Negative Gamer Review: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (PSP)

Your mother has always told you; “Beauty is only skin deep”, yet you still seek out that which is most attractive. Childhood joys of playing through a blocky pixel dungeons were replaced with detailed sprites then by lavishly painted textures stretched over high-polygon models. If given the choice of two products that appear to be functionally identical, you’ll pick the prettier one. For most of us it’s unavoidable; it’s human nature. Sometimes though, this pursuit of beauty can have its perils. Enter Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

If you’re new to Chinatown Wars and haven’t already experienced the game on the Nintendo DS, please disregard the following couple of paragraphs. Don’t worry we’ll get to you soon enough. All of this is your fault of course for not purchasing the game on the DS in the first place. Shame on you.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the PSP is a visually improved, more detailed and smoother experience than the DS version. All of the cut scenes have been redrawn, the music enhanced and the particle effects dialed up to 11. Only one thing is missing from making this game an odds-on favorite over its DS stepbrother. That feature is touch.

“Haven’t Rockstar Leeds replaced all of the touch controls and mini-games with suitable button mapped equivalents?” You ask. Of course they have. “Doesn’t the overall polish and production values bring a significant boost to the quality of the title?” Of course they do. “Why then are you complaining about one niggling little feature? Don’t you know the PSP doesn’t have a touch screen? They did the best they could with the tools they had available to them.” All of these points are true, however GTA: Chinatown Wars is a better game by far on the Nintendo DS; end of story.

NOOBZ ONLY, PLZ!

For those of you who are new to the game or even to the franchise, Chinatown Wars is a crime story action game where you play a cocky Chinese immigrant who has travelled to Liberty City following his rich father’s death. Suffice it to say the shit hits the fan pretty quickly and you end up on a bloody path of revenge.

Along the way you’re introduced to smack dealers, pimps, crooked cops, psychopaths and street racing punks. Most of their activities become available to you early on in the game with drug dealing being the game’s most addictive side mission. You are encouraged to buy low and sell high to different dealers all over town. Part of the fun throughout the game is finding all of the game’s “hidden” dealers. Once located, they can be reached from anywhere in the city almost instantly by way of a cheap cab ride.

The rest of the game is the typical GTA fare; murder, ultra-violence and destruction with some absurdity thrown in for good measure. The story is thin and forgettable as are most of the characters with the exception of Zhou Ming, a Triad mobster who will have you perform traditional dances in Chinese festivals in one mission, to chain gunning wave after wave of rival gang member en masse in another.

The driving and on-foot controls are more or less identical to the DS version with the exception of throwing grenades. Their solution is to hold the L button to aim and Circle to throw. This workaround is less than elegant, but it gets the job done. Driving is still a major weak point of the game, since the portable’s screen makes it hard to see far enough ahead of you to avoid other cars. The PSP has a wider screen than the DS but it has no benefits for vertical view distance.

Touching is good, when it’s appropriate!

The mini-games in Chinatown Wars are a central part of the package. You have to engage in one for almost every story mission, side mission and even simple activities like stealing a car. On the DS these games really added to your immersion; to steal some cars you had to unscrew the steering column, fasten two wires and twist the ends. Other mini-games had you digging through trash cans for guns, money or drugs. You never needed much instruction because the “controls” were so natural. On the PSP though, it’s a more manual and frustrating experience. You can tell Rockstar Leeds really put a lot of effort into trying to make these mini-games as intuitive as possible but the end result is something that feels unnecessary and cumbersome. It is nigh-impossible to shoehorn a set of features from one platform to another when they fundamentally don’t translate to a satisfying user experience.

If you are completely new to this game, you may not notice any of this. For me though, after playing the game on the DS for weeks on end when it came out I can’t separate my experience on one platform from the other. As a result I had to stop playing this version after about 15 hours. I completed the story and most of the side missions on the DS and I couldn’t bring myself to finish a play through on this platform. It’s a crying shame this game sold so poorly on the DS in the first place, making the port a necessity.

An embattled Take Two Interactive seem to have willed this game into existence, since Rockstar have never whored out one of their franchises like this before (yuk-yuk). GTA sells like hotcakes on home consoles, but the combination of rampant piracy and the “child’s toy” image of the DS meant utter failure for the better of the two games. Bottom line; this port simply shouldn’t exist. To quote one of the most egotistical designers in the world, Tomonobu Itagaki, playing this version is “a loss of face for everyone involved.”

A few other points worth mentioning:

• The game features an autosave feature. On the DS, this took a half-second to initiate after which the user was allowed to resume gameplay while the saving process completed. On the PSP, this takes a good 10-15 seconds where the user is presented with a darkened screen and a flashing R* logo; nice.
• I purchased the game on the PSN, so I can’t speak to the UMD load times, but on the digital version all of the “PDA” menus took several seconds to display. The GPS feature is especially hard to use and slow to load.
• The music is greatly enhanced from the DS version’s midi-like tracks. Here there are some additions that get close to being actual musical “performances”, but they didn’t go all the way to include vocals or any licensed music.
• The analog nub can be very imprecise. Some of the mini-games require small, specific movements. You’ll probably pull your hair out a handful of times each play through.
• This version has lots of cool lighting effects throughout the course of an in-game day. Unfortunately, the dynamic range of the lighting goes too far at night. I started to play off of a save with an in-game time of 23:00 while outdoors and it was completely unplayable due to the extreme darkness of the screen. I tried all three brightness settings on my PSP-3000 thinking it was just set too low.
• All of the game’s combat difficulty and mini-game timers appear not to have been tuned for the PSP version. Some gameplay sections and mini-games are much harder to play due to the control frustrations.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the PSP is a solid game underneath a pile of many major core issues. I wanted to love this game so much more than I did. Chinatown Wars on the PSP is half a victim of my own exceptions and half a victim of the inherit limitations with the platform. R* isn’t so much to blame for the quality of the title, but mostly the hubris of porting a game that was designed almost entirely around a touch based interface.

You should buy this game if…

…you love the GTA franchise, haven’t played the DS version and can get past the technical limitations of a top-down camera on a small screen.

Final score

If you have a DS and consider buying this for your PSP, kick yourself on the butt (or ask a friend to oblige) and go buy the DS version, again, if already owned.

(What does this score mean?)