So this is my essay. It’s titled “Why I hate the Nintendo DS sometimes”, by me. The thesis to this essay will be “games like Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars makes me hate the Nintendo DS sometimes.” Hopefully handing in this instead of an essay on Macbeth’s greed will still net me a passing grade from my English teacher.
I’m fully aware that there’s no way to write an essay titled “Why I hate the Nintendo DS sometimes” as your review for a Nintendo DS game without being labeled some kind of fanboy or hater so I’ll roll with it. Sure, I’m a DS hating fanboy. Granted, I lean favorably towards an assortment of solid DS games that would be considered too small or old-fashioned to be released on a console, and it’s the handheld that I wound up not selling because it actually got new game releases that weren’t just Playstation 1 JRPG re-releases, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a slight grudge against a system I’ve invested so much of my life into. After all, while the DS lost the battle with my approval, it won the war against the PSP, so I’ll suck it up and force myself to accept that the latest Castlevania side-scroller boasts the Nintendo Seal of Approval.
For it’s not the games that I hate, it’s the assorted bits of hardware that irrationally stray from what would make sense in a normal, rational video game system. What’s the point of the DS having a microphone? So the game can force me to yell or blow into it while out in public, surrounded by strangers in a society that shuns schizophrenics? I can’t talk to people online with that microphone either; players still needed to buy a headset adaptor for said purpose. Any game that has attempted to use the presence of a second screen for anything but secondary information has neglected to account that most gamers aren’t Ozymandias and have a hard time computing date from two screens at once. Finally, the touch-screen, the highly touted gameplay innovation! It’s not that the touch screen doesn’t make sense when used in certain cases (point and click adventure games) or even spawned new and unique ideas (Kirby’s Canvas Curse, and….well….), it’s just that so many people seemed so convinced that having a touch screen was going to change the way we play games that everyone tried their hardest to force some kind of use out of it. Remember when the DS first came out, every game tried to incorporate some kind of shoehorned touch screen gimmick, like the forced mini-game segment or the unintuitive control layout with “virtual buttons” on the screen? I try to forget those days, and thankfully so do most developers it seems, as most DS games nowadays comprise of traditional, non-touch screen-based games. Even Nintendo has made the touch screen, at best, an optional control method in its recent high-profile releases.
But games like Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars make me hate the Nintendo DS sometimes.
I thought that developers stopped trying to make games like this; games that think of a bevy of illogical and inappropriate touch-screen mechanics for no reason other than the sake of bragging about “innovative” touch-screen mechanics on the back of the box, but here’s the highest-profile DS release in quite some time, asking the player to poke and jab their bottom screen at the most inopportune moments. Missions will constantly ask the player to go to the bottom screen and execute some kind of trivial job; tap the screen to break a lock, turn a handle, open a wallet, assemble a gun, and a bevy of other assorted games that are nothing short of pointless. The initial series of missions exist as tutorials to explain possible optional mini-games that the player can elect to use, like searching dumpsters or a really insipid mini-game where you pump gas at the station to fill Molotov cocktails.
The game takes EVERY excuse to make you go down to the bottom screen and tap something; need to pay a toll to cross a bridge? Look down. Need to move “supplies” from a bag in your apartment to your suitcase? Look down.
One mission in particular filled me with fits of anger. I was asked to drive a boat to a remote location, pick up some contraband and evade the Coast Guard while heading to a specific dock. However, the entrance to the dock is surrounded by police boats and every minute or so, the boat will stop and force me to play a nonsensical mini-game where I had to rev up the boat’s engine. I can’t even fire my guns or control the character when the engine stalls; so if I’m surrounded by unfriendlies firing at me, mission failed. The only solution I could come up for this was to take the long road and travel all-around Liberty City and sneak into the dock from behind, taking a considerably longer time (and still revving up the boat when prompted) to complete a terrible idea of a level.
Changing pace from the pointless to the extremely unnecessary, car jacking! If you attempt to break into a parked car, the game randomly asks you to play one of three touch-screen car jacking sequences that take about 20-30 seconds each to accomplish. These are 20-30 seconds that I don’t have if I have a 3-star wanted level and the police are hunting my ass down. There are few more incessant slaps in the face than trying to run from the 5-0 and scurrying into your getaway car, only to be asked to pull out your PDA and hack into the car’s computer while an officer throws you down and to jail, confiscating all your weapons and drugs along the way.
Speaking of, there’s a drug dealing mechanic in there too. The game has some eight different kinds of drugs (based on a suburbanite’s perception of real world drugs) and the player can buy and sell them from a collection of dealers across Liberty City. The goal is to travel from a dealer selling one product for cheap to another dealer buying the same for a high price. How a gamer is supposed to keep track of the chemical free-trade market is a question in of itself, as players are often asked to go to a part of town where there may be a potential client and search far and wide for the dark alleyway that the buyer is hiding. The bigger problem is that this isn’t entirely optional, as your story missions offer little reward, and hijacking a taxi and collecting fares doesn’t quite pay the Crazy Money that it used to. The game has the tendency to occasionally (and begrudgingly) halt your progress and demand that you bring X number of drugs or cash before you can start the next mission.
Finally, there are a few awkward control choices; to throw a Molotov or grenade, you need to look down at the touch screen and move the stylus around a circle to aim, all the while attempting to dodge enemy fire on the top screen. Just above the “throw fire” button is the weapon select screen, which may or may not respond to a press from you thumb. All of these, combined with the knowledge in the back of your head that the game can throw an unlikely touch screen mini game at you at any time, means that I found myself having to awkwardly hold the stylus in my hand as I played the game and controlled my character. And keep in mind that this is a game that uses every button on the DS as is.
In conclusion, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars makes me hate the Nintendo DS sometimes.
Now that my essay is done, let me shift tone and get to the positive attributes of the game with the rest of my review.
You play as Huang, the spoiled rich son of a murdered Triad boss looking for revenge and a lost sword of great value. Of course, this being a Grand Theft Auto game, Huang can elect to vent his rage on the civilians of Liberty City by jacking someone’s car and driving on the crowded sidewalk. The game has a sort of cartoonish visual style, with all of the buildings adopting a cel-shaded look and civilians presented as 2D sprites that break in two when you gun them down, adding a playful, recess-time giddiness to your killing spree. The gunplay mechanics are generally simple; lock on to something, shoot it while it shoots you and hope you have more health and a bigger gun than your adversary. Of course there are a few basic strategies one needs apply (like not run into the middle of a circle of angry gang members), and the lock-on system has the tendency to occasionally target inanimate objects that aren’t pointing automatic weapons in your direction, but otherwise the game gives a fun sense of slaughtering legions of cartoon fools.
Driving is wonky and unruly, but that’s part of the fun. Unlike Grand Theft Auto 4’s semi-realistic driving physics, here your car has a habit of flying and swerving in and out of control, and I loved it! To compliment your violent new driving style, the means of which you evade police officers has changed, as you now you reduce your wanted star rating by causing cop cruisers to crash chaotically. So as long as you’re not caught driving in reverse when a cop is next to you opening your door, suddenly having the authorities on your tail becomes a recklessly jolly good time!
And when Huang realizes that the old ladies he’s been shooting at have nothing to do with his father’s death, he can begin to take the in-game missions. All of the cutscenes are presented in still pictures and dialogue, and usually consist of your boss giving you an order and Huang responding with an innuendo. Story isn’t particularly deep and all of the characters combine one crime archetype with another kink archetype, but the humor is solid enough at least.
Setting aside the “touch here to give your buddy a new tattoo” mini-game nonsense, the missions are surprisingly varied and entertaining. The later in-game missions put the focus more on driving and killing, despite the occasional contrived gimmick sequence. In particular, I enjoyed a series of missions provided by an undercover cop working incognito amongst bikers, because they almost always involved me on a motorcycle shooting other bikers at fast speeds. That terrible boat level notwithstanding, most of the missions are about a couple minutes long, which mean that you can play Chinatown Wars on the bus between stops, accomplish a mission or two and still feel like you’re making progress. In that sense, one could argue that Chinatown Wars is a better handheld game than, say, Chrono Trigger, and that’s high praise.
Despite how I spent a good two pages putting down the game and its hardware and thus terribly unbalancing the tone of this review, buy Chinatown Wars. It’s a great title that does what a handheld game is supposed to, and that is occupy your mind so you don’t have to pay attention to the snotty, tight-jeaned high school kid on the phone next to you on the bus yapping on about who’s spreading gossip about her late-night antics. And if you’re more tolerant of the DS hardware than me (or, dare I say it, actually think highly of the DS as a whole) then you might enjoy it even moreso. It’s just that I dug the game in spite of its hardware, not because of it.
4 stars
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