July 7th, 2004
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Lost on the streets of Vice City
For reasons of good marketing and musical nostalgia I picked up Grand Theft Auto: Vice City when I was in San Jose for the GDC in March. What began that one night after a cab ride from the mall ballooned into a daily obsession of Hawaiian shirts and the Thompson Twins. Initially I’d written the GTA franchise off as excessively violent and lacking true gameplay, but of course that was a narrow-minded statement founded only on comments from CNN media “pundits” and vague images of Nick Rosasco tooling around with the first game while Phil Dickinson laid on his bed reading Nitzche.
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True, the subject matter is adult. I would never in good conscience give it to someone under the age of eighteen, but here the staid product review ends. It is a dream, a tv show, half a dozen to eight years of my life as I saw it and those with more liberal parents shared. The audio is undeniably the heart and soul [ugh] of the game– radio stations so real yet far more entertaining than anything I ever remembered experiencing while sitting in the backseat of my dad’s Corsica. The chatter is humorous, the songs are perfect, and the general writing of the game is impressive and full of quotables. It’s downright fun for any number of things to do.
The colors and the camera angles while driving a Countach down a neon-lit strip were so unforgettable they pervaded every corner of my life. I would ride my bicycle home from work, needlessly swerving around invisible cars while I hummed a tune by Foreigner. When disembarking a train or entering a building, I involuntarily slowed my step to match Tony Vercetti’s well-tuned swagger, imagining a primetime audience of adoring teenagers revering and noting with care my every movement. While cooking I occasionally would shout out to no one in particular “They fight like girls! Sniper on the roof!” or “Who’s ever seen a shark that big?!” After a little sleuthing I found a way to get the soundtracks off of the DVD and convert them to mp3s. Since then I’m often likely to vacuum or hang out the laundry while listening to Espantoso. VROCK DJ Lazlow is one of my friends, I feel like he’s the guy I always tried to take to a party and get laid, but beneath his cool cynicism he was too afraid to really even let a girl touch him.
Somewhere around the end of May poor software engineering reared its ugly head and corrupted my saved game, rendering some thirty hours of play and pilfering null and void. It took me about a month of scouring message boards and angry emails to Take Two (my former employer) before I could get something workable going. In the end the lost thirty hours became eight, and I resumed my rise to power in Vice City, taking blackmail photos of congressmen and knocking over banks with getaway taxis.
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It’s over now, and I’ve beaten it, but the game doesn’t really “end”. You can still run around picking up incredibly inane packages and other such tasks for the obsessive or those with too much time. Though there are other games in the series, and more will come, I have a hard time believing that any could top the overall punch of Vice City. I’m sure I’ll play all the way through it again, if only to hear Umberto talk about wearing a dress and the size of his cahones. Until then, it’ll just float in the background, like a plastic, pink flamingo in your Camaro-owning neighbor’s pool.
