Played on:
PS2
Most people have now heard of Grand Theft Auto 3, Rockstar Games' huge PlayStation 2 hit that has now been ported to the PC. This game has gotten tons of awards on top of being easily the best selling game of 2001 on any game platform. If you haven't had a chance to experience GTA3, and you have the computer hardware powerful enough, then this third-person action game is almost definitely for you.
Some of the things that stand out in the first few minutes of GTA3 are: the unique visual style, plenty of cars to drive, tons of sounds and music, extreme violence, and an open-ended gameplay style that is unprecedented.
Grand Theft Auto 3 was ported to the PC in a fairly short amount of time (released roughly 9 months or so after the PS2 version), and the engine does a fairly good job of keeping the action going. The main thing that is disappointing is the game's unstable frame rate at higher resolutions on all but the fastest computers. My machine, an Athlon 1.2Ghz with PC133 RAM and a GeForce2 GTS, can only really maintain 30 frames per second or more at the lowest resolution possible (640x480 at 16-bit color) and with all the visuals turned down or off. Even then, it still drops to under 20fps in some of the heavier action.
The system requirements on the box seem misleading; on the "minimum" machine, with all detail and resolution turned down, the speed of the game's action lurched around sickeningly. It felt like it was dropping into slow motion at random intervals, making the game (especially trying to drive) mostly unplayable. This was on my backup computer, a 450MHz Celeron with a 16MB TNT 1 card and 128MB RAM, very similar to the posted minimum. In fact, I'd consider the "recommended" machine to be more like the real minimum requirements - 700MHz and a 32MB card with at least GeForce 2 MX speed.
There are also some confusing options in the game's display setup that, on many computers, make the frame rate very inconsistent and commonly unplayable. The problem is that they're named in such a way that you'd think they speed the game up, not slow it down. It could mean headaches and returns for a lot of tweakers and power users that don't read the manual. If they try and change these settings to what they think is best before even starting to play, it's a difficult problem to track down on your own, since they two options in particular seem like they run the game faster. On top of all this, there is a crash issue with NVidia cards and Windows XP (a very common combination, as well) that requires a download from Microsoft to fix. It's all notated in the Readme file, but it'd have been nice to have this fix on the game CD.
Despite all this, the GTA3 engine is still very powerful. Cities are full of life, with tall skyscrapers, beautiful lighting, and always people and cars around. After only a few minutes in the game you'll realize that the whole city is not being tracked and processed at once - only the things in your immediate visual range are being considered. Sometimes you can turn your back to a car, and when you spin around to look at it again, it's completely gone, or a totally different car may be in its place. While it's not anything huge, it does put a damper on the game's great immersiveness and atmosphere.
The control system has been changed fundamentally from the PS2 version (although those with gamepads who still want to use the PS2's control scheme can), with the mouse looking around like many PC first- and third-person shooters. Driving can be controlled via moving the mouse, but it is turned off by default, and for good reason - I found it almost impossible to control all but the slowest vehicles with the mouse. You can redefine keys all you want, with, say the arrow keys for driving, and completely different key/mouse bindings for your actions on foot. Gamepad controls can also be intermingled with everything else.
One thing that is particularly frustrating to me is the console-style save system. Many of the harder missions require you to spend five minutes driving around to get the mission started, only for you to die a several minutes into the action, making you lose (and repeat) up to nine or ten minutes of gameplay in some situations. Combine the fact that you can't save during a mission with repeating some of them ten or fifteen times for some missions, and it gets very frustrating. It'd have been nice to have a normal game save and load option - and for those who don't want to use it or think it makes the game too easy, allow an option to disable the in-mission saving and stick to the console-style system.
The most visually appealing element of GTA3's graphics is in the scale of the game, on top of the unique visual style of the characters. While any one specific object, building, or person probably won't be too detailed, it's how the whole thing is put together that makes it look so good. Most of the game's cars look excellent as well, with appropriate reflection and chrome effects.
GTA3 has a full night and day system on top of a weather system, which do pretty nicely in generating atmosphere. The realism of street lights at night really grabbed me, looking incredibly realistic. And while the rain itself looks ugly, other visuals that go along with the precipitation (puddles with reflections, the streaking effect of the city's lights) are great.
One thing that GTA3 has that seems fairly unique is a "trails" system - a sort of motion blur effect that you can turn on or off. I wound up turning it off after less than a minute, though. I thought the trails looked rather ugly on the PC compared to the PS2 version's trails (probably something to do with the resolution and motion-blurred picture on a TV), and also hurt the frame rate quite a bit. This is a feature that maybe could have used more work for the PC version, with possibly an adjustable slider to tweak the effect's subtlety.
Gameplay is where GTA3 shines. The game has so many things for you to do, powerups to get, and people to kill that you feel a bit overwhelmed at first. If you read the game's startup tips that pop up as you go, though, you learn the feel of the whole thing fairly quickly. You'll also figure out pretty fast what actions will get the attention of the local law enforcement. Either way, just traversing the city and exploring all the places to go is enough to keep one busy for hours.
When you're done with running around, it's time to do some missions. You start off working for the local Portland mafia, running a couple of errands and doing some odds and ends. This is only meant to get you acquainted with driving around the city, though; fairly soon, you'll be whacking people left and right. You receive missions from different people in the area, which keeps you moving and offers some interesting plot twists a little later.
