[For the latest guest post where I hand over the blog for someone else’s perspective, I’m very happy to welcome for the first time Solarayo, who you can find at aceasunder.com]
Ah, the entire Grand Theft Auto series is a guilty gaming pleasure of mine! It all started back in the day when I rented a PlayStation 2 and Grand Theft Auto III from the local corner store. Man, I feel old…
I can’t easily explain why the trademark GTA criminal experience is so fun to me. I think it has a lot to do with having the freedom to cause as much chaos as you want. Games typically put you in control of benevolent heroes. Becoming a bloodthirsty henchmen-for-hire is something both terrible and fascinating. Also, huge bonus points to the sarcasm and dark humor the series is now infamous for.
Anyway, to date I have played and completed all of the 3D iterations of the series, including the 2002 80s Miami parody known as Vice City! San Andreas will likely always be my favourite in the franchise, but Vice City is certainly a very close second place.
Exploring the mean, sunny and neon streets of Vice City is just like taking a relaxing vacation… well, when you’re not shooting up the place, stealing pretty sports cars, and running deadly errands for the city’s crime community.
The game’s stylish lead, Tommy Vercetti, is a monstrous man on a mission to make amends for losing his boss’s precious drugs shipment. With the help of the city’s evil crackpots, Tommy finds out that it is much more satisfying to build his own criminal empire instead, and it was a heck of a lot of fun helping him do that.
Vice City itself looks like a beautiful paradise, and I wasted so many hours happily exploring the sights. I’ve shamefully run over many people on the gorgeous beachfront, had extensive shootouts in colourful nightclubs, beat up snobby people on the grand golf course, stolen show cars in the mall, and used boats to collect many a packet of drugs on the pristine waters surrounding the area.
Tommy can acquire various business properties on his quest. These generate income and allow you to perform special missions which was a such a cool concept to me at the time. I will never forget nor stop laughing at the Mr. Whoopee ice cream business and the two scoops of, um, innuendo on their truck’s roof.
One of my favourite irrelevant activities in the game was barricading myself in one of the city’s many hardware stores. Once all the cars were stacked outside, I would start blowing things up and shooting enough bullets to get 6 Wanted Stars and the army after me. That made tanks appear to come hunt me down, and I had a blast trying to escape with one for my car collection.
And of course, I can’t talk about a GTA game without acknowledging the controversies the series always seems to have created, even though there are far ‘worse’ games out there. Back to the ice cream innuendo and considering the response Vice City would trigger in the culture of today, I don’t take this game seriously AT ALL. It’s an over-the-top parody designed to make fun of everything and everyone. Speaking as an asexual female gamer, the strip clubs, general portrayal of many female characters, and full-frontal nudity parts made me extremely uncomfortable, but that stuff is part of the game and not in there to offend anyone.
Oh! And I can’t close out this article without mentioning the game’s freaking amazing soundtrack of ’80s songs. As a child of the ’90s, a lot of the well-known hits were new to me and I got to hear them for the first time while playing this game. Every time I hear one of those popular ’80s songs today, I’ll always fondly remember causing chaos in Vice City paradise!
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City spent a total of 10 weeks as the UK’s #1 game across two different five week spells. Details of what was at the top of other charts at the time are after the page break:
SuperGTA
printing company that he buys later in the game: the former serves as a love interest for Tommy, while the latter is more of a father figure due to his childhood memories of working with his father at a printworks. Tommy Vercetti was born in Liberty City to an Italian-American family. His father worked as a printing press operator for an unknown company, and a young Tommy would sometimes help him at his job by cleaning the rollers.