Part1
I've played the full game a fair bit now, so this is going to act as a mini-pre-review bit. I've only played the first chapter, you see, because I'm getting it for christmas so I don't want to spoil it all now. Anyway, press on. The first thing that hits you about GTA is just how simple and fun it is. It takes a second to pick up, and a year to master, which for me is the Holy Grail of gaming. There's something incredibly stress relieving about running down a line of Hare Krishnas, or driving a police car onto the live rails, getting out just before it blows. It's fun, enjoyable and stress relieving. Then the police get onto you, and you have to fight or flee. Suddenly, the game takes a much more complex and exciting turn. You really have to drive well to escape a force of five Squad Cars, all faster than your own, and to make things worse, they get out and start shooting at your car, or they set up barriers accross all the major roads with two cars and two machine gunners. It gets frantic, and it gets exciting. The car chases are only made more thrilling by the thousands of civilian vehicles on the road, all driving around realistically, and even better, the emergency services. The Fire Engines hose down burning wrecks while Ambulances drop off paramedics who revive innocent victims. All have to be avoided in the heat of the chase, otherwise it's fight or get busted. Should it come down to this, there are countless tricks and tactics you can use to kill pigs, from fitting a car bomb to your vehicle before parking it in the middle of a pile up of squad cars, to ramming their cars repeatedly with a Fire Engine 'til they blow. The best, of course, are the simplest, and so GTA provides you with crates dotted about the city containing power-ups or, of course, weapons. There are only two weapons in the first chapter, and only four in the whole game, but they constitute such a small part of the gameplay and are so well made that it doesn't matter a toss. The Pistol and the Machine Gun are the first mad available to you. It's hard to shoot people in GTA, and the system might at first seem awkward, but after a while you get used to it and it makes the gunfights quite skilled affairs.
By answering payphones around the city, and checking for hints on your pager, you get 'Mob Jobs' from your friendly local Mafia don: Bubby. The deal is, basically, that Bubby is this fat madman (at one point he asks you to car-jack a limo and pick up the Mayoress of Liberty City just because he's feeling horny) who's in strong competition with a slightly less obese madman going by the intrigueing moniker of 'Bald Man Sonetti'. You don't, by any means, have to accept these jobs, you can ignore them totally, or accept them and then just run down all the important mobsters that Bubby directs you to. However, should you accept them, along the way you meet all sorts of weirdo gangsters, most you have to kill, some you have to chase then kill, some you have to pick up and take somewhere, but best of all, some you have to pick up after a bank job and act as the getaway car. It's all great stuff, the missions are well designed, varied and have enough twists in them not to make it boring. In fact it's a worryingly regular occurance that you'll get double crossed, or find yourself in a bombed taxi avoiding every cop car in the city who've just been called on you by some two faced rat. What's more, you even begin to like Bubby. He's somewhat eccentric, but he's funny, and in one instance he even goes out of his way to murder this bloke because he told you to piss off.
GTA combines the absolute overwhelming freedom of an open-ended game with the involving directional gameplay of a linear story-driven game in a bizarre but effective union. The whole game is well made, varied, exciting, addictive and challenging, and it combines the best elements of totally different, even opposite genres and games succesfully. One of the all-time classics.
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