“Smash and Grab” – Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

**Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories** (Rockstar, PlayStation 2, 2005/2006)

I can see where the wow factor would have come from in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. In 2001, when Grand Theft Auto III was achieving mind-blowing new things in the field of open city and mood creation, nearly-accurate versions of SNES games were the state-of-the-art in the portable space. And yet, just four years later, PSP owners could go where they liked in a very similar Liberty City, shooting and delivering and police-chasing and generally causing chaos on a small screen. What a leap!

The PSP version of Liberty City Stories, though, did not reach the top of the UK chart. In November 2005, it entered at #2 behind a climbing Star Wars: Battlefront II. That was, to be fair, not a bad result by the standards of any portable game which wasn’t Pokémon. Only the two GBA games linked above and Ridge Racer PSP had ever done better. Nintendo’s burgeoning DS hadn’t provided a #1 yet either. But the PSP’s audience wasn’t big enough to break that barrier outside of its launch. By June 2006, Liberty City Stories was sitting at #37. The week after, it was released on the PlayStation 2 at the low price of £19.99. What followed was the best PS2 game sales figure of the year and five weeks at the top of the chart.

Playing Liberty City Stories on the PS2 after playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there is no possible wow factor. Although some technical improvements were made over the PSP version, and it has the advantage of being based on the oldest and least-impressive city of the series, it still feels lacking. There is little visual detail and everything is rather eerily empty. Cutscenes lack panache and even the sound bears the audible marks of over-compression. Radio stations repeat themselves often enough to quickly realise it’s the same advert for Citizens United Negating Technology For Life And People’s Safety next to the same song each time.

When it comes to the missions and story, things also tend towards the simplified. Many of the possibilities and richness of the world of the last couple of PS2 instalments are gone, replaced with pretty simple escapes and shootouts. Which should absolutely make sense for a portable format, but even then things don’t quite add up. You still often need to complete several stages in one go and make large trips across the map. And the way that the game sits uneasily with itself is typified by a new game mechanic: the magic taxi.

If you get killed during a mission in a Grand Theft Auto, you reappear at a hospital, less equipment and cash. If you get busted by the police, a police station. It gives a little more of a sense of a big living world, and a nudge towards exploring whatever new area you’ve ended up in. Liberty City Stories maintains this approach. But when you re-emerge, it provides a magic taxi with a glowing arrow on the road nearby, which takes you instantly to the place you need to initiate the mission from. It’s a nod towards convenience, but given intro cutscenes and the aforementioned distances, it’s still rather an inconvenience, especially if you are trying to play in limited bitesize chunks. A restart mission option would make for a much better experience. But, of course, the game then wouldn’t be as much like the advertised experience of a console-standard GTA on-the-go. The attempt to stretch to both goals leaves it stuck in unhappy compromise.

Not many people came away from playing Liberty City Stories on PS2 with it as their new favourite Grand Theft Auto. In the same way as portability making Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine for the Game Gear surely the best version despite its technical limitations, the PSP version of Liberty City Stories was clearly the better one. The success of the inferior PS2 version stands as a monument to the power of both the brand and the impetus to play Grand Theft Auto, any Grand Theft Auto, and the massive number of PS2s out there in people’s homes. In a year when new consoles had either launched or were on their way soon, the PS2’s continuing dominance was a pressing concern for many. Grand Theft Auto was too big to get stuck on the PS2, but that wasn’t the case for everyone.