About nine months. That's how long it took from the release of GTA III to the release of Vice City, and that's really insane to think about. Then again, it was originally meant to be an add-on for GTA III.
Vice City has more of everything. You can drive cars, but you can also ride motorbikes, helicopters, and aeroplanes. There's a new kind of mission, like the very first proper heist mission of the GTA series, as well as the real estate business, during which you need to get buildings and businesses to launder your money.
In 1986, Tommy Vercetti (Ray Liotta) gets out of jail, having served his 15-year sentence for the mob. Sonny Forelli (Tom Sizemore), his boss, decides to send him away to Vice City to take care of business, but it doesn't take long for Tommy, who feels resentful because of his time in the slammer, to start taking the underworld of Vice City for himself after his original mission for the mob goes wrong and a lot of money is stolen.
Tommy's first contact is a sleazy lawyer, Ken Rosenberg, who has ties to the underworld of Vice City. Through him, Tommy encounters South American drug lords, ruthless real business tycoons, and English rockers. He also befriends Lance Vance (Philip Michael Thomas), a freelancer looking to avenge the death of his brother.
Soon enough, Lance and Tommy find out that the man behind the busted drug deal was a local drug lord, Diaz (Luis Guzman). They work for him for a while, and he has also killed Lance's brother and then finally takes him out. This gives Tommy a proper base of operations from Diaz's Scarface-inspired mansion, and from the suggestion of his friends, he begins procuring real estate.
Sonny has not forgotten his money, though and feels the mob is entitled to a slice of the Vice City pie. The main story culminates with Sonny coming over with his men and Tommy making his final stand, which ends with a lot of corpses and him and Ken at the top of Vice City's criminal underworld.
Vice City is a totally different kind of place from New York-inspired Liberty City. Away are the fog and the rain, replaced with the heat of Florida in the Miami Vice-inspired Vice City, with its beaches and neon-lit streets. The map is also a lot bigger than Liberty City. Then there's the radio, which is blasting 1980s-inspired radio stations with a selection of all kinds of hits song from the era.
Here's the thing, though, even on the Definitive Edition, you can tell that the original game was pushed out quickly after the 3rd game. The map itself is, at times, a bit strange, with huge swaths of nothing but empty space. Some of the buildings seem way too small. The big buildings you can enter, like the mall, don't really have much in them; they just exist there. On the Definitive Edition, there are some fixes here and there, like most of the stores in the mall have modelled interiors, whereas in the original, they had photo textures from real stores as windows.
The AI is pretty insane as well. The cars can randomly turn from the wrong places and cause accidents. Then again, the AI also causes bystanders to be mercilessly killed by each other. It brings its own interesting chaos to the world. There's something very wrong with how the AI works at times, but as said, that unpredictability can make the game fun as well.
The vehicle physics is somewhat off too. At times, the cars can feel a bit floaty and bounce erratically all over the place. It's been a while since I've played the original, so I can't honestly say if driving always felt like this, but I do recall flying being a cumbersome thing, and flying is, here as well, not the best-done thing. Maybe that's why there are only a handful of missions in the first place that require flying.
But perhaps the biggest flaw of the game is the story itself. The basic story is all fine, but the way it is presented is not quite as well-tuned as it should be. I can only assume that because of the relatively short time in between releases, some of the story elements were cut. It's funny, I didn't really notice it when I played the original game back in the day, but now, it's easy to see that things are missing, especially when it comes to the motivations and personalities of the characters.
Some missions, especially the real estate missions, feel somewhat obscure and are poorly, if at all, telegraphed to the player. When you buy the companies, you usually get a decent idea of what to do to make them make money. But with a couple of places, you kind of have to stumble upon it accidentally. A striptease joint requires Tommy to sit for five real-time minutes on a show and spend hundreds of dollars there, but nowhere is this said. The game just expects you to go there and sit down in one specific private room. Another mission is to sell drugs from an ice-cream van, but nowhere is it mentioned that you need to make 50 or more sales for it to pass.
That said, I've always loved Vice City. It has its blemishes, and the difficulty level is all over the place at times, even with modern controls. But the game is fun, and the 1980's atmosphere feels spot on, at least if you like the Miami Vice aesthetics.
Vice City really is an impressive feat when you think about it. They took what they had done with GTA III and improved upon it greatly. There's more of everything in an environment that looks, at its best, a lot better even in its original form. For the missions, it uses a lot of old tricks, but also quite a few new ones, with a lot of variety and even the real estate business. While a bit tedious when you are collecting money for it, it offers a great deal of variation in terms of missions as well as the people you see during them.
I liked GTA III, but for me, it was Vice City that made me fully realise what the series could do and what was possible with its take on crime movie cliches. I love Vice City, warts and all, because of what it is and how it presents itself, in its own imperfections.
You can get Vice City from Steam as well as on consoles. It's sold in a collection with GTA III and San Andreas, and as such, I'd recommend getting it at 50% sale. The work done for the remastering is more of a bare minimum, so waiting for half price is more than fair in my opinion.
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