Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Grand Theft Auto III came out when I was in eighth grade. I'm sure many older people would be quick to point out many games that came before it, but for my friends and me, GTA3 was unlike anything we'd ever played before. When we hung out, we'd take turns playing it - the rule was that you could play until you got arrested or killed. We'd have rotations of four or five of us, just sitting around watching one another beat people up on the streets, pick up hookers, steal cars, and blow shit up. We weren't even doing missions - the "background" of the game was good enough for us. Liberty City was our playground. Eventually, as we matured a bit, we all stopped being mesmerized by the ability to kill gang bangers and cops, but only because we found cheats that would give us tanks and flying cars. I wasted more time playing that game - not making any progress at all toward beating it, mind you, but just playing around with it - than any other game I can think of. College me would be upset with middle school me for wasting so much precious logging time. But eighth grade me was just blown away by a revolutionary game that let you do things you never even saw in movies. Perhaps college me and middle school me could jointly appreciate Chinatown Wars, a game that is by no means as meaningful or revolutionary as GTA3 but one that eclipses it in terms of greatness. I've played through III and Vice City (albeit with extensive use of cheats - good bye, five-star wanted level; hello, flying tank) and I've dabbled with San Andreas and IV, but never has a GTA game been made that held my interest in the missions as well as Chinatown Wars did. I loved it! The familiar side quests and dicking around in the city are back - this time along with an extensive drug trade that's easy to spend hours at a time unraveling - but the main point of the game is the same. You make contacts and a reputation, move up various ladders, keep friends and enemies close, and fuck up a whole lot of shit along the way. The coolest part of the game was the non-repetitiveness of the 58 missions. The way I recall it, too much of the older GTA games revolved around stealthily tailing somebody, protecting VIPs as they were ambushed, and killing people. Those genres are all back this time around, but along with them come some very original missions, often made even better by the use of the DS touch screen and stylus. Whenever you steal a parked car, for instance, you must engage in some kind of metagame to jump start it. Cross some wires, disable an alarm - you know, simple shit like that. Some memorably different missions included one on a salvage boat (use a sonar to find sunken crates), one amid a Chinese parade (mimic one of those dragon snake things to avoid suspicion), and one where you must outsell a rival coke dealer (make ten deals on the street before he can). My personal "wow, that's really cool!" mission was one where you need to destroy a bunch of stolen cars - some with a magnetic crane, some with Molotov cocktails, and some just by pushing them into the sea with a bulldozer. Having played this game, I think GTA was almost meant for handhelds - the "mission after mission" gameplay structure goes hand in hand with the "pick up and play" aspect of a DS. In fact, this wasn't only my favorite GTA game ever, but my favorite DS game ever as well. There's just something so refreshing about opening up a DS - a so-called "kiddie" system - and playing a game with drug lords, gang violence, and very R-rated (and hilarious) dialogue. This game comes with the greatest of my recommendations.