Grand Theft Auto has come to the DS. It’s not really what I expected to happen, and when Alex (the editor, duh!) suggested I try it out, I was surprised to find out it was on my favourite little handheld console. Obviously, to accomplish this, it’s a lot less advanced graphics-wise and not as many features could be fit in, but it’s still quite fun.
Basically, you play a young Chinese guy called Huang. His father’s been killed, you need to go off and deliver a sword… blah, blah blah etc. There is a sort of plot going on, but it’s a bit dull, so mostly I ignore it in favour of the simple steal a car, buy drugs, escape the police, steal new car, sell drugs ideal. Before I became a drugs dealer I was making very little, picking up $10 every so often by stealing a taxi and giving people rides. My first drugs deal earned me about $25000, and I bought a new apartment, where I could ditch my drugs, save, and park my stolen cars. Lovely.
That’s pretty much all there is to this game. It’s top down view, as befits a low graphics DS game – which is also how GTA started off, apparently (I haven’t played any other GTAs). Speaking of not having played other GTAs, I’m told that the city I’m driving around in is “immediately recognizable”, according to Alex, who was probably quoting someone. It’s Liberty City, and it’s exactly the same model as GTA IV on any other console. I’ll assume some avid GTA fan knows what the hell I’m talking about, I sure don’t.
But the fun thing about this game is, obviously, the Grand Theft of the Auto. You can steal pretty much any vehicle that’s sitting around – limos, buses, armoured cars, Hellenbachs, whatever. Jump in and take over. Each has different handling and speed, and it can be quite challenging to escape the police when all there is on the road for you to hijack (by pressing X you can kick someone straight out of their car and drive off. It took 15 tries of this before I got bored of watching the poor people chasing their car as I drove off) is a bus and a broken down truck.
But what is really fun, is that you can take commercial cars and do their jobs for money – steal a police car, you can follow the radio and go to run down some criminals, as a vigilante justice. Run someone down and soon enough a guy in an ambulance will come along to try and patch them up. It’s always entertaining to nick the ambulance and drive off while the paramedic tries to resuscitate the victim. Then you can play paramedic yourself, and pick up patients, drive them to the hospital and get paid, all the time making sure that when they flatline you tap their chest on the touchscreen to get their heart started again.
You can do this with taxis, and you can attempt to take armoured cars full of guns if you flush the driver out with some shooting first. Ah yes, the guns. The combat in this game is pretty crap. Grab a gun, shoot people. Or hit them with sticks and baseball bats. You can also get entertaining things like tasers (which set people on fire if you shock them long enough) and flamethrowers (which set people on fire anyway), but besides that there’s not much to do with combat. And the police steal your weapons every time you get caught anyway, and as far as I can see, there’s no way to stash your weapons in your apartment, so you have to get new guns every time.
It really is a fun game, but apart from the fun of stealing cars and boats, and driving around listening to the car radio, hijacking cars, doing missions, selling drugs….. where was I going with this again?
Nometet.com says: 
+ Great fun to hijack stuff
+ Huge city
+ Different vehicles
+ Driving around as a cabbie
+ You can whistle at the DS to call for a cab!
- Can get repetitive
- Plotline is funny but not particularly deep
