Now playing: GTA Chinatown Wars
I’m currently on holidays with the wife. To sate my gaming desires whilst on the road, I’ve bought my DS Phat with GTA Chinatown Wars and my PSP 1000 with God of War: Chains of Olympus. Of course, I can’t charge the PSP battery enough so that CoD CoO can update the PSP’s firmware (one nice thing about the original DS and the Lite is that you don’t have to worry about this bullshit). So Chinatown Wars is the game du jour.
GTA:CW is Rockstar Leeds making a 3D GTA game from a top down perspective. Its got all the colour, edginess and humour of a full console version without the feeling that something is not quite right, as was the case with the two PSP iterations.
Your stylus is used appropriately, to manage your menu items, emails, GPS map, etc and the traditional dpad + buttons used for driving, moving and combat. This being a DS game, there has been an attempt to add stylus gameplay into the mix, such as using touch screen actions in minigames- such as hot wiring cars.
It works, mostly. Maybe its because I’m sill playing on the original DS, but I’ve found using the dpad to be somewhat painful after a short time. The game is still fun, but jeez it is hard. Its not easy to pin down why, but I found myself having to replay missions again and again.
Happily, the makers have taken one of many people’s criticisms of GTAIV to heart. If you fail a mission, you see the mission briefing (skippable, of course) and then you have the option to skip the travel to the missions by pressing select. Hallefuckinglujah!
So if you’re going to make your game hard, at least make retrying easier. Thanks Rockstar Leeds. Theeds.
June 14th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Keep in mind that I know *nothing* about the PSP but how come you have enough of a charge to play a game on it, but not enough to upgrade the firmware? Also, is there any way you can plug it into an outlet or something?
June 14th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
PSP is like that. I had just enough charge, when plugged into a PSP USB power cable, to boot the device, but PSP was notorious for needing a full battery before a firmware update. So I can boot it up to the PSP’s XMB but if I try to load GoW CoO, it prompts me to update the firmware (which I haven’t done in two years since playing R&C Size Matters). Then it fails me because the battery is so dead. I’m trying to source a replacement but Psp1000 batteries aren’t easy to find.