|
It doesn't help that the cutscenes in Liberty City Stories highlight one of my biggest pet peeves with the PSP: loading times. Now there's probably no one on this planet that actually enjoys them, and to be honest, the loading times in this PSP title are very manageable. However, why is that in order to start a mission, I have to drive up to a location, get out, walk up to a glowing circle, wait through a loading screen, watch a short cut scene, and wait through another loading screen before I can get to the task on hand?
Play it on the go, or not at all
 "Buuu-t wait," you say, "that's how every GTA game has worked!" Yes it is. But how many of those GTA games were on handhelds where the whole point is pick up and play gameplay that fills shorter play periods? My issue is that after you fail a mission—and you will fail many of the punishing early missions, you have to sit through these loading screens again when you go back to start the mission. All the talk about making this game ‘friendly' to portable gamers by Rockstar Leeds seems to have been just that. Talk. I wasn't able to find a single part of Liberty City Stories where a change to the conventional GTA-formula was made to make it handheld friendly.
What was waiting to be found immediately upon turning my PSP on was the old GTA "go-there, kill-them" mission design. Here the limp main character robs Liberty City Stories of its ability to hide the simplicity of the missions by stripping away any motivation players feel to complete them. In Vice City, every mission Tommy set out on felt like it served a purpose in getting back his money and ultimately more. With San Andreas, all of CJ's task was part of a larger quest in serving vengeance on those who killed his mother. Here you just do things because... well, I guess because someone told you to.
The actual missions themselves will drive you nuts early on by sending you on insultingly simple and short tasks, and then will shortly compel you to throw your PSP at the nearest wall by exponentially increasing in difficulty. Some of this can be blamed on the design of the mission themselves: the same foes you face towards the end of the game make appearances very early when you have limited access to good weapons, but a good portion of the blame could be placed at the feet of the controls.
The default control setup leaves Toni with no good way to perform a drive-by shooting—the backbone of any hit, but simply switching to type 2 lets you tap the left and right shoulder buttons to look in the corresponding direction while driving. Why this wasn't made the default is beyond this editor. Another annoyance is that you can toggle the d-pad and the analog nub use in the game—but it's global—meaning if you want to use the d-pad for running around and the analog nub for driving, you're out of luck.
Aiming, or should I say, locking-on, is executed with the right shoulder button and is where this reviewer promptly got off the GTA-on-PSP hype train. Why is it that when I'm standing in front of two cops shooting at me, the game decides that I want to aim at the old lady behind me? Why is this still an issue in the fourth Grand Theft Auto game!?
It's not like we're talking about the first 3D Grand Theft Auto game ever made. This "lock-on problem" has been with the series since it went 3D despite and despite many complaints along the way the whole issue seems to have been skipped over in Liberty City Stories. To be perfectly fair the problem was only partially solved in San Andreas with the addition of a free-aiming mode that used the second analog stick.
|
