Developer:
PS2 and Windows
DMA Design (now Rockstar North)
Xbox
Rockstar Vienna
Publisher:
EU / NA Rockstar Games
JP Capcom
Release date:
October 22, 2001
Genre:
Action
Description:
Since its release last October for the PlayStation 2, Grand Theft Auto
III has become one of the most popular games ever made. Far superior to
its predecessors, GTAIII let you go on a free-form crime spree in a
surprisingly lifelike city. It was so successful that, even amidst
stiff competition from games such as Halo and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3,
it earned GameSpot's Video Game of the Year award, both from GameSpot's
editors and its readers alike--and the accolades didn't stop there.
Now, publisher Rockstar Games has finally released a version for the
PC. And while it has somewhat steep hardware requirements and doesn't
offer any significant new content, it doesn't manage to screw anything
up either. Six months after its initial release and in a relatively
unchanged form, Grand Theft Auto III still remains a great, great game.
The basic appeal of GTAIII is the ageless fascination with using
firecrackers to blow up model cars, staging horrific toy-train wrecks,
and lighting plastic army men on fire. It sets you down in the middle
of a detailed clockwork world, presents you with a physics model and a
wide variety of interesting objects to interact with, and then gives
you the freedom to smash them into each other and enjoy the resulting
mayhem. Within this metasandbox mode, you're also presented with a
series of missions, which tell the ongoing story of your life of crime
among the game's cast of unsavory characters.
While these 73 missions provide a proper plot and a beginning, middle,
and end to the game, you can attempt them at your leisure. In between
the missions, you're free to do whatever you want, either on foot or in
any number of vehicles, most of which you can relinquish from their
owners at the touch of a button. Other than the always satisfying
manufacture of general chaos, there are plenty of more-structured tasks
to undertake. For instance, if you steal a cab, you can begin accepting
fares in what amounts to a nearly complete re-creation of Crazy Taxi.
Police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances also each have timed subgames
associated with them. In addition, there are 20 mass-destruction
challenges (called "rampages"smile, 100 hidden packages to find, and 20
cinematic superjumps hidden throughout the city. Completing these side
tasks grants you various bonuses, ranging from access to extra weapons
to cash bonuses.
The real star of the game, however, is the environment itself--a
corrupt municipality called Liberty City. Scotland-based developer DMA
Design (recently renamed Rockstar North) has done an amazing job of
creating a living city dense with detail. The streets are busy with
both pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Time passes, the sun rises and
sets, and different weather patterns move in and out. And unlike in
most games, you can actually drive to the skyscrapers on the horizon
several miles away. What's more amazing is that the huge city is
presented as a virtually seamless world. There is a short
one-to-two-second loading time (down from the PlayStation 2's five to
seven seconds) between the city's three districts, but otherwise the
only breaks for loading occur momentarily before mission cutscenes.
The PC version permits you to play the game in resolutions as high as
1600x1200, a huge leap over the relatively low-res PlayStation 2
version. In addition, the textures have been reworked and are now much
sharper. Details, like some store signs, that were blurry on the PS2
are now clear enough to read easily. The polygon counts, on the other
hand, are unchanged. The higher resolution makes the simple geometry
stand out, especially on the character models. However, the impressive
view distance and general amount of activity on the screen counter the
somewhat chunky models. Pop-up is a more serious problem. The "bubble"
in which active objects in the world exist ends long before the horizon
does. On a long stretch of straight road, vehicles and people simply
materialize in the distance. On the low-res, fuzzier PS2 version, this
effect was much less noticeable. It would have been nice if the object
draw distance had been made adjustable, but it's more of a minor visual
distraction than something that actively interferes with gameplay.
It's worth noting that the enhanced graphics come at a price. We tested
the game on the "recommended" system--a 700Mhz CPU with 128MB of RAM
and a 32MB graphics card--and were required to turn every detail to its
lowest setting to make the game playable. And even then, it stuttered
enough that the PS2 version seemed like the better alternative. It's
hard to imagine that Grand Theft Auto III would run at all on the
so-called minimum specs. Fortunately, when we tested the game on a
higher-end system, with a newer graphics card and a faster processor,
we experienced significantly better results.
System requirements:
Windows
* 450 MHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon CPU
* 96 MB RAM
* 8x CD-ROM drive
* 500 MB hard disk space
* 16 MB DirectX 8.1 compatible graphics card
* DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
* Windows 98/98 SE/Me/2000/XP
