Returning to Vice City

What follows is a sort of loose collection of thoughts I had during my current re-visit of 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Don’t expect some grand conclusion or an essay; just come with me on this little trip, won’t you?

Me & Gaming

There was a time when I played almost every new game I could get my hands on. I spent a staggering chunk of my meagre paycheque on big box games, almost irrespective of genre. I remember one month I picked up a new Civ game (Call to Power I think), Freespace 2, and some odd cheaply made action games from the bargain bin. And Unreal Tournament, of course.

Over the years, probably partly because of my job making the damn things, my taste in game genres has narrowed. It’s not that I can’t appreciate or won’t play things outside of my preferred play spaces, but these days the overwhelming majority of games I play for reasons of personal enjoyment are open-world action games set in some version of a real city, with bespoke missions but systemic or RPG elements. Essentially? GTA clones.

The problem is that this genre is all but dead now, which means that when I descend from my work desk to my couch at the end of the day or for a brief lunch break, I’m usually re-playing some old game or other. Mostly these are newer games whose gameplay stands up pretty well. I can’t count the number of times I’ve re-visited GTA V, Mafia III or Watch Dogs 2. And given it only came out 7 years ago, most every bit of Red Dead Redemption 2 is seared into my brain as a core memory.

Older games don’t always stand up so well. Whether it’s janky physics or obtuse controls, it can be hard to go back to even games that were considered ‘classics’ in their day, even if you sank a good chunk of one decade of your life into them way back when.

So when I go back to re-visit things like the original GTA 3D trilogy, I usually play just enough to get a strong huff of nostalgia, then quit before it gets too frustrating.

Which is why when I found my disc copy of the GTA 3D Trilogy’s “definitive edition” and fired up Vice City last month, what I didn’t expect was that I’d still be playing it a month later.

An aside: On the Definitive Editions

It’s kinda hard not to mention the GTA trilogy’s Definitive edition without a lot of opinions from folks. From the initial release’s bugginess to the colours being way off to the clearly AI-infused upscaling of assets, it wasn’t Rockstar’s finest hour. Thing is, to the credit of R* and their devs, it’s clear a lot of work has been put into the thing. There’s still a lot of things about these versions that purists will rightly criticise (that I still sometimes fire up the original on a PS2 with a CRT monitor says a lot) but the fact is they’re currently really the most playable way to go back to these games.

Part of the reason I found myself still playing VC a month later is the quality of life changes this version added, including a GTA V style weapon wheel and some of the larger missions being given checkpoints a bit like The Ballad of Gay Tony.

A few missing songs still hurt, though. Damn music rights…

Vice City: the Place

Taking off rose-coloured glasses is hard. Basically, it’s near-impossible to disconnect our fond memories of a thing from the pleasure we get re-visiting it so I won’t even try.

2002’s 1986 Vice City (everyone got that?) is one of the best video game cities I can think of. Objectively there’s more to do in GTA San Andreas’ Los Santos and Las Venturas, but the combination of the sense of place, the aesthetics and the general feeling makes VC my personal pick for best classic Rockstar video game city.

Driving down Ocean Beach past the neon art deco hotels and palm trees is An Experience, and that it’s one of the first ones you get in the game following the main mission is very smart.

There’s a gaudiness to Vice City too that other 3D universe cities lack. Almost from the outside you’re at fancy parties, meeting rock stars, shooting up (and owning) penthouses, mansions and sports cars.

It’s not like those things are -entirely- missing from Liberty City, Los Santos, San Fierro or Las Venturas, but they’re brought to the foreground here. More of the city than not feels affluent, and the entire game’s focus is on gaining wealth.

It’s a goofy power fantasy in probably the most overt way of any GTA game.

For such a tiny digital city, too, it does a surprisingly good job of reducing the most broadly memorable parts of the real Miami into a small video game playground.

Play Style: Knowing You Won’t Finish

Something which may have impacted my enjoyment playing the game this time is actually expecting it to be janky and unplayable. At no point did I think “right, time to rush into the next story mission”, because I fully expected to quickly hit a wall with an unplayably tough or frustrating mission blocking any further progress.

As a result, I found myself both just cruising around the city enjoying the world, and doing more side tasks. I think this is the first time I’ve ever collected all the “hidden packages”, for instance, or bothered doing Taxi and Vigilante missions.

The interesting up-shot is that I ended up with more money and more weapon unlocks, making some of the otherwise-tough missions more playable.

(It also had the amusing impact of sometimes having an overly powerful weapon in a mission they weren’t expecting me to - resulting in cut scenes like Tommy Vercetti being threatened by a cook with a meat cleaver, while Tommy himself had a goddamn chainsaw.)

Non-Linear Missions & Acquiring All The Things

Something that makes Vice City work particularly well to minimise the jank and intense difficulty of some of its missions is its structure. In GTA III, GTA IV and GTA V, the core mechanics are that you complete one of several open ‘main’ story missions, which unlocks more, and you keep going. But at a certain point, you’ll have no choice but to finish some annoyingly tough mission. (A good example would be the GTA IV mission The Snow Storm.)

Beyond a few early missions, in Vice City you quickly learn that you need to buy one of a half dozen or so major ‘assets’ (businesses) that then have a chain of 5 or so missions to play before they’re operational’. To finish the game, you need to complete the majority of these business chains, but not ALL of them.

The up-shot is that whenever you hit a mission that’s particularly impossible (I’m currently kinda stuck on the first Phil Cassidy mission, “The Shootist” due to how its shooting-gallery controls are tough on a gamepad) you can always just ignore it and move on to do a mission for another assets.

I’m sure I won’t actually finish the game this play through, but given I can largely avoid the most frustrating missions by just moving on to another asset, it’s kept me playing much longer than I expected to.

Flying High

The driving in Vice City feels fine… ish. It’s a little janky and the cars explode way too fast, but it’s still quite enjoyable in all but the most twitchy of sports cars. So when I finally got to the mission, uh… checks notes “Dildo Dodo”, I was a bit concerned when I realised it was the one mission in the game that’d force me to fly the game’s only player-pilotable plane - the amphibious Cessna 150-inspired “Skimmer”.

I was expecting it to feel a little tough and to find the mission hugely frustrating, but to my total surprise flying the Skimmer in Vice City not only felt good, but it also, IMO, felt better than any of the planes in GTA V / Online. It’s sluggish but only to the point where you always feel like you need to make small corrections, giving it a bit of heft that works marvellously.

Kinda wish this was the flight model in GTA V now.

I Know That Guy!

Okay, there’s no getting around it - this era of games has some very cringe humour. It has the expected bits of comedy that wouldn’t fly so well these days. For instance, one mission has a psychotic fan of Love Fist try to kill them while seemingly dressed in a bad drag outfit.

But at the same time, the broadly written characters are quite endearing. Certainly, endearing enough that I can’t help but like Tommy (except maybe when he goes full sexist during the chain of film studio missions) and his crew.

It’s also a nice change going back to the era when Rockstar intentionally used big famous names for their games. I mean, there’s good value in finding great character actors you probably don’t know to vanish into their roles like in IV, V and the Red Dead series, but it’s hard not to smile when you begin a cut scene and realise “oh shit that’s right this guy’s played by Danny Trejo!”

Less On-Rails

GTA games have gotten more on-rails over the years. Not just in the structure of the missions (noted above) but the way missions play out. I was surprised, playing VC, how often I was able to do something like “take a helicopter instead of a car” to starting a mission, making the mission easier or at least different to play out.

There are slightly fewer guide tracks on many of the missions, which gives you more freedom to think outside the box.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still very far from being a true sandbox game, but it’s still a surprisingly malleable experience.

Not Better Left Unsaid

A lot of major story elements in this game are inferred, but not in a good way. As much as I agree with “show, don’t tell”, it’s not really clear why you should buy, say, the Malibu Club at all, but when you do the cut scenes imply that intention was always to organise a big heist from out of there.

This happens often enough that I wonder if there was originally more by way of phone calls and messages telling you what to buy and why that got cut for time or budget reasons? Sometimes it almost feels like half the game’s cut scenes are missing.

Fun Trivia

• It was originally intended to be an expansion pack for GTA III. Kinda wild to think that an expansion pack got turned into a full game and was done in basically a single year. Though, San Andreas, which is much bigger and more detailed than this game, was done in just 2.
• At the time it was announced, my friends and I had a good ‘ole confused conversion about why anyone would want to make a PERIOD PIECE set in the 1980s? I mean, that was just not long enough ago to make a period piece. (You can imagine the brain-melt we had when it was announced GTA San Andreas would be set about 11 years before its release date.)
• GTA Vice City was set 16 years in the past from when it was released. If it was released today, in 2025, it’d be set in the distant past of 2009. Excuse me while I keel over and die from old age.