GTA Chinatown Wars

[miffy495]

Picked it up a couple of weeks ago, but was waiting for the DSi to arrive before playing it so that I could christen the new machine in style. Finished about an hour of play now, and I have to say it's pretty damn good. The top down play takes some getting used to. The biggest issue with the camera angle for me has been knowing which walls are low enough for me to vault and which are not. Controls are implemented well also, with the notable exception of tossable weapons. Grenades and molotovs are a pain in the ass, frankly, and having to use the touch screen in the heat of a gunfight to use them seems really clumsy. I have to run to class now, so no more impressions for now, but I figured I'd get the topic up at least. Anyone else playing? Thoughts?

[miffy495]

So I just finished a mission that had me hijacking an ambulance that was under police escort and having to defibrilate the patient in the back every time things got too exciting and decided that I love this game. Man, that was tense, used the touchscreen beautifully, and was really creative design too.

It's bizzare to be driving around the full GTAIV Liberty City on my DS. Well, more or less full. The whole city proper is there, but Alderney has been excluded. This means Algonquin, Dukes, Broker, and Bohan are all accounted for, and in full as well. The map is massive, but still familiar. My knowledge of the airport from frequent rounds of Grand Thumb Auto proved instrumental to my success in one mission, as I expertly used the geography to evade capture. Perfect.

Touchscreen is largely well implemented. Things like hotwiring, bomb defusal, and PDA interface are perfect and creative. Filling up bottles for molotov coctails at a gas station is clever too. As said though, actually throwing the damn things is a different matter. I'm getting better, but it's still needlessly frustrating.

So yeah, check it out. I'm gonna go play some more.

[Roderick]

Is it in any way like the old topdown GTA's of yesteryore?

I can't bring myself to buy this. I know it's good, I know I'll enjoy it, but I just can't be bothered. Gaming fatigue? Perhaps.

[miffy495]

Well, it IS topdown. Honestly, I only put a few hours into GTA 1 and 2. I just couldn't get the hang of those damned character-relative controls. Drove me crazy, and I'd just get frustrated and quit. From what I played, there are a bunch of similarities. Things like weapons pickups are nearly identical, for example. It's amazing how much this feels like the best of old and new for GTA. All of the good elements of the topdown earlier games (from my limited experience) have been retained or at least evoked, while the writing and structure of the later 3D iterations has been added. I'll admit I laughed out loud at a couple of lines in the cutscenes.

Another thing I didn't get to mention earlier is the new way that the wanted system is handled. GTAIV had a good start at trying something new, but it ended up being just too damned easy to get away if, for example, you hightailed it into the subway and waited til your stars went away. In Chinatown Wars, there's no radius system to worry about, and if you just run away your wanted level will remain as long as you're hiding (if you're at more than 1 star, anyway). For each star you get, if you disable (not destroy) that many police cars, they will have less resources to pursue you with and your level will drop a star. For example, if I get 4 stars, I need to ram 4 police cars off the road without killing the officers in them. Doing this will drop my rating to 3 (and 1 greyed-out) stars. Disable another 3 cars, rating will drop to 2. Etc, etc, etc. I'm not sure why the stars are greyed-out rather than simply disappear. There may be some mechanism that will restore stars if you take too long or something. Not sure.

I straight-up love this system for police evasion. It works, without the need for arbitrary bribes or that ridiculous circle system. It takes the ideas that they seemed to start to have for GTAIV and makes them into something much, much better. You're constantly running and panicked while simultaneously having to pick your moments and ram the police away to try to lose them. Chinatown Wars has already given me some of the most intense police chases that I've had in any GTA, and I've had some damned epic chases. I can think of a few from San Andreas that may top it, but for a topdown portable GTA, this is a stunning achievement.

[Nevsky]

I am really enjoying this game. Sadly, I've been busy in the last two weeks, so I've not been able to play it enough.

Agree that the use of the touch screen is real standout, especially in the way they make the run-of-the-mill driving+shooting missions a bit fresher.

I'm very much addicted (sigh) to the drug-dealing mini-game. Even though it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable (whereas shooting people doesn't? what does that tell you...), it's surprisingly deep for such a peripheral part of the overall experience.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Damn. I need this! It sounds excellent!

[James]

Yeah, it's pretty great. It actually reminds me of the classic GTA games more than I expected, but also introduces more of the newer elements than I'd expected, if that makes any sense whatsoever. The top-down view is obviously reminiscent of classic GTA, but so is the auto-correction that helps you stick to the roads, which may take some getting used to if you're coming straight off the back of one of the more recent GTAs, but makes a whole lot of sense. Actually, one of my first impressions on playing the game was, on seeing a zoomed-in view of a pedestrian, thinking "oh shit, that looks exactly the same kind of bad as the pedestrians in the original GTA". Anyway, it's nice to feel the nostalgia, but with a lot of elements from the newer games that make it that much more bearable to play. You know, like saving. I never beat a single city in GTA 1. That's partly because I was obsessive about it and would restart if I did anything I considered a major fuck-up, and I considered quite a lot of things a major fuck-up.

My main complaint would be the on-foot controls. Combining the rotating camera with screen-relative controls on a D-pad does not work too well, unless you're not bothered about following roads and not falling off piers and stuff like that. Also, I don't know of any way to switch between different combat targets in the same approximate direction other than desperately flailing at the right shoulder button in the hope that it will suddenly decide to switch to the guy you actually want to shoot, which doesn't really work. Also, the automatic drive-by thing sometimes decides it's a better idea to shoot blameless pedestrians than goody-containing trucks with great big red arrows floating above them. Then again, I haven't tried turning that feature off, and don't know how it works without it, so I can't really offered a fully qualified critique on that.

Something that really surprised me is the amount of ancillary details they put into the missions: I'll be on my way to where the main event is taking place, and I'll pass a highway pile-up, or a police chase, or whatever. Actually, it's normally one of those two. Still, it's pretty cool. I guess ideally that sort of stuff should come up occasionally in the open world, but I can understand that to have a really convincing event it helps for it to be scripted, and if they're going to go to the effort of scripting it, they want to be pretty sure you'll see it, so they put it somewhere you're likely to pass. I'd like it if in future they could develop methods for seamlessly working that sort of thing in at arbitrary locations and times, but it's a nice start, and not something I expected to be more prominent in the handheld game than its full 3D counterparts. I mean, there's been some similar stuff in the previous games (I believe in IV there's a mission in which a truck accidentally unleashes a load of lumber onto the road, which for a moment seemed like it might have been a really cool coincidence, but turned out to be a scripted event; the DS incarnation of these events, however, seem less integral to the mission itself, which makes them seem more natural and convincing. Anyway, I'm rambling.

GAME IS GOOD.

Oh, and stealing from drug dealers is hard but that doesn't matter because dealing drugs yourself will make you a lot of money if you just follow the tips they e-mail you.

Edited April 7, 2009 by JamesM

[soupface]

@JamesM, I agree with you on the on-foot controls and switching targets in combat: they're kinda hard to get used to and make fights a little frustrating. I would've liked to have the game zoom in some during hand-to-hand or firefights, allowing for a little more precision and control over targeting.

I played a hell of a lot of the first GTA back in middle-school, and Drugwars in high-school, so I feel right at home with the drug trading game in Chinatown Wars. I feel there are too many hot tips (you receive emails from dealers that want to offload drugs at low cost, or that are desperate for more of a certain drug). These don't make me feel that I'm being clever about buying high/selling low, but instead that I'm just running some quick little missions set up by the game.

That said, drug trading is a lot of fun. It's much more exciting to be chased by the cops when you have all your money invested in a trunk full of coke. There's just more on the line. It's also really satisfying to disable a cop car by weaving through traffic, leaving it to smash into a line of slow, law-abiding taxi cabs.

[Nachimir]

Been staying away from this thread until I got it ¬¬

While beating up pedestrians, one of them screamed "WAGH! I'm still a virgin!"

Foot controls are indeed a little awkward, but bearable I'm finding with the left shoulder button aligning the camera.

Having the map only be a 90° aligned approximation of the GTA IV one is confusing me, I no longer know my way around it visually. I'd also swear this map is a bit smaller, it seems to take no time at all to get around it.

I think there's a little bit of driver assist going on; it seems very easy to align a car perfectly on centre lines when driving into oncoming traffic, and just like in GTA IV cars land easily on their wheels. That the cartoony physics allow really silly car tumbles:

Also, being a martial artist with the super quick moves:

This game is really making me smile.

[miffy495]

Yeah, the driving assist is mentioned in pretty much every review. It does align you with the nearest road when driving. You can turn it off if it bothers you though.

[Nachimir]

I don't mind it, but it's a really jarring contrast to the foot controls

[Nachimir]

Has anyone else played around with the chainsaw? Flying cartoon limbs and splatter is a seriously weird thing to see on the DS

[brkl]

Apparently this didn't sell very well at all in the first two weeks. Kinda odd, considering I almost picked up a DSi with this even though I've had past bad experiences with Nintendo consoles and portable consoles. Plus it must've had some penetration into public conciousness since it was mentioned in South Park. Plus it's apparently very good. Curious and disappointing.

[Moelman]

Apparently this didn't sell very well at all in the first two weeks. Kinda odd, considering I almost picked up a DSi with this even though I've had past bad experiences with Nintendo consoles and portable consoles. Plus it must've had some penetration into public conciousness since it was mentioned in South Park. Plus it's apparently very good. Curious and disappointing.

Yeah, from what I read analysts predicted around 200,000-400,000 units in the first month and it only moved 89,000. I guess that is still good for an M rated DS game, and DS games usually have longer shelf lives than other console games.

This is one that I'd like to pick up, but I just haven't had time, and I have so many other DS games to play already. Kind of good to see them taking the less serious route like it's been in the past instead of continuing on with the feel of GTA IV (not that it didn't work for GTA IV).

[ThunderPeel2001]

It didn't sell well? Price reduction... price reduction!!! (Please.)

[Moelman]

It didn't sell well? Price reduction... price reduction!!! (Please.)

Yeah, kind of sucks since it pretty much guarantees we won't be seeing any titles like this coming to the DS anytime soon. Just further solidifies the position that DS is for kids and soccer moms. :/

[Jake]

Just picked this up (along with hatsworth, and a DSi to finally replace my classic original Tyco Toys slab DS). Can't wait to stop reading books for a week or two and play handheld video games instead.

[shammack]

This is my first GTA game, so I don't have any basis for comparison, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm tempted to go back and check out some of the console iterations, although it sounds like a lot of my favorite features were introduced in this game anyway.

Favorite moment so far: I took a cab to meet a drug dealer down at the docks, and after I got out, the cab tried to turn around and drive away, but bumped into something and then just drove headfirst off the dock and sank into the ocean.

[toblix]

It seems the cab AI is as awesome as it is in GTA IV. I still remember my cabby busting through the toll gate without paying, which resulted in a high-speed car chase, with the driver cursing all the cop cars trying to ram him off the road. It ended with us trapped in a cluster of about seven cars which finally exploded.

[Nachimir]

The GPS in this one sometimes picks absolutely mental detours to get somewhere.

[ThunderPeel2001]

It seems the cab AI is as awesome as it is in GTA IV. I still remember my cabby busting through the toll gate without paying, which resulted in a high-speed car chase, with the driver cursing all the cop cars trying to ram him off the road. It ended with us trapped in a cluster of about seven cars which finally exploded.

Man, that sounds brilliant. That's never happened to me. I need to get a cabbie to bash through a toll booth!

[James]

Foot controls are indeed a little awkward, but bearable I'm finding with the left shoulder button aligning the camera.

I've experimented with that, but I found it took a little too long for it to swing around to feel properly natural, and I was pressing it way too often, which was annoying me. I can tolerate the on-foot controls; they're just a bit fiddly and irritating.

I need to get back into this game.

[miffy495]

I don't think I've ever actually taken a cab in any GTA game. Am I really missing out?

[shammack]

I don't think I've ever actually taken a cab in any GTA game. Am I really missing out?

I just use them as a convenient way to move large quantities of drugs around safely without having to worry about cops, or to quickly "warp" to an area if I'm too lazy to drive there. Other than that, they're not particularly useful.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I don't think I've ever actually taken a cab in any GTA game. Am I really missing out?

Jeez... you drove to every mission? Wow. That's some patience!