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One thing that sets Liberty City Stories apart from the recent console games is its inclusion of multiplayer support for up to six players. The game has a handful of basic modes, including takes on deathmatch, capture the flag, and king of the hill. You've got team games as well as free-for-all modes, and you'll unlock more characters and locations as you proceed through the single-player game. While you can play the game with two players, the big environments make playing with two players pretty boring. But in a larger group, the game's definitely got some multiplayer charm. Just don't expect it to steal the show.
This Liberty City story has a fairly weak conclusion.
Liberty City Stories looks great for the PSP, and it's doing some very ambitious stuff from a technical standpoint. However, some parts of it do look noticeably unsightly. While the frame rate is definitely less than stable, the game still manages to convey a good sense of speed when you're driving fast. The game's characters look about as good as you could hope for, and animate pretty well in the game's many cutscenes. There's a lot of pop-up--pretty much par for the course throughout the GTA series--though here, the horizon is just a bit closer, causing cars to magically materialize just ahead of you on the road. This can make fast driving a little tough at times. Even though it has its bouts with low frame rates, it's easy to be impressed by the way the game handles such large environments. Also, the load times throughout the game are very manageable and never get out of control, which makes the game's large areas even more impressive.
The audio end of Liberty City Stories is structured identically to how it's done in the "big" games, but again, on a slightly smaller scale. The cutscenes are given full speech, and for the most part, the characters are well-portrayed and voiced, even if you don't recognize most of the names in the credits. Whenever you're in a car, you can listen to a handful of different radio stations; as you'd expect, it's here where the game gets its jokes in. From commercials telling you that the Internet is clearly a tool of the devil that ruins lives (which is true) to ads for generic mascot-driven kart-racing games, there's a lot of funny stuff here. However, the radio stations loop more frequently than you'd probably like, presumably due to storage limitations.
If you've played previous Grand Theft Auto games, you might recognize some of the characters; but previous knowledge isn't required to understand the story.
The music in the past two Grand Theft Auto games has been incredibly important in setting the game's tone. The '80s music in Vice City and the rap stations in San Andreas were key to both the tone and the pace of those two games. The PSP game's soundtrack doesn't really serve as the same type of pop-culture touchstone. The rap station, hosted by DJ Clue, depicts a pretty accurate take on late-'90s East Coast mix-tape and rap radio. A bunch of the music on the other stations, however, was custom-written for the game, with a focus on sounding sort of like various forms of pop music. While 1998 might be a little too recent to get nostalgic about, there's still a bunch of really awful boy-band pop music from 1997 and 1998 that would have made for perfect "driving around and running over cops" music, so it's disappointing that some higher-profile stuff didn't get licensed. The game has a custom soundtrack feature, as well, but it doesn't directly work with any of the audio already on your PSP memory stick. Instead you have to download a custom CD ripping application that Rockstar has developed and inject the audio into your saved game. Additionally, it's been built to only work with commercial CDs, so your sizable MP3 collection is apparently useless. Considering that the PSP already has MP3 file playback, it seems strange that you have to jump through so many hoops to get custom music.
It's worth mentioning that this game makes absolutely no concessions when it comes to making it a little friendlier as a portable game. You still save at safehouses, still have to drive your way to each mission, and still have to start the entire mission over again if you fail. When you're busted or wasted on a mission, the game spawns a taxi that will take you back to the mission start point, if you desire. But that would put you at the beginning of the mission with no weapons, no armor, nothing. That's not much of a help, so you're left reloading your game every time something goes wrong and going out of your way to save as often as possible.
Squeezing all of Liberty City onto a UMD is a neat trick.
If you're the type of person that plays your PSP games sitting down, at home, in large chunks, this doesn't make any real difference. But if you're an on-the-go sort of person who tries to squeeze in a few minutes of GTA here and there, the time it takes to get into a mission and start making progress might be a bit too much. Some in-mission checkpoints or other options would have probably solved this problem. At least the PSP has sleep mode--you won't have to load the entire game up just to play for a few minutes. Also, it's worth mentioning that while the game seems to be spinning the disc almost constantly, there doesn't seem to be a noticeably heavy drain on the system's battery life. You'll get roughly the same amount of battery life out of GTA than you would out of most other PSP games.
It's really pretty amazing that GTA: Liberty City Stories manages to cram in so much of the GTA experience that you're used to seeing on consoles. While the game is definitely a fine technical achievement and one of the best PSP games to date, the dull storyline and basic mission design do bring the whole thing down a bit. Maybe it's not entirely reasonable to expect for this game to live up to its console counterparts in every respect, but it retails for just as much as they did, and attempts to do many of the same exact things, so it really is a whole new GTA (just in a familiar setting). Yet for all it squeezes out of the PSP, it doesn't quite squeeze everything that makes the GTA series so special. But if what you're after is a game that looks and plays like a Grand Theft Auto game for your PSP, you'll definitely be satisfied.
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