Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

I've added a shit-ton of games to my backlog recently; in addition to picking up an Xbox One, I decided to sign up PlayStation Plus. There's a few free PS3 games released every month as well as PS4 and PS Vita should I ever purchase one of them, as well as very good sale prices which resulted in my grabbing a few Fatal Frame and Grand Theft Auto games. I had played some of Vice City back when it first came out but never got around to finishing it, so I figured now was a good time to get that taken care of- I was just in Florida for a few days, so... appropriate! The dreary New York-inspired Liberty City from GTA III is traded away for the Miami stand-in Vice City; an environment that's brighter, more colorful, and has a heavier focus on water-based missions as well as Cuban and Haitian gang wars rather than the Italian mafia and Triads. It also featured the inclusion of bikes- faster and more maneuverable, but more dangerous to drive than cars; also your character actually talks this time around and has a personality. Tommy Vercetti, fresh out of prison for killing eleven men in what was likely a setup by his own boss, is sent by the Liberty City mafia down to Miam- I mean Vice City, basically to get him out of town, but also to help out in a series of drug deals. The first one goes horribly wrong, so now it's up to Tommy to work his way through some missions to figure out who ambushed him and to get his boss's money back and then some. For a while it's pretty similar to the previous Grand Theft Auto III, until mid-way through the game where Tommy has basically removed any rivals from the city and realizes this is a golden opportunity to take the city over completely, mostly by running side missions for gangs and investing in struggling criminal businesses. This takes up the second half of the game and it's completely open-ended- you can really do it in whatever order you want, and can skip over some missions entirely. I liked the change; it's noticeable that Tommy eventually stops taking orders and starts completing missions simply to help himself or his allies get ahead in Vice City, and it really does feel like Tommy is starting to own the city the further along you get, rather than GTA III's more passive Claude (yeah, that's his name). Still though, while the game blew me away twelve years ago with how huge it was and how great it looked, the graphics aged pretty horribly and it wasn't long before I felt like I knew the whole city inside and out. At least the second issue should be fixed in the next GTA game I'll play- see you in San Andreas!