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Pint sized
By PaulEMoz
"PS2 owners, it's time to get excited! RockStar has taken the unprecedented step of porting their PSP smash, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories to the PS2! Why bother to play it on the go when you can now play in the comfort of your own home, whenever you're not actually having a life! And forget that silly little screen. Liberty City Stories can now take pride of place on your 42" Plasma TV! With games publishers taking such bold steps, why bother with handheld consoles? They're too fiddly, anyway! Take advantage of your armchair and large screen TV, and be blown away by Liberty City Stories, now on the PS2, where it belongs!"
OK, enough about that. It's obvious to everyone that this has been released on the PS2 to squeeze more cash out of the punters. But hey, a great game is a great game, right?
Now you can hold Grand Theft Auto in your hand! Oh, wait...
Liberty City Stories is not a great game. It's a decent game, sure. But decent is not a word that should be used alongside a game carrying the Grand Theft Auto moniker. To be honest, all that this port serves to do is make the series look old and tired. There's nothing original or fresh there. Right from the start, with an opening sequence almost directly ripped from a scene from Reservoir Dogs, you'll be underwhelmed. Even the main character comes from a previous GTA game. The whole thing just... makes you....... yaaaaawn.
I mean, all the elements are there. It's just that they've been done to death in the previous games. The story isn't very interesting, or very funny... it's just not very good. The missions are all same-old same-old. And, if you get bored of the main missions, do you really want to drive around delivering pizzas again? No, I didn't think so.
I know just how he feels.
If you've never bought a Grand Theft Auto game in the past, this is not the one to get. For a start, every other entry in the series is as cheap, or cheaper. They're also much, much better. No, the only people that should buy this are those that love GTA but either couldn't afford a PSP, or simply weren't interested in buying one.
It's interesting to note that, on the weekend that Nintendo launched the sleeker, sexier DS Lite, Sony have countered with GTA Lite. The game that was supposed to be the killer app on the PSP, the one that would make EVERYONE buy one, is released on the PS2. I don't know about you, but I find that rather damning.
July 2006
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