GTA: Vice City Stories. Let the flood commence

Games
1

UPDATE 9/27/06:

New Trailer and Info:

http://pspupdates.qj.net/Steal-these-Grand-Theft-Auto-Vice-City-goodies/pg/49/aid/67724

New Info:

Load times between islands are short, even when in the air.
• The Empire Building mode involves attacking properties owned by other gangs. To initiate the attack, you need to destroy a gang car parked outside. Once done, gang members will try and attack you. Once you’ve killed them, you need to head inside the property (which will have its own interior). When you’re inside you need to kill all the enemies and wreck the place so that the business cannot operate any more. After that, the building will go up for sale, which will allow you to buy it.
• You don’t have to make it the same type of business it was before, you can make it your own. Choose from six different types that include prostitution, loan sharking, protection rackets, drugs, smuggling and robbery.

• As revealed before, this mode is three-tiered. Select to start up either a small, medium, or high roller business. The small costs $2, 000, medium $3, 900 and the high roller $5, 800.
• Once you’ve chosen the level and type of business, construction will begin. Actual hoarding will go up around the site while the building is being build. The time it takes for completion is around two in-game days.
• Once done, you can enter your new building that will have gang members working for you, a notice board to make changes to the business, and a save point.
• The business will then make money, but if you want to make serious cash you’ll need take on the missions that are provided to you from inside the building. These are of course varied, and an example Go>Play saw was when they had set up a prostitution business, they took girls to and from clients around the city within a given time limit.

• An appropriate type of vehicle will spawn outside every type of business.
• Gangs members can also attack your business, and as revealed before, you’ll be notified of it on your pager. Set up gang members and equip them with weapons to defend your business.
• Only five of each type of business can be run throughout the entire city.

UPDATE:
The web site is now online with a lot of new stuff:

http://www.rockstargames.com/vicecitystories

The trailer is out:

http://www.rockstargames.com/vicecit...railer1_hi.wmv

The 80s are back.

You gotta appreciate Rockstar’s way of holding back all their info and splooging it all out in one go. The game will be released on the PSP in October like LCS last year. Here are some tidbits of info that have came out of Australia (ganked from gaf 'natch):

• The game takes place in 1984 - two years before GTA: Vice City
• Victor is a 28 year-old US Marine
• Players can now take on the water of Vice City With jet ski’s!
• The animations are more life-like and is a ‘‘step-up from previous titles in the series’’
• A multiplayer feature similar to the PSP version of LCS is in the game
• VCS is ‘‘much, much bigger than Vice City’’
• Some landmarks are half-built or yet to be refurbished to their state circa 1986
• There’s new or altered locations and buildings
• All new vehicles and weapons
• You can fly helicopters!
• Radio stations from Vice City make a return
• New weather effects (hurricanes,…)
• You can swim in the game!
• Bikes handle better than before
• There’s also no more seamless exterior-to-interior gameplay as seen in LCS (There’ll be a slight loading time)
• A new addition in Vice City is the chunder-wheel, which you can ride in first-person view!
• Binoculars is in the game
• LCS is ‘‘rookie first-gen PSP title compared to VCS’’
• Draw distance is great and is said to be better than Vice City on PS2
• Trip skips make a return (If you die or get busted a taxi will take you back to the location where you received the mission from)
• New animations which give both the lead characters and pedestrians a whole new degree of humanity
• Far richer color palette that brings sunsets to all new levels of beauty, and realism
• Increased density of pedestrians, cars and objects
• Reduction in clumping (where groups of the same model type appear together)
• Far more interiors that its predecessors

I’m sure we’ll know a lot more in the next few weeks.

2

Sounds like a great deal of improvement, but it’s going to take a lot to overcome the burnout I have with this series. I played San Andreas and LCS for less than three hours each, and have felt no need to play them any further. Rockstar’s not getting another $50 from me anytime soon.

3

I barely played LCS at all, haven’t gone back to it after the first session. About the only cool thing in it was the ferry terminal, and getting beat up by striking ferry workers, because otherwise it’s the exact same map as the original. If they’d put real music on the radio, I’d be all over it, but they didn’t so I’m not.

4

I found LCS to be a pain to play on the psp and ps2. Unless they release a PC version, I’m taking a pass on VCS

5

If the load times are less, I’ll get it.

6

Gee, I wonder what the next version will be called?

7

GTA3: Milking the Cow?

8

If you didn’t like San Andreas, well, did you ever really like the GTA series at all? It isn’t just a rehash of GTA III and VC; it expands and refines everything about the series. It’s the best sequel I’ve ever played.

9

Sold.

10

I played GTA3 all the way through the final mission, and enjoyed it. Played Vice City to what seemed to be about half way through, and enjoyed that.

However, once I stopped, I didn’t feel the need to start again. LCS and SA didn’t fix things for me. I don’t doubt that they are fine games, but with so many other games out there…

11

Well, I’d still rather see this coming out on the PS2 rather than the PSP but I’ll take what I can get to tide me over until GTA 4… :)

12

That pretty much describes my experience, except I didn’t finish the missions in GTA3, I just played it till I’d unolcked both the tank and the plane. I haven’t played SA yet because I’m just GTA’d out. When I bought LCS I was actually looking for an old version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms to play and picked up LCS when I couldn’t find one. Total waste of money.

13

GTA: VC was my first GTA and I played it to death. Loved every bit of it. Currently I’m still playing GTA: SA after eagerly anticipating it for a long while (I wanted to wait for the PC version). The magic just isn’t there for me anymore.

For one thing, SA is just way too big. This is great at first because it feels like such a huge and realistic world, but after a while of playing, the tedium of just going from place to place wears me down. Also after playing it for a fair bit, certainly > 15 hours, I’m nowhere close to knowing the layouts well. VC was just the right size that I could learn to navigate it well and be proud of that, after a while.

It could be that I’m playing it wrong because my main plotline missions are in San Fierro now but I still feel compelled to go to Los Santos to do stuff there and I shouldn’t. I’m still playing it occasionally, but I still feel that VC was more “fun”.

14

I loved that SA was huge, I want gta4 to be even laregr. I dont like learning the entire layout of the city. I’ve been in LA for 7 years and havent got it memorized.

15

One of the great thrills of the GTA games is realizing you’ve learned the topography and using it to your advantage in missions and general Cain-raising. When I first played GTA3, I tooled around Portland for ages, learned the whole thing cold… then I unlocked the second island! And I could memorize the layout there! And then the third area! In Vice City they reduced this to two areas, both bigger but still more or less manageable although I never quite figure out the landscape in VC like I did in GTA3. San Andreas, however, was just so god damn giant that I didn’t even try to remember where stuff was, hell I could barely find my way back to my own house when I needed to.

When the proper GTA4 comes around I am worried that the size fetish will continue and it will be “FIVE TIMES BIGGER THAN SAN ANDREAS” or some such nonsense. To me, GTA3 was the perfect size – big enough that it’s not hopelessly repetitive, small enough that you can get from one place to another without long, meandering, interminably boring road trips. I would also mention how I hope they overhaul the gameplay mechanics as a whole instead of bolting on new features like from GTA3->VC-SA which sometimes work but other times feel, well, bolted on. But I won’t. Except I just did I guess.

16

Really, the only thing I want from GTA4 is for it to not be GTA4. Time for a new setting!

I mean, I like the games, but they’re sucking the concept dry.

17

I’m looking forward to VCS. LCS is basically a PSP system seller. It’s what the console is designed for. It’s the console experience on a handheld. LCS had its problems but it remains one of best PSP games I own and one of the cooler demos of the PSP’s power.

All that said, I’m surprised people haven’t started bitching about the price. VCS: The First $50 PSP game.

18

So would it be accurate to say that Rockstar have successfully tamed episodic gaming and made it successful?

zoinks!

19

I’m not planning on touching another GTA game until it hits PS3 or X360. Next-gen GTA FTW.

20

Pretty much my sentiments exactly. It would be cool if you had like a telephone in each safe house that lets you call a cab for a fee, so that one cut-scene later, you get teleported to any other safe house you own in the game and time advances. That would make the huge fricking size a bit more manageable.