Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories is Rockstar’s second Grand Theft Auto game to go from a PSP game to a better-selling budget PS2 game. In many ways it is an improvement on Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories in exactly the same way as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was an improvement on Grand Theft Auto III. It gives you some new things to do, in a technically much more impressive and larger setting. It fixes some of the most obvious PSP teething troubles. And most importantly, it has an enhanced sense of place and time which makes it a lot more fun to hang out in.
Having a much more distinctive aesthetic helps technical improvements come across as much bigger than they are. Driving around basking in the neon haze of one of its yellow-orange-pink gradient sunsets while blasting Depeche Mode on the radio is a much better and more unique experience than any Liberty City Stories equivalent. Up to a point, this makes sense for the same reason as for the PS2 originals. Grand Theft Auto III being an introduction to a whole new approach was enough, but its sequel had to take it somewhere different to stand out. Liberty City Stories being a proof of concept that you could fit that open world into a portable game was enough, but its sequel had to do more.
It’s not exactly like-for-like, though. Vice City was the second one of these games. Vice City Stories, especially in its PS2 incarnation, is the fifth in barely over five years. And while its radio stations might offer some new songs and new parodies of American xenophobia to listen to, Vice City is not a new setting but a familiar one, from a game which could not yet be generating particularly powerful nostalgia. It is more of the same old, with the same gameplay and the same nihilistic attempts to shock and offend.
This is where the stories of its title might be able to save it, but that is an even bigger step down from predecessors than Liberty City Stories was. There is no more attempt to do anything different or more ambitious, and the progression of new missions marked on the map come with barely enough narrative justification to make sense. The main character Vic Vance getting kicked out of the army early on does come as a dramatic moment, but mostly in the sense that I was pleased I wouldn’t have to schlep my way out of the army base before picking up a vehicle every time any more. I can only imagine how painful that process was on the PSP. Still, rather than checkpoints or reconsidering mission types, the same half-arsed magic taxi solution from Liberty City Stories is in place again, along with being able to buy back your weapons as you leave hospital. Massive progress!
Vice City Stories once again sold very well. The appetite for Grand Theft Auto remained high. But it sold significantly less well than Liberty City Stories (and only spent one week as UK #1 rather than five). More of the same wasn’t cutting it to quite the same extent. Pattern and the rule of trilogies would dictate that the PSP and PS2 should have hosted a San Andreas Stories, but they didn’t. It seems to have become apparent that it might have been a step too far. Partly that’s a matter of timing as well. The PS2 was becoming old news. The PSP was not any kind of big news any more. This is where we leave the PSP in this story of best-selling games, just a couple of years old and after one launch game and two ports. As of March 2007 that was still one launch game and two ports more than had topped the charts from the rival Nintendo DS, but that story was still to come…
Top of the charts for week ending 17 March 2007:
