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.