemplifies the film noir tenet in that there are no good, moral characters to attach to and hope for their happiness and prosperity: only bad characters that fall on a spectrum of amoral behavior. The problem with every character in GTA III is not their scumbaggery, but that they’re all caricatures. The Leone crime family seem like a parody of every Italian mob ever depicted with their ritzy attire, restaurant place of operation, and overbearing mother figure yelling at a made man from a distance. Kenji is the classic Yakuza member, justifying the ultraviolence he commits with ancient Japanese spiritualism. At least it’s amusing and also disturbing how aroused his sister Asuka becomes around Clyde the more death and destruction he causes. These characters might only seem as one-dimensional as they are because their relationship to Claude never surpasses a formal employer-client dynamic. I’m sure corrupt cop Ray and sleazy yuppie Donald Love lead interesting lives, but it’s difficult to peer into their characters in a deeper manner when it's all strictly business.

The business of all of these criminal figures at least begins to wrap around to something interesting around the second half of the game. After Claude’s relationship with the Italians is soured due to the Don’s wife Maria and her philandering, Claude enters the center of a drug trafficking ring involving all of the gang factions, shoveling SPANK around the city attempting to occupy control. Things get rather contentious between the Colombians and the Yakuza when Claude whacks Kenji using a cartel car to set them up and take blame. This escalated gang war only gives Claude a clear opportunity to get closer to Catalina, which he eventually does at the cost of her murdering a scorned, grieving Asuka. The final mission involves following Catalina’s helicopter to a cartel base. Fitting for a final mission of a challenging game, the caveat to the climax of Claude’s revenge plot must be done without any purchased weapons or ammunition, as Claude must rely on cartel pickups. Why not just make Claude also do this mission stark naked while they’re at it? Catalina finally earns her comeuppance via a bazooka shell, but GTA III’s ending is not happy. A part of the mission was to rescue a captured Maria, who Claude decides to shoot as the screen goes black. Jesus, Rockstar. Maria was a trifling skank, but that’s just ice cold. Ike treated Tina with more dignity than that.

I could easily write off GTA III for being completely undercooked in every feasible department. The world is empty and bland, the controls are austere, and every mission is padded with unfair bullshit. All of the characters have the charisma of a gaggle of cockroaches, including the protagonist we’re intended to root for. However, I’ve come to a realization that maybe most of these discrepancies were intentional. It’s possible that all of GTA III’s attributes ranging from its world to its characters seem raw and generic because of a bluntness the developers want to convey. Through the game’s fabric, a sort of satire is subtly interwoven through the game’s active ethos. Perhaps the reason why Liberty City is an unflinching depiction of New York City without the superficial glitz and glamor associated with a bustling American metropolis. Claude as a silent protagonist isn’t a mistake made by sticking to traditional video game tropes despite the cinematic evolution of the medium, but only a stoic, unwavering sociopath could survive on the brutal city streets run by people who have no human warmth. The harsh ending indicates there are no happy endings here, only the next step in a cycle of violence and greed. It’s a bit of a stretch in divulging some sort of substance, and I don’t think any concerned parent would care in making their decision to keep it away from their children. Overall, GTA III’s substance is defined by its innovations, which were certainly awe-striking at the time. No other game tested a gamer’s subconscious ID that thirsted for animalistic impulses, nor was there one that facilitated it. GTA III belongs in a museum where we can give it all the respect it deserves, but from an impersonal distance.

By that, I mean, you know how loads of 6th gen games have little quirks that are kind of annoying or make the game harder? ...Alright, by that, I think I just mean bad design. GTA III is pretty much just ALL bad design for everything that matters. You can't restart missions and have to go all the way back to the mission giver if you fail or die, your enemies will always shoot you first because the auto-aim sucks ass, and you have to pray that it aims at the guy you want it to aim at. That means you'll die a lot since, despite programming the game to only let you get shot a few times before you croak, Rockstar treats health pickups like secrets in this game! Oh, and the gang members you HAVE to piss off to progress will try to take you out of your car and/or shoot at you if they see you, just to annoy you even more. I know this is Rockstar's first 3D game, but it could easily be much better designed than THIS. If I ever finish this game, I'll suspect I'll either have joined a BDSM club or I'm being forced to play it in Hell.