Leaving Vice City
Today Facebook was nice enough to put a status update I posted a year ago in the sidebar for me. So, FYI, I watched Yojimbo one year ago today.
Relatedly, I keep a text file with a list of games I’ve finished, and when adding Bastion and Dragon Quest IV I happened to notice that I’d finished Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on August 16, 2007 (close enough to 4 years ago today). However, I’d played through most of the game well over a year before that, and only picked it up in 2007 to finish the final mission. After that I wrote the following, which I present to you as a historical curiosity.
I finally fucking finished Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The game’s stats page says I am 67% done with the game, but that must be a rounding error or something, because I assure you I am 100% done with it. I’ve never been more done with something.
The GTA games are interesting, but not for the reason everyone thinks (you can bone a hooker in a car and then run her over and take your money back). They’re interesting because as a simulation, they’re pretty neat, but as a game they’re an unalloyed disaster. The missions, which are the game part of the game, are often ridiculously hard, and not in a good, challenging way. Most of the time it feels instead like the developers just didn’t spend very much time refining any aspect of the gameplay. The shooting parts are especially bad, and that’s why I got frustrated with the last (very shooty) mission and gave up on it for a year and a half. I don’t even know why I felt compelled to finish it now.
GTA does highlight some of the things Japanese and Western game developers do differently. Western developers tend to go all-out on one killer feature (you can drive or walk or fly a helicopter all over an enormous city!) and do everything else really half-assed. Japanese games tend to be more conservative, and don’t stray too far from what’s already been done, but they focus on the whole experience of the game, to a really remarkable extent. Shenmue II has much less area to explore than Vice City, and you can’t drive a car or anything like that. The scale isn’t as broad. But the city looks and feels real, whereas in GTA everything looks extremely fakey when you’re not zipping around in a Lamborghini.
The other thing I realized is that, aside from the drugs and the Ray Liotta, the missions in Vice City are basically what boys are imagining when they’re playing. Replace the guns with Super Soakers and the city with a Maine backyard and you’ve got my childhood, more or less. People who freak out about these games need to take that into account.
August 18, 2007
