Planet Grand theft Auto

 It's hard to say why Grand Theft Auto is so much fun to play, since many people seem to get bored with it quickly. The simplicity of the gameplay might be one factor: You spend most of your time driving a little car through city streets, collecting points for committing crimes. It might sound like a good time initially, but for how long? For many, the answer will be "not very long."

So what type of gamer will enjoy GTA? Let's reflect on your childhood for the answer. First, did you like Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars a lot when you were a kid? Second, did you spend most of your time ramming the aforementioned toy cars into one another and lighting them on fire?If you answered "yes" to these questions, there's a good chance you'll enjoy .

But enough psychoanalysis. Sure, it's fun to cruise around the cities in GTA, running over innocent pedestrians and hijacking cars, then using them to crash into others for points. But your real purpose in the game is trying to get noticed by the local crime syndicate. To do that, you must successfully complete jobs for big points. Get enough points, and you'll advance to the next level and go on to other cities and bigger jobs. The more successful you are, the more difficult the jobs get. Some will be in multiple parts; others will have a time limit. And just because you work for the wrong side of the law doesn't mean you're safe from harm. Blow up a car with a rocket launcher while standing too close, and you'll be a crispy criminal. The life of crime is dangerous and risky. Even if you don't get killed or severely hurt, the cops will be after you all the time.

That's why patience is important. You can drive around recklessly all you want, but you'll constantly have the cops on your tail, interfering with your assigned job and the points you'll need to get to the next level. The easiest way to get the cops after you is by running over people or crashing into a squad car, and, unless you're sadistic, you usually run over people accidentally because of reckless driving.

It can take as long as two hours to achieve one million points and proceed to the second level. Later on, you'll need three million, which can take as long as five to six hours to achieve. This is somewhat frustrating because you can't save your game during levels. Since the game comes with a Windows 95 version you can multitask, so you don't have to tie up your PC playing the game, but if your system crashes, you're out of luck.

GTA is fun, and it has some excellent features. Vehicles all have appropriate physics. They steer, brake, accelerate, and handle like you might expect. Sports cars can stop and turn on a dime, but aren't very durable (if your car takes too much damage, it won't run properly and might even explode), while trucks have a large turning radius and take a long time to get up to speed, but are fairly durable. Small details - like the beeping sound a truck makes when it backs up, the various engine sounds, or the way pedestrians scream and run if you drive on the sidewalk - add to GTA's cool factor.

Once you get good at driving the cars, especially the fast sports cars, you can really zip through traffic. On roadways, if you gently tap the turn buttons, you can change lanes to avoid traffic without compensating for recentering the car, since it does so for you automatically. That makes a big difference when you're speeding down one of the multilane interstates. Another feature that really helps is how the perspective zooms in and out, determined by your rate of speed - it zooms in when you're going slow and out when you're going fast to expand your field of vision. The only flaw with this technique is that it doesn't always zoom in right away, so a tall building can block the view of your car until it does.

GTA is a good game that is highly recommended at a bargain price, but won't win any awards. Wanna-be sociopaths who can deal with the shortcomings will have a lot of fun, and if you could save games within levels, it would come even more highly recommended.

The original Grand Theft Auto delivered a new type of experience. The overhead "crime spree on a disc" managed to be more than just a shocking, violent game. It was just plain fun to drive around, get into a four-car pileup, hop out of your stolen car, mow down four or five pedestrians with a machine gun, and blow up a few cop cars for good measure. GTA: London 1969 bridges the gap between the first game and GTA2, scheduled for release later this year. As one would expect from a mission pack, there haven't been many changes made to the formula, so only those who still enjoy aimlessly driving through the streets of Vice City in search of a new car to steal and blow up need apply.

Though mission packs have long been a part of PC gaming, there really hasn't been any solid add-on technology on consoles. GTA London requires that you own the original GTA disc (Rockstar is selling the two discs together under the name Director's Cut, in case you don't have the full game) and makes you put it in while starting up as part of its bizarre swap trick-esque startup sequence. You boot up the system with London in the unit. It'll tell you to put in the original disc, spin for awhile, and then tell you to put the London disc back in the drive. Whether this is because it's actually using game code from the original disc or just trying to keep people from playing the cheap add-on without buying the more expensive full game is unknown, but I'd suspect it's the latter.

The differences between the mission pack and the old GTA levels are minimal. If you want to stay legal, you'll want to stay on the left side of the road. You'll also be entering and exiting vehicles on the right side of the car. This will initially cause a bit of confusion. I know it caused me to get caught by the cops (er... nicked by the bobbies... whatever) more than once. All the speech has been replaced with the slang and accents you'd expect to find in London around 1969. The music has also been completely revamped, and it fits the scenario nicely. The graphics are mostly new as well, providing new textures for buildings (there were a lot of pubs in London back then, I guess) and new cars, including an Austin Powers-esque ride, complete with accompanying secret-spy music.

The GTA London mission pack really doesn't hold a candle to GTA's original three cities, but it still manages to be reasonably fun. If you've still got that itch to jack fools for their rides and smoke cops (and honestly, who doesn't?), then GTA London should make the wait for GTA2 a little bit easier to bear.

The Getaway Provides a 3D Gta - Like Game for the PS2 - Much better than London 1969!

Everyone's favorite carjacking simulation is back to remind you why you should lock your doors in traffic. Grand Theft Auto 2 delivers in all the same areas as its predecessors, while fixing a couple of the annoying little problems and adding a touch of depth in the process. But Grand Theft Auto 2 is largely the same as the original top-down driving action game and its mission pack, London 1969. So while all the fun of going on a crime spree is intact, so are most of the previous games' flaws.

There's a bit of story to go along with Grand Theft Auto 2, but it really makes no difference: As a budding young criminal, you are striving to make a name for yourself in a near-future world filled with drugs, guns, and turf wars. Each of the game's three levels is populated by three different gangs, each of which runs a section of the city. The gangs are roughly identical - only different colors and different gang vehicles separate them. Each gang has a set of pay phones, which you can answer to take on odd jobs, as in the first game.

The catch is that a gang will only assign work to you if it respects you, so you have to earn that respect by driving over to a rival gang's turf and shooting up as many of their members as you can. Once you've smoked enough gangbangers (a set of meters lets you know where you stand with all three of the city's gangs), you can start taking jobs - just don't expect to be able to head back into rival gangland without having a few shots fired your way. Thankfully, you've got a health meter this time around, so you can withstand some damage before going down.

The mission design is similar to the original game. You'll be making deliveries, picking up bank robbers, blowing up buildings with car bombs, and other unsavory tasks. Since each gang has a different set of missions, you'll have to eventually ally yourself with all of the gangs if you want to try all the missions. And since you need an enormous number of points to finish a level, you'll have to at least attempt most if not all of a level's missions to succeed.

The difficulty of the missions can be a little frustrating, but the game isn't all about missions. There's plenty of fun to be had by just kickin' it freestyle out in the streets, stealing cars at random, shooting up crowds of innocent bystanders, and duking it out with the police. The cops are a bit smarter than they used to be, and they've got a larger arsenal, too. It's tougher to lose the pigs than it was before, and they'll do everything they can to cut you off on the road and get you off the streets. Even if you manage to kill a few cops and keep running, a SWAT van full of armored troops will be dispatched to handle the situation. Later levels have even more drastic types of armed response, ranging from feds to tanks.

To combat the boys in blue, you'll have to find weapons, which are conveniently scattered throughout the city. Conventional weaponry includes a pistol, dual pistols (that inexplicably require different ammo than your standard pistol), a silenced machine gun, an unsilenced machine gun (again, different ammo for each), and a shotgun. You can also score heavier items, like grenades, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, Molotov cocktails, and a taser-type gun that lets you zap people from quite a distance. In addition, you can mount things like machine guns, mines, car bombs, and oil slicks on most of the game's vehicles, but since you actually have to pay for car upgrades, and cars get destroyed so easily, most of the upgrades aren't really cost-effective.

The game's graphics have been overhauled, most notably in that Grand Theft Auto 2 uses a great deal of colored lighting, which makes the police cars look good. The camera isn't quite as jerky as it used to be either. Though most of the graphics are smooth, there are a few really obvious problems. The worst of these is when pedestrians fly up toward the screen after being hit with a heavy weapon. The little guys look absolutely horrible up close. Also, the near-future car design may disappoint people who preferred stealing the more contemporary cars of the original.

The soundtrack follows the same format of other Grand Theft Auto games, and delivers a good mix of techno music and radio chatter. With the exception of the yapping noise that accompanies mission briefings, the sound effects are quite nice and also make fairly good use of 3D audio.

The game lets up to six players compete on multiplayer-specific maps. You can play tag or play to a certain number of kills or points. You can also play with or without cops on the multiplayer maps. It would have been nice to see some innovation in the modes, like maybe a cops-and-robbers mode or even a capture-the-flag mode. Unfortunately, the network code apparently isn't very good anyway, because play is usually sluggish even over a LAN.

Whether or not you'll enjoy Grand Theft Auto 2 depends on a couple factors. If you're easily offended by the concept of running around and committing wanton acts of destruction with a few simple button presses, this game isn't for you. If the first game's control scheme baffled you, there's no solace to be found here either. Though the game manages to be quite a bit of fun, it occasionally still feels like a glorified mission pack.

While the Grand Theft Auto series may be one of the most popular things going on in gaming these days, most people don't really know too much about the roots of the series. Yes, the "III" in Grand Theft Auto III does, in fact, mean that there were two games out before it. Those two games were top-down, 2D games that had the same basic structure as the newer games in the series, but it was done on a much smaller scale. That smaller scale is now available in an all-new GTA adventure for the Game Boy Advance. GTA Advance basically takes the gameplay from GTA1, adds in some of the conventions of GTA III, and brings along a rather dull and poorly written story, too. There's some nostalgic gameplay here, but by and large GTA Advance just isn't much fun.

GTA Advance merges the look and feel of GTA1 with some of the gameplay conventions from GTA III.

GTA Advance takes place in Liberty City, the stomping grounds of GTA III. The story puts you in the role of a guy named Mike. When the game opens, you and another guy named Vinnie are getting ready to skip town with a bunch of money. But the escape goes bad and Vinnie is a victim of a car bomb. So Mike sets out to find Vinnie's killers and make them all pay. Along the way, you'll go on a lot of pretty standard missions, including taking out specific enemies, blowing up a building, checkpoint racing, and picking up and dropping off hookers, and so on. The story is conveyed via your mission briefings, which cut away from the top-down view and give you two large, static character heads to look at while reading the game's dialogue. The game doesn't really have the ironic sense of humor that helps make the GTA games great, and the dialogue is written in a very plain way that really lacks punch. These things make it easy to not care at all about the game's overall plot.

The look and feel of GTA Advance take things back to the original Grand Theft Auto, though there have been some changes. Some of the side missions introduced in GTA III are here, so you'll be able to hop in a cop car and go on vigilante missions, drive a taxi, play paramedic for a day, and so on. You can enter yourself into races for some extra cash, and the game has 100 hidden packages for you to find. Every tenth package adds another item to your hideout, which is where you go to save the game. Annoyingly, picking up a weapon from your hideout doesn't give you the maximum ammo count, so if you want to roll fully strapped, you'll have to enter and exit your hideout over and over again to recollect weapons until you've picked up enough bullets to do the job.

Other changes to the old GTA is that cars can now flip over, which usually happens if you T-bone them really hard. Generally speaking, though, the vehicle physics that govern how the cars react in a collision just feel strange. Cars pinball off of one another and go flying after even slight hits, and a vehicle's weight isn't taken into consideration as much as it probably should have been. On top of that, the game does a poor job at delivering any real sense of speed. One of the great things about the old GTA games is that they ran really fast and smooth, making high-speed driving a real thrill. Here, the game sort of sputters along, and you never really get the feeling that you're driving through the streets of Liberty City at breakneck speeds. Furthermore, the game's camera zooms out when you start moving faster, but it doesn't pull back far enough to give you a clear view of the road, making dodging traffic and making turns a real chore. When driving, you'll probably spend as much time looking at the map as you do looking at the road; though unfortunately, the onscreen map can't be blown up. The game comes with a foldout map of the city, but this is completely useless since a piece of paper isn't going to show your current objectives on it.

Sometimes the dialogue that pops up mid-mission can really obscure the action.

Graphically, GTA Advance does a good job of looking like the old GTA games, and the static images you'll see during mission briefings look pretty good, too. But on the street, the game's stuttery pace really gets in the way of the action. On the audio side, GTA Advance is almost entirely speech-free. You'll hear some words from other drivers when you collide with them, but these canned phrases repeat pretty often. The developers have attempted to duplicate the radio function by giving each different car type its own music. The digitized tunes, however, are pretty repetitive and aren't so great.

All in all, bringing the classic GTA gameplay back is a neat idea, but the execution here is weighted down by the lame story, straitlaced dialogue, and the occasional technical issue. If you're curious to see what the roots of GTA really were, you should probably just go to Rockstar's Web site, where the first game is available in its entirety as a free download.