Grand Theft Auto - Vice City Stories

Empire sites are the thing that separates this one from its neighbours. Clear out a rival gang's property and it becomes yours, and then you choose what it does: protection racket, smuggling front, drug operation, and so on. Each tier costs money, raises income, and paints a target on your back, because rivals come to burn it down and you have to defend it in person. It is not deep economics. It is enough of a system that money stops being pocket change between missions and starts being something you actively manage, which no other Grand Theft Auto of the era asked of you.

The year is 1984, two years before Tommy Vercetti steps off the plane, and the man doing the work is Victor Vance, brother of the Lance who dies badly in Vice City. Vic is a soldier who gets discharged in the first ten minutes and spends the rest of the story being dragged into other people's schemes, usually Lance's. He is the closest thing the series had to a reluctant protagonist at the time, and the writing knows it, letting him grumble his way through jobs he clearly resents. Whether the pastel-and-neon Vice City needed a second visit is a fair question; the answer is that the city holds up better as a playground than as a novelty.

Rockstar Leeds built it for the PSP first, which shows in the mission length and the density of the map, and it shows in good ways as much as bad. Objectives are shorter and cleaner than the sprawling multi-stage set pieces of the console games. The PS2 conversion sharpens the textures and draw distance, adds proper analogue control, and drops the handheld's multiplayer, leaving a single-player game that runs better than the original ever did.

Swimming arrives here, which sounds trivial until you remember how many earlier missions ended in a canal. Vic can also hijack helicopters mid-flight and board boats from the water, and there is a fire-truck and paramedic side career that pushes you into corners of the map you would otherwise ignore. The soundtrack does its usual heavy lifting, and the Phil Collins subplot is the sort of straight-faced absurdity the series used to do without winking.

What lingers is the shape of the thing: a smaller, tighter GTA that trades scale for the satisfaction of watching a map fill up with businesses you own. It was the last of the PS2-era entries, and it goes out doing something the others never tried.