This recent
Christmas, my mother was doing some shopping for my siblings. Since one had requested
Grand Theft Auto 3, she had done a bit of homework- asking co-workers who had seen the game, had heard of the game, that sort of thing- but, for a final recommendation, she asked one of the individuals working in the
Electronics Department at the
West Side Wal-Mart. Said
minimum-wage monkey informed her that he himself owned the game, and loved it to death, but he wouldn't recommend buying
GTA 3 for anyone else.
Of course, said sibling managed to get his hands on it anyway, but that's another story. The point is, though, the guy at Wal-Mart was right-
this is not a game you buy for someone else.
GTA 3 is not a particularly gruesome game- at least, not gruesome in the sense that some
shock horror movies or video games are. There aren't any vivid pictures of skin being flayed from torture victims, there aren't any scenes of dissection... it still merits the
M for Mature rating given it by the
ESRB, though, due to the casual treatment the game gives to violence.
Yes, it's a story about organized crime. Yes, the nature of its themes are going to be oriented towards an older audience. Yes, the
mission tree contains a number of goals that don't inherently involve killing gang members, yakuza, or Cartel thugs. Yes, you can spend the game just doing stunts around
Liberty City and playing around with the
Taxi and
Firetruck missions. When it comes down to it, though, you can't get around the fact that most of the game revolves around a wide variety of ways to make people into corpses.
Like
the guy at Wal-Mart said, you don't buy this game for
someone else. Instead, you give someone else
gift certificates in the amount of forty-nine ninety-nine (or however much your local store prices the game)
plus any applicable sales tax and hint to that someone else very strongly that they should buy this game the moment they have the chance. Everything mentioned in the previous writeup is true.
Rockstar has created a masterpiece- if I were to have only two games for a
Playstation 2, they would be
Final Fantasy X and
Grand Theft Auto 3.
Play
GTA 3- go to exciting places, meet
interesting people, kill their enemies, steal their cars, meet
more interesting people, kill their friends, kill their girlfriends, steal their cars, blow up their cars, shoot more interesting people, blow up helicopters, steal tanks...
Wicked fun.