Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

I thought I was getting toward the end of the game when I found out that the city kingpin, Diaz, was behind the botched drug deal the game starts with, and I began working for him. But as it turns out, I wasn't; after taking out Diaz, I'm now able to buy businesses in Vice City, and have more, even higher-class missions. I didn't expect the game's content to be this involved, which is pretty cool.

Technologically Vice City is really a mixed bag. The physics are great, but the camera makes it hard to see if your escape route is face-to-face with a police car. The crowd-based AI is very awesome, with pedestrians investigating dead bodies or fleeing gunshots and car crashes. Aiming at and shooting these people, however, is extremely difficult with the game's control scheme. And the game world is impressively large, with laudably short load times (after the super-long one as the game boots), but until a point in the game where you can get more, which is fairly far in, there's only one save point and it can be a real pain in the ass to get to.

On the whole it's way too fun for the flaws to really get in the way. My new guilty pleasure is mowing down groups of gang members on the sidewalk.

Progress: Criminal Rating: Thug (711)