GameSpy
Review
of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
Can you miniaturize Grand Theft Auto? The question is moot -- it existed in miniature before GTA3 blew up the world with its mainstreaming of sandbox play. A more valid question is, can a GTA game on the DS, with all the attendant limitations and gimmicks, feel "real enough" to people like us today, people who just a few months ago were deep in GTA4? Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars says "yes." Simultaneously constrained and elevated by the limits of its platform, Chinatown Wars proves that the heart of the sandbox experience can thrive outside of a big-budget blockbuster. It also leads you to believe that it could teach its grand sibling a few tricks.
Grand Theft Auto IV actually tried to render a real-deal human drama amidst the distracting, undermining sandbox play. Chinatown Wars isn't even trying to go there. And really, I don't blame the writers. They just didn't have the tools to recreate their aberrant diorama on the DS, at least not in the form that we've become accustomed to. Think of how sound helped to texture GTA4's world, and lend it its sense of "place" -- the characters' voices, the radio stations, the pedestrian chatter. Think of the cut-scenes, with their body language and their stylized nuance that still somehow managed to achieve naturalism. In Chinatown Wars, this is all cooked down into still pictures and text. And while these narrative elements do look cool, if you peer into their soul, it's like seeing a funhouse reflection of GTA.
Protagonist Huang, the pampered son of a murdered gangster, traffics in snarky one-liners. The characters he meets -- ranging from a hopelessly incompetent Triad who's basically a composite of tuner culture and Asian popstar stereotypes, to a junkie cop with a hard-on for redemption -- are mainly receptacles for his dick and doodie jokes. While I don't doubt that these guys could be a Brucie-caliber riot if transported off the handheld, they're more or less defined by the limits of the format. In other words, they're there to make you chuckle on occasion, and dole out story missions.
In spite of all this, it's a little surprising to see how readily the act of playing GTA translates to the DS. Perhaps it shouldn't be; the series was born like this, so to speak, in a form that makes even Chinatown Wars' top-down, lo-fi 3D feel cutting-edge. From the moment I started playing, I was engaged in very much the same way I am when I play GTA4, scanning the map in search of available missions to push the completion percentage forward, in order to achieve, achieve, achieve. And GTA is no less an ass-kicker on the DS. What you do during missions hasn't changed, and the content is no less imaginative. You're still driving crazy, shooting people and burning things down. It's still aggravating if you fail and have to redo some parts, but in most cases you can immediately restart and skip the long drives. Mechanics are reworked for the format, which means driving is quite forgiving, shooting is typically fool-proof, and it's easier and more fun to ditch cops.
Simplified controls don't amount to mere concessions made to shoehorn a "full-featured" experience onto a handheld, however. And while there are plenty of touchscreen sequences that scream "gimmick," the DS interface is harnessed to great effect where it counts. Unlike the console games, where you get to creep intimately through the nooks and crannies of the diorama in high-def third-person, Chinatown Wars makes Huang's PDA your window into Liberty City, and it's no less effective a vehicle to draw you into its world. Let's face it: we spend much of our time in real life with our noses to a screen, reading about the world in lieu of living in it, and talking to distant people while snubbing the ones right next to us. In Chinatown Wars, this disconnect serves a useful purpose -- you get e-mails like you would phone calls in GTA4, offering up missions and (mo' crucially) easy GPS coordinates that lead you to them. What's the alternative? Driving blind through the streets en route to the mission giver's spot on the map, minus the self-updating line that illustrates the best path. In this day and age, that sounds unthinkable.
And then there's the drug trade, rendered in broad strokes by Chinatown Wars as a persistent in-game economy. This is where the PDA comes into its own, and earns the touchscreen interface its stripes. There are drug dealers all over Liberty City, offering different sorts of product. Sometimes, they'll even e-mail you when they have a specific need, or are in the middle of a fire sale. ("I'm selling coke at crazy prices!" says one guy early on. All I can think of is the impenetrable narco-dealer cant from "The Wire.") On the surface, it's a way to make money to keep yourself deep in weapons and new safehouses. Really, though, it's a relentless metagame with the potential to highjack your whole experience. You can view the "turf map" on the PDA, which illustrates which gangs control which territories, and what drugs they're buying and selling. I think back to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. Once I discovered that the auction system was the best way to acquire powerful gear, that's all I did. Dealing in Chinatown Wars got me the same way, with an added bonus of actually drawing me out into the world, where I could experience all sorts of little emergent things.
By perusing the turf map, you discover that there's a measure of complexity in this top-down rendition of Liberty City that you miss by simply driving through it. Individual dealers have names that go along with their caricatured identities and gang affiliations. This allows you to associate places with people, which was easy to do in the bigger GTA games, and a notable accomplishment for this little subsystem. Was it a happy accident?
Maybe, but who cares? When we think of GTA, we think of blockbusters built to massive specifications. Chinatown Wars proves that much of the stuff that really draws us to these games can be realized without expending millions of dollars and man-hours. Anyway, my highest recommendation: Though I'm done with my review, I'm far from done playing. In spite of my early kneejerk dismissal, I can't get enough of this crazy little unregulated dystopia where you can get heavy assault weapons delivered to your doorstep.
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