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Take You Down To Chinatown By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman After hearing all the stellar reviews of GTA: Chinatown Wars, you’d think Rockstar Games had managed to put one of those 3-D GTAs onto a DS cart; unfortunately, by thinking that you’d be sorely mistaken. While GTA: Chinatown Wars isn’t a 3-D GTA on handheld like Vice City/Liberty Stories, it is a very amazing game done in the 2-D styling of GTA 1, 2 and their expansions.
Despite that fact that Chinatown Wars is done in the 2-D style, it does have a lot of elements from the more recent GTAs. Most notably is the “living city” aspect from GTA 4, where you’re not the only thing that matters in town. You’ll immediately see that the cops don’t just chase you and that the NPC aren’t a bunch of marching ants on some preset trail. The living city seems a bit toned down from its 3-D counterpart, but that may have to do with hardware limitations. I think this works out for the best, as I’ve seen some game breaking stuff happen in GTA 4 (like the time an errant police car hit Ron mid cut scene and froze his game).
The game follows a very typical GTA formula. You start out as a lowly street urchin getting jobs from local crime bosses, eventually working your way up the criminal syndicate ladder and becoming the “capo di tutti capi” (or Dai Lo, big brother in this case) of the crime world. Doing the main missions progresses the story and raises your criminal ranking, while doing side missions gains you more: money, cars, weapons, etc. The missions range from simple assassinations and dope muling to more complex things such as: rigging a street race, surveillance, or laying down distractions for the police to tend to while the real crimes are being committed elsewhere. I’d like to thank Rockstar Games for not including a DDR style mission in Chinatown Wars, since that was the biggest waste of time in San Andreas.
New to this version of GTA are the dope dealing jobs offered in this game. Dope dealing is basically that famous browser and graphing calculator game, Drug Wars which is an adult version of Lemonade Stand. You’re given the opportunity to purchase different drugs from a network of dealers at various prices and play a sort of stock market game trying to find people that will buy those drugs at a higher price. I really love and hate this mini-game at the same time for a few different reasons. I find this mini-game way to close to the way my life was at one point to want to get into it. Every time I go out and drive across town to make a drug deal, part of me dies since I’ve played this game before just in my own town. I’d seriously would have rather been some fat, unsavory pimp escorting girls to motels than some skinny asian kid that dealt with drugs. However, I like this mini-game, since it’s one of the easiest ways to make money in GTA history (I’ve honestly made $40,000 in one transaction, as one guy was selling coke very cheap and the next day decided to buy it all back at 10x’s what he paid for. But I guess that’s how dope fiends are).
As I mentioned before the graphics are very similar to the early GTAs, but they are a lot more polished and attractive. The game is done in the cel shaded style, which gives the cars, architecture and natural scenery a lot of depth to what might have been a very flat looking world. The “cut scenes” are done in the same cel shaded art style, but are done in near static images making it seem more like a comic and less like those B cop movies in the recent GTAs (which isn’t a bad thing). The only things about the graphics I can note are the safehouses, since they literally look like they were drawn in MS Paint. They’re blocky and done in a very minimalist style that it screams “cop-out” over design limitations.
The audio in this game is just ok, but in my opinion it works for this game. The first thing you’ll notice is that the game lacks any licensed songs on the radio, all you have are synthesized instrumentals done in some genre/artists style. This isn’t a big issue, since Liberty City is so scaled down in this game that I’m rarely in the car for more than a few minutes. Another thing with the audio is the lack of recorded voice tracks. However, this one seriously works in the game’s favor. Since Chinatown Wars’ story revolves around the asian Triads and criminal organizations, I’d probably be trying to deafen myself with a sharpened pencil to the ears just so I wouldn’t have to hear things such as: “Yous a rucky rucky man” or “Ret’s get a flied lice downtown” (yes, I feel I have a right to bash my own people).
Due to the fact that I inadvertently quit drinking (don’t worry, you know I’ll be back), I can’t give you a drunk review on this game. So I’ll finish this one off by saying, if you’re not a fan of the GTA series (seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?), I’d give this one a shot, you might actually like it. However, I would wait until the price went down, since I couldn’t see you finding $35 worth of enjoyment out of this game as a virgin to the series. On the opposite note, if you’re a fan of the newer GTAs; you too might want to wait until this thing is less than $30 because it’s short (I’m talking like 10-12 hours to get 100%, as a veteran). The only reason I could see you buying this at the full price is if you’re really itching to have a take anywhere GTA (which this does satisfy) or if you’re a rabid fan of the top down GTAs (which I am). Otherwise, just wait until the thing makes a price drop or until Gamestop has 20 used copies per store and doesn’t know what to do with them all (that should be happening in a couple months).
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