Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Preview from Jae - Thursday, 29 January 2009 @ 9:00am

We often forget that the highest system seller of this current generation is actually the Nintendo DS. With well over 50 million units sold world wide the market is a phenomenal one. The over-saturation of brain puzzle games, tomagotchi-style titles and games based on Miley Cyrus is a sign that it has hit mass market. Admittedly there's not much on the lookout for the DS this year. One title that will use this to its advantage is GTA: Chinatown Wars.

I was never an Asian gangster in my younger years although I did mix with the crowd and even dated a gangster chick for a short while. Things got out of hand when I had to start carrying a machete around with me so I decided to clean up my act. Chinatown Wars can now resubmerge me into that world while keeping a safe distance from the real bad apples in town. Having witnessed two gangster deaths right in front of my eyes I can say this plays pretty close to home, just without a fake ID or a thirst for late night clubbing.

Huang Lee, your Niko in this game, has a fairly abrupt start in Liberty City. Flying in from Kowloon (translate: Hong Kong a.k.a. Jackie Chan Town) to deliver a false family heirloom to his uncle, Huang quickly finds himself barely alive in a car sinking to the bottom of the river. You’ll get to engage in your very first stylus-based minigame by tapping the touch screen to break the rear glass of the car for your escape. This then sets your primary objective to find those responsible and turn them into barbeque pork buns. Seriously, go watch this movie and you’ll never eat them buns again.

Jaenimated

I can comfortably say there are no DS games you can clearly compare to Chinatown wars. The only game that springs to mind is David Jaffe’s Calling All Cars for the PSN and the only similarity there comes from the graphical style and angle of vision. The point of view for gameplay stays in top-down mode for the entire game. You’ll get snippets of comical cutscenes as well as other views when completing a minigame. One thing that you see when you start the game is the traffic that goes to and fro throughout the city, all real time AI events without pre-scripting. Obviously missing is voice dialogue. You get vocal comments here and there, however due to the limitations with a DS cartridge you get to see a greater emphasis on the gameplay and town scale.

Liberty City veterans will notice that the game includes the islands and districts from the other titles and packs them all into the DS. Impressive compression from what I could see. Borrowing elements of GTA 1 and 2 and blending them with aspects of the sequels of late has a good outcome from the Rockstar Leeds title. I thoroughly enjoyed the five missions I previewed, all varied in objective and all as criminally insane as each other. From blowing up the side of the building to get into a safe, to taking down every Jamaican in the northern hemisphere this title looks to pack a lot of punch.

When it comes to police chases star ratings are back, with a different tactic to lower your wanted level. Instead of staying out of their view you’re now expected to make a certain number of their vehicles crash or blow up. Taking sharp turns, narrowly missing oncoming traffic or using your arsenal are just some ways in which you can blow up the boys in blue. Ingenious and something refreshing from the usual high speed chase.

Bang bang! Chin chang! Wing wang!

It wouldn’t be a GTA game without some form of controversy. Sleeping with hookers was done, drink driving we saw last year so there wasn’t much choice on what to do next in this title. Drug trading it is then! I was genuinely shocked at seeing that this game put you right in the heart of being a drug dealer. You play the middle man by buying and selling cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, acid, weed and probably something I’ve never heard of. This goes to show the inconsistency of government classifications to games as we all know about the Fallout 3 incident that led to a complete change to the game world wide. Let’s not go on about this topic as the less mainstream press it gets, the less mums I have to see on Today Tonight claiming Rockstar and Nintendo made their son a cocaine addict. This game aims towards the mature DS market and makes no apologies for doing that, nor should it ever have to.

One component that was not available yet was the WiFi capabilities of Chinatown Wars. Whether or not a full blown multiplayer experience will be available is still up in the air, although the function of trading weapons and drugs seems to extend online. I can see it now, forums across the world will be talking about trading five hits of ecstasy for $35 each and a parent or guardian will intercept and interpret this all wrongly. In the wise words of Beyonce “Uh oh uh oh oh oh o-ohh”.

Lookout for my review closer to release date. In the mean time go spend more time in local Chinatown to set the scene, after all – who doesn’t like them some sweet and sour pork?