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Wouldn’t it be great if someone made a game where you can
steal cars, drive freely around a huge city, do missions for mob bosses, run
over anyone, blowup emergency vehicles and get points for killing as many gang
members as possible and earn huge amounts of cash, all in glories 3D? Well,
someone at Rockstar games thought that would be a great idea too. Yay! The first two Grand Theft Auto games were released on the
PC only, were top down, two dimensional, and were instant hits. GTA3 was
released on the Playstation2 first and then ported over to the PC. Luckily,
GTA3 takes everything that made its predecessors great and throws them in to
a three dimensional world. The GTA3 world consists of three massive city-like
islands which you can explore freely at your leaser. In order to progress to the
next island you must follow the story line. The story line in GTA3 is an
odd one as you’re basically a free lancing thug for hire doing missions for two
main characters and one optional character per island, for monetary compensation
of course. Once you’ve completed the two primary characters’ missions you’ll
unlock the next island and the story will carry over to the next two primary
characters for that city. You can also choose to do optional missions. The optional missions consist of stealing a cab and
pressing “TAB” which will activate the “cab driver” mode in which you pick up
pedestrians and taxi them to where they want to go to earn a fare. Another is
stealing a police car and pressing “TAB”, this will activate the “Vigilante”
mode and you’ll be able to drive around “taking care of” criminals and getting
rewarded for your effort. Two others are stealing an ambulance or a fire truck
and taking people to the hospital or putting out fires and, yes, getting paid. Another nice feature of GTA3 is the radio stations
available to you when you “borrow” someone’s car. The radio stations range from
Techno and Rap, to my favorite, “Chatterbox”, which is a spoof on talk radio. If
you get bored of the radio stations you also have the option of copying MP3s
into a folder located inside the main GTA3 directory of the PC version
game. The game will ‘automagically’ give you a “MP3 Player” station and you can
listen to your own music while driving. The controls are a little difficult to get used too at
first as it was designed with a gamepad in mind. You can either buy a gamepad
for your PC or you can master the keyboard and mouse controls. The graphics in GTA3 are great! There are some
slight anomalies here and there, which fix them selves after you’ve been playing
for a few min, but other than that everything else is beautiful. Given that it’s
a port over from a console, Rockstar, games did a fantastic job in
bringing GTA3 to us PC users as well as taking advantage of the 3D
hardware capabilities available outside of the PS2. GTA3 is one of those few games you can leave
installed on your computer for months and simply play when you want a quick fix
or play it all the way through and then just goof around by driving aimlessly
around the three islands, driving off ramps to get stunt bonuses or trying to
find all the little secrets that are available. Either way GTA3 will
provide you with endless hours of fulfilling entertainment. |
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