Latest Game Reviews Of All Game Consoles

[clement291]

Hey guys, here u will find the reviews of all the latest games of all the consoles.So pls keep checking this thread. And don't forget to post your comments.

[clement291]

Last year's SmackDown! vs. Raw was the first game that featured both of the big WWE television brands; it was also the first American wrestling game to feature online play. This year, THQ is bringing us a brand-new entry in the series, WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006, a game that looks to shake up some of the in-ring aspects that fans of the SmackDown! series have come to depend on. We sat down with the game's producers to get a feel for exactly what will be new for SVR 2006 when the game is released later this year.

One of the biggest new additions to SVR 2006 is the momentum system. As anyone who's watched a WWE match can tell you, the peaks and valleys of any well-executed wrestling match are all fueled by momentum; the developers at Yuke's are looking to reflect this phenomenon in their new approach. Each wrestler will have a momentum meter that, when filled up, will let you pull off that wrestler's finishing move. The difference here is that the momentum meter is dynamic; just as a real wrestler's energy may ebb and flow in a WWE match, so too will a virtual grappler's momentum shift in SVR 2006. Pull off a string of successful moves, play to the crowd, or execute some well-timed reversals, and your momentum meter will fill up; start screwing things up, and it will deplete at a rapid clip--and you'll be starting from ground zero once again.

Running concurrently with the momentum feature is a stamina system, a feature first introduced in that other upcoming THQ/Yuke's joint effort, Day of Reckoning 2 on the GameCube. As you might expect, stamina also plays into the tempo of a match, as a tired wrestler isn't a very effective one. You'll want to watch your stamina meter carefully when playing the game--start off the match with too many high-impact moves, and you might burn yourself out just as your opponent is getting started. The stamina feature ties directly to the stamina attribute each wrestler has; some of the heavy hitters, like Kane, will have relatively low stamina ratings--a fact balanced by their incredible strength ratings. The quicker you can end a match, the better, and if the match lasts too long, the big guys are at a distinct disadvantage.

Batista is back in WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006, complete with his silly opening entrance dance.

One of the main reasons for implementing the stamina system in SVR 2006 was for online matches, where players would execute a few moves, then run around the ring for extended periods of time, avoiding contact with each other all the while. The implementation of a stamina meter means this cheap technique won't be available, as your wrestler will eventually tire out if you spend too much time jogging around the squared circle. If you manage to knock down your opponent and have a few moments to spare, you can regain your stamina by holding the "select" button. Regaining stamina will also mend limb damage, but only to a certain degree. So, as you can see, there will be definite tactical benefits to keeping track of your stamina.

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[clement291]

Believe it or not, Bungie first introduced Halo to the bespectacled masses way back in 1999. At the time, it was a first/third-person action game for the PC and Mac (you know, that cute little box your dad uses to burn CDs) boasting a plethora of unique changes to the action genre. All plans abruptly changed, however, when Bungie was acquired by Microsoft, who morphed Halo into the world's best console first-person shooter and the number one reason to invest money in their strange green box when it launched in the fall of 2001.

Halo wasn't the game we were expecting it to be. It was better. What a difference two years make.

So one could only wonder what insane changes might have occurred in the three long years Bungie has been working on the highly anticipated sequel, Halo 2. How exactly do you improve a game that is widely agreed to be among the best of all time? Well, it turns out you don't do much. Halo 2 is an exceptional first-person shooter that expands on the original with a fantastic multiplayer component, great control and a few notable gameplay tweaks, and while it stumbles a bit in its single-player campaign, it's still more than worthy of a permanent spot in your collection.

The campaign picks up right where the first Halo left off, with Master Chief enjoying a hero's welcome back on Earth while the leader of the Covenant forces is branded a failure and sentenced to death. This dual viewpoint approach dominates the game's storyline, bouncing back and forth between the human efforts to stop the Covenant invasion and a burgeoning civil war threatening to destroy the Covenant from within. It's a little hard to get into the nuts and bolts of the plot without spoiling the big twists, but suffice to say, it's your job to shoot things, drive things, and kill things in order to save the universe.

Perhaps due to the popularity of the original game, Halo 2 benefits from a much more comprehensive narrative; a few Halo novels written in the intermittent years have fleshed out the conflict, and this game revels in its newfound mythology. A great deal of the plot focuses on the aliens, which is pretty cool, but at the same time leaves you wanting to hear more from the humans. It's a little lopsided.

It's also very, very linear, following much the same formula as Halo. You'll go from location to location shooting anything that makes your reticule turn red, then figuring out which door/path is open, running through it and killing more things. While it provides a nice enough mix of indoor and outdoor areas to keep things fresh, Halo 2's campaign is still very much a scripted corridor shooter. You don't explore, you don't solve puzzles, you don't do really anything aside from kill, kill, and kill, and often you're just doing it to get to the next cut-scene. To be fair, the scripting is good and the game never feels like target practice thanks to the solid A.I., but those who found the rail crawl marginally frustrating before will find it hasn't changed much over the years.

Some will also take issue with the fact that despite three years in the making, Halo 2 has a cliffhanger ending. We have no idea if another game is planned (though we'd bet our unborn children that it is, were that legal), when it might be out and for what system. Yet BOOM- the game leaves you hanging with plenty of unresolved conflicts and without a particularly satisfying climactic point like the Warthog ride from hell in the original. After such a long wait and such passionate fan fervor, it feels a little cheap of Microsoft and Bungie to leave �em out to dry.

The campaign is a little shorter than the original, clocking in at around 10 hours if played by a Halo vet on the Normal difficulty setting. Of course, opting to try it on Heroic or Legendary will extend that play time significantly as the number of enemies increases and the A.I. gets nastier.

You'll see many familiar aliens from the original game alongside a couple new ones, most notably the apish Brutes and some hard-to-hit flying beasties. Ramping up the difficulty seems to raise their I.Q. as well, which is good to know because on Normal, the game isn't very hard. You can also play through the full campaign cooperatively (though not online through Xbox Live), which is great fun.

Though the single-player experience is not very thrilling in its design, the fragging itself is top notch. Before Halo, console first-person shooting was regarded as awkward, difficult and ultimately ill-advised. The game not only changed that widely held opinion, but has become the unrivaled benchmark in console shooting, so much so that just about every game after it has 'borrowed' its intuitive control scheme. Lucky for us, then, that the same great gameplay is back, intact and in a few ways improved.

For one thing, you no longer have to scour the land for health packs � Halo 2 forgoes traditional health entirely by removing it from the game and simply increasing the rate at which your shields recharge. If your shields are gone, you can only take a few hits until you die, creating a more tactical experience. You'll run into battle, watch your shields erode, and then find cover as they recharge. It creates a faster-paced game and removes the multiple stamina bar management. Health packs are so 2001.

A more heavily touted feature is dual-wielding. Most one-handed weapons can be dualed and you can mix and match to your heart's content. Both guns can be fired independently using the two triggers, letting you deal out a prodigious amount of damage very efficiently and making previously underwhelming weapons much more intriguing. Dual Needlers, for example, unleash a devastating torrent of homing needles that can eradicate ground units handily. The flipside of dualing, however, is that you lose the ability to toss plasma or frag grenades, which as we all know are perhaps the most useful weapons in the game. Dualing has its purpose but is not overpowered, just a smart, fun addition.

New weapons are here alongside most of the old ones. The SMG isn't very effective alone, but can be deadly when dualed. Your trusty Battle rifle is back with a new burst fire rate and groovy mini-zoom. Since you spend a lot of time dealing with the Covenant, you'll enjoy their cool plasma tech in the form of a solid Carbine rifle and a very effective sniper rifle, not to mention a few other nasty surprises. The best weapon in the game, though, is the Plasma sword, which you'll remember from the original game when the Elites used it to gut you over and over again. Well, now you can gut them right back. You can swing the sword as a melee weapon or lock on to an enemy and perform a usually critical charging uppercut from a good three meters away, which is the most effective attack in the game. It's great fun and adds a whole new ninja dynamic to the game.

But even a giant blade is no match for a giant tank. Most vehicles from the original are back, including two variations of the world-famous Warthog (one with a machine gun turret and one with a pulse gun turret) and the big nasty itself, the Scorpion tank. The Covenant ships are more exciting, though. The whip-quick Ghost (now equipped with a boost) is perhaps the best in the game thanks to its maneuverability and accuracy, while the graceful Banshee has a couple new evasive moves. The vehicles pleasantly play a larger role in the campaign than last time and are essential to what makes this such a great series.

Not to be outdone by Grand Theft Auto, Halo 2 now lets you jack enemy vehicles by simply pressing �X' as they pass by, at which point you'll trigger an animation of you hopping on the vehicle and tossing the poor driver headfirst into the dirt. It's actually a bit harder than it sounds, especially when dealing with a Ghost trying to mow you over at top speed, but the move is hugely satisfying and a great alternative to wasting your cache of plasma grenades trying to bring down a tank. It doesn't play into the campaign much but is undoubtedly one of the more essential concepts for Halo 2's awesome multi-player.

Playing the original Halo with buddies was an always exciting but somewhat difficult experience; you'd either have to cram together on the couch to play split-screen or link together a few Xboxes for a LAN party. Halo 2 does away with all that thanks to its fantastic Xbox Live support, which does as much for the game's multiplayer experience as it does for your aching back � no need to carry your TV up to your friend's second-floor apartment.

The breadth of options for online play is staggering. Supporting up to 16 players at once, Halo 2 features seven main game types: Slayer, Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Oddball, Juggernaut, Assault and the new Territories mode. Most of these were in the first Halo and should be instantly familiar to vets. Recalling EA's Battlefield series, Territories is a new mode that has two teams fighting for control over certain locations of the map, while Assault is like reverse Capture the Flag as you plant a bomb in the enemy's base.

Each of the modes comes with a built-in list of variants created by Bungie, which include Team versions and weapon-specific game types (turn Oddball into Rocketball!). Plus, players can set up customized game and tweak just about every conceivable thing to their liking. With about a dozen maps spanning the gamut from small melee style arenas to vast, open playgrounds, the combinations and permutations are deep. Unlike the original Halo, you can play any type of game on any map. Given, certain kinds of games make more sense on certain maps; you wouldn't want to play 2 on 2 Capture the Flag on a giant map, for instance. At any rate, the choices are many and the variety impressive.

We do take issue, though, with the continued lack of offline bot support. Since online success depends heavily on learning the maps, the ability to play maps offline with bots seems like a no-brainer, yet again we're shut out. Curses.

But otherwise, this is a complete online package. Xbox Live has seen more than a few upgrades since its inception, and Halo 2 takes advantage of the service's stability by producing a well thought-out set of features. Finding games of the appropriate skill level is easy thanks to handy player rankings and a smart Optimatch system. If your team or group of friends wants to stick together while checking out different game servers, you actually can move everyone through the system together by forming a temporary party. Full clan support is here as well for those wishing to go semi-pro.

They've thought of just about everything, particularly when it comes to stat-tracking. Extensive stats are recorded after every match, including medals, hit percentages and head shots, fleshing out the experience for vets who want to see how they stacked up. Astoundingly, Bungie.net actually keeps track of every player's performance in every matched game by tracking wins and losses. At least it works right now � we'll see what happens when the number of players online goes from a few hundred thousand to a few million. Heck, if the host cuts out of a game, the server will automatically switch to another user so the whole game doesn't crash. Smart, smart, smart.

When you combine the solid performance of Xbox Live (I suffered very few lag issues when testing out Halo 2) with the built-in team mechanics afforded by the use of voice, vehicles and modes, you get an unrivaled online fragfest. It might not introduce anything particularly new in terms of gameplay, but what it does, it does better than anyone else.

Not to take anything away from it, but when Halo first hit the scene, it was a revelation in graphical design partly due to the world's unfamiliarity with the power of the Xbox. Nowadays, we expect big things from Xbox games, and Halo 2 mostly delivers the goods. The in-game action is beautiful, from the eerily realistic bump-mapped surfaces to the accurate physics and animations. Fancy lighting effects are everywhere � the game world is consistent, smooth and popping with color. Aside from one load when you start the game, it all streams in seamlessly with just a tiny hiccup when you pass through a loading area. It's technically unsurpassed.

At times, however, the game suffers from some weird pop-up texture issues and occasional framerate slowdown, though this is usually constrained to the cut-scenes. You sit through quite a few of them over the course of the story and can't help but notice their general lack of polish.

The sound, on the other hand, is flawless. Several rousing themes chime in from time to time to punctuate the action and lend a cinematic sense of drama to the goings-on. An enormous amount of dialogue was recorded for Halo 2, so much that you'll rarely hear lines repeated. In multiplayer games, the voice chat volume changes depending on your proximity to others, adding more to the immersion. Tack on great Dolby 5.1 positional support, and you have every reason to upgrade your sound system.

Your experience with Halo 2 is inextricably tied to your particular wants and needs from a first-person shooter. Despite a genuinely better plot this time around, the short, linear campaign and unresolved ending will certainly aggravate those hoping for a more evolved single-player game. But make no mistake � what Halo 2 lacks in its single-player it more than makes up for in its great gameplay, gorgeous delivery and flat-out addictive multiplayer. This is as good as console fragging gets. Once again, a little slice of gaming heaven from Bungie results in an easy recommendation.

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[clement291]

Despite its old age and jaded disposition, the Game Revolution staff still has no idea what it wants to be when it grows up. Will we chase bad guys as police officers? Help sick people as doctors? Wear chaps as construction workers? All the world's professions sound really friendly and helpful when we read about them in social studies books.

Except, that is, the life of a digital criminal. First, he shoots the friendly cop off his bike with a sawed-off shotgun. Then he jumps on the bike, breaks out his glock and streaks down the streets firing indiscriminately at passers-by. In the chaos, a car explodes and flings the flaming construction worker across the street. Minutes later, the helpful doctor shows up to survey the carnage and maybe grab a couple watches. As the bodies are being loaded into the meat-wagon, our loco hero drops out of the sky in a crop duster, hitting the scene like a meteor. Corpses, doctors, and onlookers all burst into flames and go flying.

Leave it to Rockstar to help us discover what we really want to be when we grow up: Los Angeles gangstas. After playing so much of Rockstar's new Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that we can no longer drive the legal speed limit, we here at GR can honestly say that if we weren't game reviewers, we'd be in jail. Of course, we're too sane to actually try any of this stuff, so we're pretty happy just pretending with the amazing new GTA.

Set on an island off the West Coast in the 1990's, San Andreas follows the hard-knock life of Carl CJ' Johnson and his travels through Los Santos (L.A.), San Fiero (San Francisco), and Las Venturas (Las Vegas). After moving to Liberty City (see GTA 3) for five years in an attempt to escape the gangster lifestyle, Carl returns home upon learning that his mom has been gunned down by a mysterious assassin. Vowing to avenge his mother's death and restore glory to his neighborhood gang, the Grove Street Families, Carl and his crew battle rival gangs, drug dealers, cops and mountain militiamen until everyone bad and good is dead, including your mother's killer.

As soon as you get into town, though, you'll be picked up by Samuel L. Jackson's Officer Tenpenny and his crooked cop cronies. They'll take your money and possessions, threaten to frame you with a murder, and then dump you off in rival gang territory. So, you jump on one of the game's many new features, a bicycle, and ride home. Bicycles are shockingly cool. After cruising hot cars and bad ass choppers in previous games, a simple bike might seem a step in the wrong direction. Lucky for us, they handle well with bunny-hops, wheelies, stoppies, and if you lay into the X' button you can actually haul ass.

But if you want to get the most out of a bicycle, you'll have to develop your character by eating well and going to the gym. When Carl is hungry, he'll gradually lose muscle and stamina and hit like a sissy. Without stamina, Carl won't be able to sprint on foot or jam on a bike for long without becoming winded. So you can take Carl to the gym, where he'll gain muscle and stamina, be able to hit like a truck, run a mile at top speed, and look like Tom "Tiny" Lister's big brother. To sustain your physique, you have to eat, but if you eat too much, Carl will become visibly porky and will lose the ability to scale fences and climb over obstacles.

Want to downplay your fat gut? Then buy new clothes, tats or hairstyles. On top of that, you can gain proficiency with all weapons and vehicles through repeated use. San Andreas keeps some sort of statistic for just about everything you do, and the fact that many of them actually affect the way you play the game is incredible. Not only is GTA a racing, action, adventure, stealth, arcade bonanza, it also has RPG elements to boot. This game is the alpha and the omega.

Once you've cultivated your inner G, you might wander through Los Santos (an awesome replica of Los Angeles), and stir up some trouble. For the most part, the game plays much like the prior two GTA games. You jack cars, you shoot people, you put out fires and you pick up fares just as you've done before.

However, San Andreas also lets you grab a pimp-ride and take hoes to waiting Johns, drive big tankers around in trucking missions, burglarize homes with moving vans, tag up the city with a spray can, take scenic photographs of the various locales, challenge martial arts experts for new melee moves, date various girls, recruit gang-members, take over rival gang territory, fly planes, enter low-rider contests, dive for oysters, dual-wield mac-10s, and generally go nuts in a million ways that don't have anything to do with the main story line.

This freedom has always been the GTA hallmark, and in that regard, San Andreas piles on the features to ludicrous proportions. Comparing San Andreas to any other game is like comparing King Kong to the other monkeys; it is the Overgame. San Andreas's only real competition is Vice City, just like Vice City's only real competition was GTA 3. Since merely listing the new features took up its own paragraph (and I didn't include them all), lets just take a look at a few in particular. After all, time spent reading this review is time spent not playing.

Take the turf wars. As a gang, you want money, power, and respect. To this end, you must defend your territory from rival gang hit-squads while taking over other neighborhoods. Get heated up, walk into a rival gang's territory, and start pumping their members full of lead. Once you've killed about five gang members you'll start a turf war, in which you'll have to survive three waves of attackers trying to drive you out of their territory. When you kill them all, the territory will be yours.

To make this task easier, you can recruit gangsters from your neighborhood by targeting them and pressing Up' on the D-pad. Once you get a nice little group of strapped homies, you can wander into a rival gang's territory and start tearing it up. However, the only commands you're able to give your goons are Follow me,' and Stay here.' Otherwise, they act independently, which can be a bad thing since you have some extremely violent friends.

Once you've spilt swimming pools worth of blood and wracked up tons of money and respect, you might like to go out for a quiet night with one of your many girlfriends. For the most part, dating is easy: just take your girl someplace nice then take her home. As you take a girl out more and more often, your chemistry with her will go up until she's ready to get it on. However, if you find some flowers you can present her with those for some guaranteed play.

If one of your friends is over, you can even walk up to the Cooperative mode icon in front of your girlfriend's house and then you and your friend can rip up the streets as Carl and his girl. While there isn't a lot to do here other than raise hell, kicking ass and fighting cops with two people is a lot of fun. The camera is peskier than ever at these points, since the co-op sequences aren't split-screen, but the bodies you can generate as a couple will make the exploits of Mickey and Mallory Knox seem like the adventures of Mickey and Minnie Mouse in comparison. You make dead people.

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[clement291]

I'm a betting gamer. Not that I've got a favorite bookie, but when new fighting games comes out, a little money always hits the table. So The Con should be my new favorite portable fighter. In part, that's because it's one of only two fighters for the PSP (the other being Darkstalkers), but also because it builds betting right into the gameplay.

Unfortunately, good gambling requires something worth wagering on, and The Con unsuccessfully tries to fool us into thinking it's got the goods when all it really has are good ideas.

Its main hook is that you dont have to bet on yourself, so throwing a match can be as profitable as winning one. Instead of beating opponents senseless, you can actually lose convincingly and make loads of cash. This is explained through the games plot, and like any good liar, The Con comes with a passable story. After players break free from the street fighting sister of Large Marge, they embark on a journey to build a winning trio of fighters with an ultimate goal of earning enough cash to be truly independent. It's pretty silly stuff, but every fighter needs a framework. With the ability to select and switch out fighters from your crew, The Con seems to have some flexibility.
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The fighting system doesnt, however. It plays more like Mike Tyson's Punch Out than a true 3D brawler. There's no rotating around opponents, only leaning left and right off a fixed axis. The 'behind the back' perspective isn't always a detriment, but does make some strikes and blocks hard to see, and therefore difficult to time. Even with that issue, everything soon becomes predictable and throwing counters is incredibly easy. That knocks the system off balance and puts nearly every fight in the palm of your hand.

In any given bout, though, there may be more to worry about than the lugs throwing punches. Bets can be placed before the fight begins with wagers on either side. There's also an option to set exactly when the bet goes through, so if the odds aren't stacked enough at the outset, you can hold the bet for a minute and either deal serious damage or take it to stack the odds as desired. Once the bet goes in, you can reverse strategies to pull out a big win against the odds.

Trouble is, even with all the mechanics down pat, there's not much depth to either the fighting or betting. Throwing a fight is merely a matter of calling the throw, setting the point at which the odds lock and then doing just well enough to keep the con going while taking enough damage to lose. The only mechanic that presents any variable results is the amount of damage you deal or take. If you don't 'sell' the thrown fight, the results are harsh. But the combat is limited enough that after a few fights, even that point is easy enough to suss out.
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Building a respectable fighter does entail a unique set of intricate maneuvers and is easily the game's strong suit. Your goals are twofold: build respect and win cash. Winning generates respect, but losing can generate more cash. Losing can also do serious damage to a fighter, which changes their downtime considerably.

Unlike almost every fighting game ever, The Con asks players to take care of their fighters between bouts. Several weeks might pass between matches, and each week can be given over to training, resting or healing. Training builds stats, but after throwing a fight some serious hospital time might be in order. Just do what Tyler Durden did and say you fell down some stairs.

It's neat that The Con builds these managerial tasks right into the primary game, but perhaps because there's no option to play without them, they're not taken as far as they have been. Like the betting and fighting, it feels lightweight. Still, there's a budding fight manager inside this game, and it hints at a great idea.

The only truly detailed facet is character customization, as there is a ton of gear to earn. A very robust character creation system generates fighters based on one of five fighting styles (tae kwon do, judo and street fighting are options), with more possibilities for customization than you can shake a broken arm at. Even combos can be tweaked through a very accessible system that lets players simply dial in the sequence of moves they prefer.

Too bad the menus chug and plod as players wait for new stuff to appear. Sometimes it's worth it, as 'limited edition' swag will become available. These items give stat bonuses, making them worth the cash. But since beating guys with the cheap stuff is easy, its hard to care much about upgrading.
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Aside from Story mode, The Con also comes with Quick Fights, Time Attacks and Survival gauntlets, but since the fighting engine is actually the games weakest point, none of these modes are worth playing.

Sony was probably hoping Ad Hoc one on one matches would extend this games shelf life like a preservative, and to an extent, they do. Through game-sharing, you can play with a friend who doesnt own a copy. And while the brawling engine isn't good enough to keep friends coming back, the ability to bet items won in the campaign is pretty cool, reminiscent of playing for pink slips in Forza. After paying tens of thousands of dollars for a vest that increases strength, losing it to a friend creates some real competition. In China, I hear, people are killed over that sort of thing.

At least your customized characters look cool. The Con doesnt push any of the PSPs graphical envelopes, instead delivering a clean, well-animated and generally smooth-looking fight. On the other hand, it doesnt sound great. Id love better sound effects to go with the bone crushing strikes and some better music to beat people up to.

No one will take a slug over The Con, though, because it's never going to inspire the sort of devotion that breeds violence. It's passably fun and offers cool ideas for the future, but in a world packed with incredibly addictive fighters, that's damning with faint praise. Next time, I hope the folks behind The Con do a better job selling me on their ruse.

[clement291]

Love em, hate em, or completely misunderstand them, just dont call the GTA games overrated. They are not. Since redefining free-form gaming with the revolutionary GTA 3 , the series has managed to not only win every major video game award in the book, but has glided through the typically inhospitable hallways of GR like that nerdy kid in the corner of your math class, acing each test without breaking a sweat or a pencil. We hate how much we like these games.

But time and again, were floored by what Rockstar manages to pull off, and so once again we hit the deck in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. it does what no other game has managed to do on Sonys handheld: almost entirely live up to the imposing pedigree of its console kin.

And it is, without question, the best action game yet for your PSP. Thats not only because of the handhelds underwhelming lineup of late its because this game manages to smash every ounce of GTAs relentlessly entertaining gameplay into your pocket with nary a technical belch. What it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in delivery and scope, providing carpooling criminals with the gaming equivalent of a MAC-10.
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As the title implies, the game is set in the same faux New York as the seminal GTA 3. You again play a mafia grunt - this time named Tony Cipriani - who gets in good with the Leone crime family and slowly works his way up the anti-corporate ladder. The plot is pure GTA, filled with brutality and humor as you run errands for your bosses, whack opposing mob types and absolutely terrorize civilians with your abhorrent shenanigans.

Its safe to say that no one plays GTA for its plot, and that trend doesnt change with Liberty City Stories. You always have a nice assortment of missions, but by and large, the story doesnt do anything wildly interesting. You kill people, you make your bosses happy, you kill more people, you get some new bosses, you kill people, etc. Some fun, witty humor shines through in the form of your mother (whose guilt-tripping drives you to perform unspeakable acts of violence), but most of the story is tepid, standard mafia video game fare, kapish?

Liberty City is reprised perfectly. It all feels quite homey now the red light district, the docks, even landmarks like the old hideout from GTA 3 will be instantly familiar to vets. Youll know the map like the back of your hand before even turning on your PSP.

The same goes for the bulk of the gameplay. In addition to the story missions, all the classic side fare returns, including taxi rides, vigilante missions, pizza deliveries, hidden packages, rampages and a smattering of extra missions. Part of the joy in GTA is creating your own dramas by randomly getting into trouble and seeing what kind of damage you can do before your wanted meter becomes unmanageable; that makes it to Liberty City Stories entirely intact.
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The control transition isnt quite as smooth. The analog nub proves fine for driving, but going on a shooting spree is a little trickier due to the frisky aiming scheme. You can lock on to targets, but often this points you at some innocent shlub instead of the hitman youre trying to introduce to your glock. As is usually the case, the rigidity of the analog nub makes aiming much trickier than it was in the console versions. It takes some getting used to, and even then youll prefer to handle your business from behind the wheel.

Or behind the handlebars. Motorcycles now cruise the streets of Liberty City and play just as well as they did in Vice City. Though you only get that games four bike models (the rice rocket, the harley, the dirt bike and the scooter), theyre a blast to drive and give a new feel to an old city.

There arent many other new bits in Liberty City Stories, which takes something of a step back from San Andreas by not including any of the features that game offered. Working out, riding bicycles, eating fast food and waging turf wars are all things of the past, as Liberty City Stories sticks to the basic GTA 3 formula.

However, it does get sideswiped by some multiplayer. Using the PSPs ad-hoc wireless functionality, up to six thugs can trash each other in team and solo Deathmatches, basic King of the Hill affairs and a few Races. Its decent fun, and though the game doesnt support full online Infrastructure play, its the first new-school GTA to have real multiplayer. Thats a good thing.
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Its also a pretty thing, mostly a result of Rockstars terrific job seamlessly getting a 3D GTA game up and running on a handheld. Though the framerate can get a little wonky and the character models are just as blocky as they are in the console games, its hard not to be impressed watching Liberty City Stories pull off its sheer size with few load times. The sense of speed is there as well, keeping the action tempo high and mighty. Thanks to a great use of the PSPs sleep mode, turning off the console and powering it back on drops you right back into the action without making you hop through load screens.

GTA is one of few game series as famous for its audio as its visuals, and Liberty City Stories takes this trend in new, minimalist directions. The voice-acting is again superb, perfectly matching the games dichotomy of cartoonish realism. A collection of radio stations are here, and while the talk station is filled with plenty of good chatter, theres far less licensed music this time around. Rockstar recently added the ability to import custom soundtracks, which is good, even if that feature should have included in the first place. It should also be noted that such constantly running audio and streaming visuals means the disc spins like a non-stop top, leading to heavy battery drainage.

But youll eagerly charge that puppy up again to jump back into Liberty City. Rockstar deserves props for miraculously cramming this much candy into such a small pouch without ripping a hole in the bottom, and while it doesnt favorably compare to its older kin, it far outshines other attempts at shrinking GTA. PSP owners with a taste for the bad life shouldnt hesitate to lift this one from their local dealer.

[freakkiller]

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