Written by Matt Cabral, 3/10/2009
This year’s New York Comic Con had me recalling the booth-babed, bass-booming glory days of E3’s past; not only was there an impressive cluster of high profile game booths, but they were garishly adorned with the sort of over-the-top excess that eventually led to E3’s 2-year downsizing experiment. You could get made up as a zombie at the House of the Dead: Overkill booth, get your picture taken with a dude that sort of looked like Vin Diesel over by The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena demo, and even have bosom-brimming nurses listen to your heartbeat over at a booth that had something to do with F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (I still haven’t figured out what the connection was). Despite all the hype and hoopla, though, it was actually within a dark, windowless van—you know, the kind child predators drive around in—that contained the absolute coolest game of the show. Of course, this demo-booth-on-wheels was adorned with giant logos and art for Rockstar Games’ upcoming DS debut Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, so it wasn’t a complete surprise that my 90 minutes in their van provided more fun than ogling cosplayers on the show floor.
Still, I wasn’t sold on GTA's latest portable entry until I got some serious hands-on time at the show. Going in I knew very little about the title, and I don’t think I was alone; ever since Nintendo flashed the game’s logo at their E3 2008 press conference, throwing mature gamers a single bone during an event more concerned with convincing everyone that Wii Music was cool, Chinatown Wars has been notably absent from the industry’s radar. And even the screenshots floating around the Internet made it look a lot like an homage, similar to Grand Theft Auto Advance on Nintendo’s last hand-held, to old-school top-down GTA. If I came from the Chinatown Wars demo with one resounding feeling, it was that I'll never trust static images again.
Seeing the game in action, and discovering it’s actually a full-on car-jacking, ho-slapping, drug-dealing, cop-capping entry, surprised me as much as seeing that group of helmet-less Stormtroopers smoking cigarette butts outside the nearest Comic Con entrance (I knew Vader’s army was bad, but c’mon guys, those things will kill you quicker than a dual-bladed lightsaber.) Despite its familiar-looking perspective, Rockstar describes it not as top-down or even isometric but as “fully 3D from an aerial perspective.” And sure enough, get the game in your hands and you see it’s popping with three dimensional life; from detail-packed vehicles and buildings, to smaller touches like street signs and hydrants, it’s all there, clearly rendered with care. But it's seeing it in motion that really brings this tiny Liberty City to life, as cars race through traffic, pedestrians bustle about the sidewalks, and Chinatown Wars' latest looking-for-trouble lead Huang Lee tears up the city as only a GTA antihero can.
The game begins with Lee, a spoiled Triad member who enjoys the perks of his badass status but has never really gotten blood on his hands, arriving in Liberty City to meet with his power-hungry uncle. He’s quickly abducted and tossed in a car that’s sent for a deep sea sleep. So begins the DS-specific fun as players must tap the stylus on the lower screen to break the rear window of the sinking vehicle. While this might have some gamers fearing an experience filled with tacked-on touch-screen play, I assure you that’s not the case. In fact, Chinatown Wars doles out the stylus play gradually, and always keeps it interesting; some of my favorites included cracking a safe, assembling a sniper rifle, mixing Molotov cocktails, and hot wiring rides. These touch-screen mini-games were all fun and never felt like a cheap excuse to force players into using the stylus. The basics—walking, driving, shooting—are handled with intuitive shoulder, D-Pad, and face button controls. Especially cool is the varying weights of vehicles—engaging in a hot pursuit chase behind the wheel of a stretch limo is an entirely different experience than fleeing the fuzz in a peppy sports car.
The title really struts its stuff when Lee’s doing what he does best: turning Liberty City into his personal playground. Missions include the expected violence-packed variety, and the DS pulls no punches in delivering an authentic GTA experience. Whether you’re engaged in an intense exchange of hot lead, dealing drugs, pulling a contract hit, evading the police, or just plowing your vehicle through unsuspecting civilians, you can expect the wanton violence to be displayed in full balls-out force. Even on the modestly powered DS, I was able to fill the screen with flames upon blowing up a gas station, clutter it with cars as the entire Liberty City police force tailed me, and cover it in blood when firefights ensued; in fact, watching enemies slump into a pool of their own life-sustaining plasma is one of the title's visual highlights.
Aside from turning Liberty City on its ass, there’s a metric ton of other stuff going on in this game. Delivering on the series’ tradition of providing narrative depth, supported by colorful characters, it utilizes comic book-like cutscenes with text dialog peppered with the sort of salty dialog you’d expect. There’s also a complex drug-driven economy, allowing you to make a buck by trading six types of narcotics. An example of how deep you can go with this is your ability to control pricing based on the location of police surveillance cameras; deal in front of the cameras and charge a hefty price in exchange for the involved risk, or stick to the back alleys for a less profitable but safer exchange. All your drugs, guns, money, mission info, character data, and anything else that a responsible gangster needs is organized on a PDA (like Niko’s info-packed cell phone in GTAIV), accessed on the lower screen.
Cramming all this title has to offer into a single preview is like squeezing stacks of drug money into a brown paper bag. In addition to the original storyline, intense gameplay, narcotics-controlled economy, and addictive stylus games, Chinatown Wars supports a 24 hour day/night cycle, changing weather conditions, the ability to replay missions, and Wi-Fi functionality that allows players to trade guns, cash, and drugs with other DS gangstas, and post stats to Rockstar’s online Social Club. Chinatown Wars packs a startling amount of content into a tiny DS cart, and that it appears to all be executed with such quality in terms of gameplay, presentation, and technical prowess leaves me wondering if smoke and sparks will begin spitting from my DS when I fire up the final game later this month.
