GrandTheftAuto3

Grand Theft Auto 3 : The greatest game... ever?

Okay, so perhaps my wife would disagree with the above statement. Possibly you might disagree as well. But I personally think that GTA3 was in fact, the greatest game ever.

Before we go into why I would classify as the "greatest", let's first examine what the game is.

Violence, mayhem, and more violence

GTA3 is among the most violent video games ever. In it, you play a street thug with aspirations to become an uber-street-thug, the King of Criminals as it were. You start out the game with a betrayal by one of your cohorts during a bank-robbery that lands you in jail. One day, while you are being transfered (I think you are awaiting trial, but I forget) some very nasty and powerful mafioso types hyjack the police van you and others are riding in, free one particular criminal from the van, and then blow-up a bridge. You escape with another criminal (named "8-ball") who introduces you to the Italian Mafia in the city. You start doing petty and trivial jobs for this crime-family, and slowly work your way up the ladder until another betrayal puts you on the run from the Mafia and you wind up working for the Yakuza. Eventually, you work for and ultimately piss off, every crime syndicate in the city, and finally prove you're more bad ass than all of them by taking most of them out.

So there is a lot of violence just in the main game storyline. However, the game does not end there. You as a player are given incredible freedoms in the game:

• You can steal cars. Walk up and steal just about any parked car in the game, doesn't matter if it's a ma & pa station wagon, a sporty coupe, a racy sportster, a parked police car, a firetruck from the fire dept., an ambulance from the hospital, or a bus. You name it, you can steal it.
• You can carjack people. Walk up alongside any car driving around in the city, open the door (or, if it's locked, blast at it with your gun to make the people get out) pull out the driver, and drive away. You can steal all of the above cars, plus FBI vehicles, SWAT team trucks, souped-up gang-member's cars (with the hydrolic lifts), or even tanks (that the military tries to use against you if you cause too much mayhem).
• You can also steal planes! Just go to the airport, hop in one of those on the ground, and try and fly the sucker (which is actually the hard part... mostly you'll just crash into the water :-)
• You can steal boats and tool around in the water.

Plus, there's lots and lots to do in this game:

• There are 100 packages hidden around the city, and as you find them more things are unlocked.
• There are many side-missions for various notorious thugs around town (like the porn peddling El Burro of the Diablos, or the Bitchin' Dog Food guy)
• There are tons of side-missions involving specific vehicles.
• There are many garages looking for certain vehicles that you can steal and sell to them (thus, unlocking that car whenever you want it)
• There are things called "Rampages" where you're given some weapon and told to ice X many people, or cars, or whatever in certain time limits.

And you can always just tool around looking for trouble... This is perhaps the most impressive aspect of the game because you can have scads of fun doing absolutely nothing at all!