Grand Theft Auto Review

So Grand Theft Auto V came out last week and everyone's been saying that its the greatest thing since laptops, the PlayStation 2, and Kid Icarus Uprising. So on that end, I pulled out the PS1 and played the first Grand Theft Auto game.

Believe it or not, there was once a time where Grand Theft Auto didn't cause all kinds of controversies. There was also a time where graphics didn't make a game, and a game didn't need to be in first person with you holding a gun to be considered passable. And it is not a time in which we are currently living. The time was however 1998, when video games were riding high, with classics like Metal Gear Solid and The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time being released, with others like Smash Bros and Silent Hill not too far behind. Before it was owned by Rockstar, Grand Theft Auto was owned by Take-Two, and before it was an open world sandbox game it was a slightly less open sandbox game that was overhead instead of third person, and guns were found on the side of the street. Its glorious.

In Grand Theft Auto, you play as one of three random blokes in one of three random cities trying to finish as many missions as possible. To do this, you'll have to hijack cars, drive to your destination, avoid the police if you tick them off, and occasionally kill someone with the aforementioned guns on the side of the street. Missions can range from delivering certain cars to certain places, killing someone, retrieving goods,the regular stuff.

In the cars, the game controls OK. You can't use the joysticks, but rather have to use the d-pad. Turning is done with the left and right buttons respectively, while accelerating and reversing is done with the x and triangle buttons. Its when you move on foot that things get messy. You control the same on foot as you do in the car, except now the square button hijacks cars and the circle button fires a gun that you happened to find on the side of the road. This makes aiming on foot harder than it should be, and pressing triangle to back up gets confusing, and leads to more than one death.

Speaking of deaths, you have lives in this game. Whenever you die, you lose a life,
whatever guns you found, and you re-spawn at a different location. You also lose a life if you get caught by the police, unless you find a Get Out Of Jail Free Card on the side of the road, which will only make you go to the police station. The lives lead into another problem, as do the police, but more on that soon.

On the presentation, its passable all around. The way the camera zooms out once you pick up some speed is cool, but up close, everything's just kind of meh. I know its sprites, and there's not a while lot you can do with that, but there are SNES overhead games that look better than this. As for music...well I'm not a big music guy, so having this games score be performed by different bands doesn't mean a whole lot to me. Not that it matters because , realistically, no music plays when your on foot, and some of the bigger better vehicles don't have radios, so no music plays there either. I'll give them credit for the music that plays being good, but I don't think the musics worth a bullet on the back of the case.

Here comes the weird part, and that's the part where the first game in a largely popular and successful franchise has so many problems to it. Ignoring the presentation and control issues mentioned above, there's saving. The only way to save is to do it on the menu. This means the only way to save your score and records it to either complete all of the missions in a particular city, or purposely lose all of your lives. And even doing the ladder can take some time, because the police take some time to show up, and finding water to fall into will work once, but you'll have to drive back about three times if you want to end the game. There's no fast way to quit the game while saving your data, and that's bad design.

And on the topic of the cops, what are up with them?? Doing crimes like killing people, firing guns, or just hitting their cars will sick the cops on you, and let me tell you, the cops in this game are out for blood. They will chase you, hit you, make road blocks, and fire at your car in attempt to kill you rather than pull you in, making that Get Out Of Jail Free Card kind of pointless. Only sometimes though. Its strange what the police consider crimes in this city. At one point, I got a truck, drove forward fast enough to blow up a taxi right next to a cop, and he didn't even bat an eye. Not much longer later, I hit a cop at 2mph, and he opens fire. The cops are  completely random and strange in how they act, and that can't bother only me.

Another problem is the map, or lack of. When you need to get to a phone, or get to a destination, a yellow arrow will come up on screen, pointing you in the right direction. However, it does only that. So you could be facing the right direction, but the arrow won't take into account the giant river that's in your way. And all of these cities are huge, so there will be driving around trying to find the right path, and after a while, that just gets boring.

And that's Grand Theft Autos biggest problem, in that it just gets boring way to fast. While playing through, it took a lot out of me to not just stop and get to playing another game, and that's not good. I'm not sure if its because the other sequels make the first game just seem bad, or if its actually a bad game, but regardless, I can't say this ones worth a play. Should you want to play it, its available on the PlayStation 1, Gameboy Advance, and on Rockstar's website. But overall, the first games was a mediocre start, and should only be played by the very curious, or hardcore fans of Grand Theft Auto. 

The Silent Protagonist accidentally blew up a motorcycle that he was supposed to steal. He's good at these kind of jobs.