Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 8/8/2023)

[Image from igdb.com]

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Developer: Rockstar

Publisher: Rockstar

Genre(s): Open-World

Platforms: PS2, Xbox, PC

Release Date: October 27, 2002

The rule of thumb when it comes to a retrospective cultural appreciation for a period of our recent past is to revel in it after two decades. Approximately twenty years is the sweet spot to open the floodgates to swim in the nostalgic backwash of yesteryear pop culture, for one decade would still remain in recent memory and three decades almost verges into celebrating the youth of one’s parents, and nothing they liked can possibly be cool. Nowadays, teenagers are interested in the fads of the 2000s (Jesus Christ) but when I was growing up in that decade, everyone was clamoring for the 1980s. From the resurgence of post-punk and new wave, the live-action rise of Transformers, to all of the content on VH1 Classic, the idea that the 1980s were a glorious, gilded time to be alive was efficiently drilled into my brain. I almost had to remind myself that the decade ended six years before I was born because I had been exposed to so much of its cultural tapestry as a child via the retrospection of the older folk who experienced it firsthand. It beats being terrified by the post-911 war on terror news or TiVoing the new sleazy, shameless reality TV show on the hospice bed of the once respected MTV. You don’t know how many times I was reminded that MTV used to exclusively play music videos back in the 1980s, truly the definitive statement for the rush of nostalgic wonderment granted to the 1980s after it had been hazy in the pop culture zeitgeist for over a decade. One of the pieces of media from the 2000s that might go unnoticed as a blatant work of 1980s pastiche is Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. If there is any example of a work that soaks in the retro kitsch of the 1980s in a towel and wrings it over the dawn of the modern 21st century, it’s this game.

However, for as deliberate as Vice City is as a vessel of 1980s nostalgia, that component of its identity might be undermined by several other aspects surrounding its legacy. Vice City is the fourth installment in the infamous Grand Theft Auto series and the second title to be rendered as a 3D open-world game. The latter of Vice City’s placements in the franchise is the more pertinent one, for it’s the entry that followed up the ground-shaking splash of the first 3D GTA game that eroded the moral fiber of modern society. Or, at least that’s what the menopausal soccer moms and fuddy-duddy political figures in Washington DC would have you believe. At the same time these people were dreading the new tidal wave of unmitigated amoral mayhem Vice City would bring, gamers everywhere couldn’t wait to get swept up in its riptide current. Vice City was especially exciting because the series could only improve on the open-world formula that GTA III established. Its predecessor merely provided a base level of player-induced chaos with a staggeringly simple foundation with half-baked gameplay mechanics and narrative weight. Even though GTA III admittedly was the first of its kind, the game is like the equivalent of putting two pieces of bread together with some mayonnaise and calling it a sandwich. While technically true, it leaves a lot to be desired. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much hindsight to note that this sandwich would be both tastier and more enriching with some bacon, lettuce, and tomato on it, and that’s the meat of what Vice City could potentially provide to the open-world crime experience.

Crafting a full-fledged GTA title around the aesthetic of the 1980s was actually a complementary fit for the franchise. Gangster films are a primary influence on GTA in the narrative sense, and the 1983 blockbuster crime epic Scarface is among the most inspiring. Songs featured in that film’s soundtrack even make up the theme for a radio station’s playlist in the previous game. Specifically, in the case of Vice City, Rockstar seemingly attempted to formulate a tracing of the hit Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone collaboration, hoping to smudge the film’s trademark print as if doing so meant that the two Hollywood giants couldn’t take legal action against them. Flying too close to the copyright-infringing sun aside, what are the benefits of using Scarface as your muse to channel the decade in which it was released? Scarface, more so than any of its other contemporaries or gangster film elders, is an excessive depiction of the crime life. Everything from the constant indulgence in the city nightlife, the violent, bombastic action sequences, to shouty Al Pacino chewing the scenery as Tony Montana exudes a whirlwind of hedonistic adrenaline relatively associated with living on the fringe of legality. Two words: cocaine snowman. Yet, all of these hyper-exaggerated elements that make up the tone and direction of Scarface never verge on accidentally making the film overblown to the point where it’s ridiculous, or at least not at the time. The prevailing aura of the 1980s was to revel in excess thanks to the economic boom at the beginning of the decade, also making material gain a stark signifier of American “freedom” in the largest anti-communist decade since the 1950s. Only in the 1980s would Scarface be approached with the utmost sincerity. Try squeezing the line, “This town is like a great big pussy waiting to get fucked” in The Godfather, and see how that film stands up as a masterpiece.

While Al Pacino’s Tony Montagna is admittedly a bit over the top, one can’t deny his magnetic screen presence while we witness the tragic downfall of his rags-to-riches story. Because the character is such an integral part of Scarface’s identity, Rockstar needed to formulate their own Tony Montagna without actually calling him as such, much to their disappointment. Race-swapping the character to an Italian guy named Tommy Vercetti did the trick, even though the uncanny connections still scream Scarface arc from the top of the Miami Freedom Tower. Instead of introducing him as an immigrant, Rockstar cements that its main characters always enter the fray the same after a stint in the big house, with Tommy being released after a fifteen-year sentence as opposed to running on the lam. Apparently, Tommy was not a respected figure in the Italian crime syndicate as his old boss Sonny Forelli immediately sent him away to do some grunt work after a decade and a half of his absence. During a drug deal, a third party infiltrates the rendezvous and gun down Tommy and the others, surviving the unforeseen attack by the skin of his teeth. Because the deal is a bust, Sonny demands that Tommy compensate for the money lost and find the culprit behind the breach, even though Sonny is obviously playing him for a fool here.

Thankfully, clarity hit Rockstar over the head within the year after GTA III hit the shelves and gave Tommy a voice and a defined personality. Not only that, Ray fucking Liotta supplies his vocal talents to another low-level mobster on his rise to the top like the character from Goodfellas he is best known for. Puts the success of GTA III into perspective, does it not? Also, we can be thankful that Ray Liotta doesn't ham up Tommy’s inflections in an attempt to impersonate Tony Montana and that Tommy is relatively down-to-earth and pragmatic for a guy who is working his way to overthrow all organized crime in southern Florida. Ray Liotta even monologues Tommy’s thoughts and feelings like his Henry Hill voiceover to enhance his personability. Admittedly, surpassing the mute avatar character Claude as a substantial character is not a high bar to hurdle over. Still, Tommy provides enough charisma and personality to remedy Rockstar’s mistake they made in the previous game and put the franchise on the right track from here on out. Maybe I just like his festive Hawaiian shirt.

While the supporting characters in GTA III possessed the ability to speak, the overall cast still somehow managed to be as chillingly distant and impersonal as Claude. Tommy’s role as a more personable protagonist also makes the various people he associates with more vibrant by proxy. Ascending to the top of the throne of organized crime involves Tommy making business relationships with the Vice City elite that practically run the city. The suave, ex-drug kingpin Juan “The Colonel” Cortez seems to use his amassed wealth and retired status to congregate his upper-class colleagues on his fanciful yacht, which is where Tommy ascertains the idea of who to make bedfellows with on his mission. These notable aristocrats include Ricardo Diaz, the irascible and unpredictable drug baron of Vice City who Tommy believes most likely orchestrated the setup in the beginning. The Sam Elliott impersonator Avery Carrington is a Vice City real estate magnate who hires Tommy to subside the property values for his own financial gain, and the obnoxious British poonhound Kent Paul is a high-profile music producer working with fictional Scottish glam metal band Love Fist. The members of this band are present only in side missions, but I highly recommend engaging with their Spinal Tap shenanigans for a laugh and a satirical look at 1980s music trends. We see an earlier window into the lives of characters from GTA III such as Donald Love and the not-yet armless Phil for a lark and to cement a kind of world canon between the GTA games.

Not every character here in Vice City is a powerful mogul that Tommy has to prove his worth to. Tommy’s two right-hand men collaborating with him on equal standing are his advisor Ken Rosenberg and partner on the field Lance Vance. Both of these men irritate Tommy to no end because neither can be relied on. Ken is as neurotic as the Jewish stereotype comes by, and the white booger sugar he’s constantly cranking up his nose probably doesn’t help alleviate his anxiety. Lance, on the other hand, showcases the game’s strong Miami Vice influence by presenting a parody character of Don Johnson’s partner Tubbs from the show. I’ve never seen an episode of Miami Vice but after consulting my mom who watched the show during its run, Tubbs is completely worthless. The same could be said for Lance during the missions, and his whining to Tommy about how he doesn’t “appreciate him” is sure to give both Tommy and the player a migraine headache. While Tommy is ultimately using the game’s supporting cast to climb the ranks like Claude did, one gets the impression that the relationships he makes are more personal through the interactions in the cutscenes, a certain repartee that goes beyond sterile commands that are just business transactions. It’s amazing how much depth can be added to a character and their interactions through the power of speech.

How does Vice City bask in the indulgent atmosphere of the decade it is set in? Let us start with the setting and its aesthetic. With some deeper consideration besides simply reusing the same city setting from Scarface, Miami seems like the perfect US city to retrospectively encapsulate the sense of 1980s pomp. Florida’s most southern major metropolis is notably a party city for wild college kids and wealthy socialites alike, the appeal stemming from its beaches and year-round tropical climate without requiring a passport to visit. Its southern settlement along the Atlantic Ocean also verges near the Caribbean where foreign island nations are but an earshot away via a breezy boat ride. Because Miami is in close quarters of these nations outside the bounds of US jurisdiction, the city is also associated with trafficking illegal exports from these countries. Namely, an elicit white powdery substance that was the center of a city-wide drug war during this decade. It’s also the drug that fueled the debaucherous high life associated with the decade, so why not set the scene at the source? Miami is fun, hot, colorful, and decadent, four words that also tend to summarize the nostalgic pining people had for the 1980s. Correct me if I’m wrong, Miami natives, but the most indelible image of the city in my perspective is Ocean Drive along the beach with the festive buildings running the gamut of the neon-colored rainbow. Put some palm trees and lawn flamingos in the shot and you’ve basically constructed the perfect postcard of the American tropical paradise.

If you couldn’t tell from my description of Miami, the mimicked GTA version of Miami is a far cry from the New York-esque Liberty City from GTA III. The atmosphere that Liberty City exuded was one of urban cynicism, a cold concrete jungle that served as the graveyard for the American dream. Vice City emits such a polar opposite of the atmosphere from Liberty City that it’s hard to believe that both metropolitan areas reside in the same country. Conversely, Vice City feels like a lucrative bastion of economic and humanistic prosperity. The American dream is still alive and well in Vice City, even if achieving it here involves skating around federal law and putting a target on your back. On top of drastically shifting the tone from the previous cityscape, Vice City itself is also designed in a different manner than that of Liberty City, naturally so considering the real American cities they parallel. Instead of three distinct burroughs of equal size, Vice City is divided by two large islands with some smaller isles between them of relatively less significance. Progressing around the map of the city is still similar to that of Liberty City in that the player must complete a certain amount of missions to visit the other islands that comprise the city. Tommy starts out operating from the resort island in the east with people in bathing suits walking along the beach sidewalks to the various clubs and other lavish tourist traps. The island in the west, conversely, is the downtown sector that completely juxtaposes the inviting glow of its eastern counterpart with dirty slum villages and a rampant gang war between the Cubans and the Haitians in the foreground. Both islands contrast each other and display a strong and honest city dichotomy of poshness and poverty under the same area code. Navigating through Vice City is also more convenient due to the straightaway shoreline drive on both islands as opposed to the grid design that emulated New York. Vice City is technically smaller than Liberty City, but it compensates more than enough with substance, style, and accessibility.

The largest improvement Vice City makes on GTA III’s open-world foundation relating to the city's design is that the developers implemented a world map, a wake-up call this kind of game desperately needed. An arrow icon could have perfected the utility of this requisite reference tool along with putting more key icons on the radar, but at least it's a step in the right direction after its appalling omission in the previous game. Other quality-of-life enhancements Vice City adds are the sturdier vehicles that will not be set ablaze by the slightest of road shrapnel or minor change in wind velocity. Of course, this makes enemy vehicles more difficult to mow down but considering how many vehicle missions involve evading the cops who batter the player’s cars like charging bulls, I much appreciate the added durability. The first safe house will provide health icons and some of the other properties that Tommy can purchase also come with free body armor. The target system when shooting has also been tweaked to the point where it targets enemies from further away depending on the firearm with a more defined reticle. The developers listened to everyone's prayers and delivered splendidly.

I complained that GTA III’s rudimentary design made the game unnecessarily difficult, so all of these improvements should make for a more accommodating GTA experience, right? Well, it seems like I was only partially correct. All of the improvements make the general GTA gameplay more fluid, but Vice City introduces a whole new slew of new mechanics that rival the austerity of GTA III. For one, everyone seems to gripe at any mission involving steering a remote-controlled model from a distance, namely the chopper in “Demolition Man” or the seaplane in “Dildo Dodo.” The objectives during these missions aren’t outlandish or anything, but controlling these model aircraft is always rigid, and accelerating them requires so much force that it feels like the player will need a paperweight. While these types of missions can be aggravating because of the controls, acclimating to them is still something that can be achieved through a small amount of practice. However, the prevalent number of escort missions really tests my patience. Fending for oneself against the onslaught of police forces is hard enough, but the additional challenge of protecting (not assisting, let's be real here) a CPU whose mortality lies in Tommy's success is a game of chance most of the time. During the bank heist, it’s a gamble whether or not Cam dies on sight from the security guards, and Lance certainly does not atone for his annoying bellyaching by adding extra firepower in the mission “Cop Land”. The cocaine that the denizens of Vice City are snorting must be laced with lead paint because their AI is as unresponsive as Internet Explorer. Forget about continuing with the mission if your car catches on fire with someone else in it. It shows me that some aspects of 3D gaming were still in their primitive stages and gaming AI still needed some heavy consideration. On top of all the new grievances, Vice City still proves that the shooting gameplay should have a duck-and-cover system because Tommy standing in the open and opening fire will often annihilate him even with body armor. Because of this, the mission “No Escape?” where Tommy has to perform a jailbreak with an endless stream of armed cops in an enclosed vicinity is my pick for the hardest mission. I guess the developers intentionally craft GTA as a challenging experience. Still, seemingly unrefined mechanics shouldn’t be the source of it.

Vice City’s difficulty curve is also just as wonky as it was in GTA III, with some missions requiring one simple objective and others acting as an endurance test. However, Vice City’s uneven difficulty progression is due to the most interesting mechanic the game offers. The first half of the game revisits the quasi-linear mission format of completing tasks for a certain character until an arc is completely akin to GTA III. That all changes once Cortez flees the country and Tommy takes down Diaz, repurposing his resplendent isle estate as his own. After that, it’s time to utilize the teachings of Mr. Carrington and invest, invest, and invest some more. Ten total assets can be purchased for a sizable sum of money, and most of them come with a line of missions. Others involve more trivial tasks like spending $300 in a private room of the Pole Position strip club and making fifty deliveries of a potent new drug out of an ice cream van, which amused me greatly. Once Tommy completes these missions, he can collect a consistent revenue stream that maxes out at the in-game 24-hour period. Some of these assets are investments of a considerably large price like the club and the counterfeit mill, so making rounds will be a consistent outlying task outside of the missions themselves. The Reaganomics-era rate of inflation is only so accommodating. One may see this tedious task as an example of grinding, but I didn’t mind it so much unlike other instances of gaining experience and or finances. The reward of a constant flow of money after completing the necessary missions was super gratifying. The struggle of rising to the point when Tommy was an errand boy pawn during the first half shifted into Tommy becoming a bonafide bigwig in the crime world. Only treating that goal with this sense of pacing could effectively translate this to the player, and I felt as powerful as Tony did. If only I could translate this to my real life.

As effective as the game’s second half is in conveying Tommy’s character arc, it does put the main plot on a cryogenic hold. Once Tommy has a comfortable hold on most of the assets, Sonny decides it's time to reap the benefits of his accomplishments. Tommy’s mafia cohorts start taxing the revenue of his new assets which obviously, Tommy doesn’t care too much for. Working his way up to being a self-made man has given Tommy a newfound sense of self-respect and is willing to defend against Sonny and hold his new ground as a prime contender in the crime syndicate. Tommy’s original plan was to dupe Sonny with counterfeit money to throw him off, but that plan falters because Lance betrays Tommy for both personal and financial reasons. Given that the final mission takes place on the upper foyer balcony of Tommy’s mansion with him gunning down Sonny’s forces infiltrating his private domicile, the Scarface comparisons should flare up once again. While the mafia’s numbers seem endless, the spacious estate gives Tommy enough room to take them, Lance, and Sonny out at a safe distance, and health and armor can be picked up at any point. Again, Rockstar learned that depriving the player of all of their defenses for the final mission was a bad idea. Unlike Scarface, Tommy’s sense of pride doesn’t lead to his downfall as he wins over Sonny attempting to toy with him like a sociopathic child picking off the legs of an ant once again. He walks off with Ken in a moment that references the end of Casablanca as he plans to continue his business ventures with him, the “beginning of a beautiful friendship” in a criminal context. No, Tommy should not have shot Ken as Claude did to Maria, as the more upbeat GTA game deserved this more satisfyingly upbeat ending.

Though GTA III spurred a monumental movement in both game design and the parameters of video game controversy, the game itself was but a beta test showcasing the base potential of what it offered and nothing more. All it took was a meager year for Rockstar to use those primordial workings that promised thrills unseen in any other video game before it and actually delivered on those promises. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a lighthearted thrill ride through ascending to the top of the drug lord ladder, and the added aesthetic of 1980s culture with a few pronounced elements of that time period certainly add to the game’s vibrancy. I became totally immersed in the game’s presentation and its intriguing pacing, even with a few lackluster aspects still retaining or adding to Rockstar’s “to-do list” for the following game. All in all, Vice City is simply far more fun than GTA III, which should ultimately be the prime aspect that really matters.