After seeing the commericals for San Andreas on TV about a million times, I was reminded that I never got a chance to play some of the earlier games. I’m finally getting a new video card which will allow me to play them, so I was wondering…
Which is better: Grand Theft Auto 3 or Grand theft Auto: Vice City?
And what is the difference, exactly?
I believe “Vice City” is the one that includes the option of kicking prostitutes to death.
[HIJACK]Except the Australian version. You can still kick anyone to death, bludgeon them with a baseball bat, run over them with a tank, set fire to them…
…but you can’t have (implied) sex with the hookers in your car. Our censors have decreed that immoral. :eek: [/HIJACK]
Basically, all three games are just further refinements of the previous game. Everything you could do in GTAIII, you can do in Vice City, plus a whole bunch of new stuff. Everything you can do in Vice City, you can do in San Andreas, plus a whole bunch of new stuff. The only real difference is the plot, which was pretty weak in GTAIII. I’d skip straight to Vice City, if I were in your shoes.
You can do that in either one.
Grand Theft Auto 3 is set in a New York type area in the '90s. I liked the setting more than Vice City.
Vice City is Scarface the game.
They’re both really fun. Vice City has a larger area, a better soundtrack, and you can ride motorcycles. Gameplay is exactly the same for both games.
“Vice City” is the better game, but you kind of have to have played GTA3 to fully appreciate it.
Agreed. Start at the beginning, and work your way through each.
Hell, you can get GTA III and Vice City as one package deal now, and by the time you finish them, San Andreas will be in the $19.95 rack. 
They play a lot alike but Vice City is the superior game. You can fly a helicopter and ride motorcycles plus he music is a lot better.
Marc
How does one finish these games? They provide unlimited fun! Feeling bored? Toss a couple grenades and before you can say “Mass Murderer Auto”, you’ve got enough Feds on your ass to torch TEN Waco’s!!
Anyway, I’d say get Vice City. After playing it, going back to GTA3 has great novelty value, but little else.
Ah, yes…GTA. The game that cost me a columnist.
We had a young, extremer-type writer who wrote a weekly column on games and the industry.
It seemed natural that we’d zing him our review copy of GTA for review and comment. God knows I didn’t want to do it.
Three weeks later he told me he was giving up writing for us. He’d been playing GTA and hit a cop with a flame-thrower or some such and just ended up thinking about what he was doing too much.
This led him to give up on computer games for a while and backing off the whole ‘Mountain Dew Extreme’ lifestyle completely.
It was a weird time for him.
Vice City’s storyline sucked me in much better than GTA3’s. Also, Vice City had Vice City Public Radio, which is fun to listen to.
GTA 1 and 2 and the London expansions for PC/PSX are also worth playing, and can be gotten cheap. In fact, I think Rockstar made the original PC GTA freely available.
I personally felt more immersed in gta3. Maybe the fact that the lead character was nameless and mute, instead of vice city, where Tommy Vercetti did your talking for you, using the bored sounding tones of Ray Liotta. Plus the radio in GTA3 did it for me a bit more… Of course, it had no motorbikes or helicopters… And i’m also sick of people saying Vice City is so much bigger than Liberty City, sure, it has a bigger area, but its basically empty space. I mean, a golf course? Who ever went there? Liberty City (gta3) is more compact, and, dammit, more fun. IMHO.
Its been a while since I played either, but I distinctly liked Vice City better. The radio was better, the different modes of transport were better, it was just more fun. Also, I found the road system of GTAIII too confusing - I got lost much more often than in VC.
Now, of course, San Andreas is another order of magnitude better, in almost every way, IMHO…
G
Heh, I gave up on the missions (I don’t have the patience to have to start each mission over from the very beginning over and over) and just go on rampages until the cops or military take me down. Lots more fun that any mission!
My problem with GTA3 was that as soon as you pissed off the Mafia, pretty early in the game as well, it was almost impossible to drive through their area of town without some shotgun-toting mafioso blowing up your car in only one or two shots. I’ve never had the same problem in other games, as the various machine guns all the other gangs use don’t do nearly as much damage (and, lets face it, dealing with the blowouts you get in Vice City and San Andreas is fun!)
I’d say Vice City is the better game. The opponents are tougher, the cops are smarter and better armed and your character is more vulnerable (ie popping tires). But you get better weapons, millions of hideouts (with money!) and a better map with huge indoor areas. The PC version of GTA3 also seemed to have a bug where if you were trying to bail out of a car and you hit enter twice, you would just get right back in! That killed me a whole bunch of times, frantically trying to get my characters dumb ass out of the car. In Vice City, a double tap on enter gives you emergency bail (yes, you can jump out of a moving vehicle) which is what it should have always done.
I also found that after a long time playing Vice City I positively KICKED ASS at playing GTA3. The GTA3 missions were simple by comparison and I had learned how to play dirty. I got through half the game in a couple of hours.
I did. Killing cops and hookers is fun, sure, but killing golfers? GOLD!
Do you get to run over mimes?