![]() The taxi system returns, where a cab will wait for you outside of a hospital or prison and will take you back to the starting point of the mission you just failed. Quick Trip allows you to skip the non-action driving sections of a mission, which is nice in theory though it isn't always available when you'd think it should be. The game includes the same "mission acceleration" options that we've seen in the past few games, namely Quick Trip and the taxis that await you after failing a mission. In other words, you'll have just as much fun flying down the streets of Vice City as you did the first time around. It's responsive yet wiley, fast and yet controllable, completely unrealistic and yet really damn fun. Vice City Stories brings with it the same driving physics system that we've seen slowly become refined since Grand Theft Auto III. It's somewhat odd that this seems to plague the PS2 version of the game significantly more than the PSP title. Fortunately, it's a little better than what we saw in Liberty City Stories as things generally don't just appear right in front of you, but it can still happen from time to time. ![]() Cars and pedestrians fade into view a couple hundred feet in front of you, and buildings and such pop into view as you drive forward. ![]() There's also a tiny bit less pop-in than before, which was a pretty big problem last time out, but it's still far from perfect. There's a little more detail to be seen in nearly every facet of the game - from the characters to vehicles to the environments, Vice City Stories is a more intricate looking title than the last title. It's certainly not perfect, as the game does chug a bit here and there, but we suppose that's the case with most games in the series. The framerate has been improved a bit, maybe not leaps and bounds on average, but it's a little steadier than last time out. As mentioned, Vice City Stories makes a number of technical improvements over what we saw with Liberty City Stories last year. Being able to swim this time out is nice, but we've seen that before and it really just feels like we're getting something back that we've already had. We suppose that'll have to wait for Grand Theft Auto IV, and we're more than willing to hold our breath, but it seems like this would be the perfect platform, literally and figuratively speaking, for some new experimentation. Sure, the handheld version was a big technical improvement over Liberty City Stories, but there's nothing substantially new to the series here and once again it comes off feeling weak on the PlayStation 2. In fact, after remembering our time with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, we can't help but feel that Vice City Stories isn't quite everything it could be.
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