I'm thirty-five and recently married. I hadn't played a video game since the late eighties--in fact, I hadn't even given them a second thought. Then everything changed. I watched my brother-in-law play GTA:VC one afternoon on his PS2. I was transfixed. I was appalled. I was, in a word, hooked. When it came out on XBOX, I bought a used copy at Blockbuster and haven't looked back.
First of all, the gameplay is phenomenal. The fact that you can freely roam the large Vice City map is worth the price of admission by itself.
Second, the voice acting is amazing--especially the commercials. Ray Liotta. Gary Busey. Burt Reynolds. Phillip Michael Thomas. Lee Majors. Robert Davi. Dennis Hopper. Luis Guzman. Fairuza Balk. Jenna Jameson. Danny Trejo. These are just a few of the names that make appearances. The radio material is so well produced, I can drive around all day listening to nothing but VCPR or KCHAT. The radio commercials are witty, sarcastic and spot-on.
Third, the story is great. You start as a nobody, recently released from jail. You finish (if you really ever do finish) as a Tony Montana-esque criminal psychopath.
Fourth--this is probably the most immoral game ever created... and it's beautiful. It's sick, sick, sick! Apart from the usual "waste him" missions, tasks include delivering drugs from an ice-cream van and driving a humvee drunk while avoiding the cops. I mean, one mission has you carving up a guy with a chainsaw! In addition, there are dozens of "rampage" icons throughout the game. When you run into one, you have two minutes to kill a certain amount of people a certain way (e.g. "kill 20 gang members in two minutes with a meat cleaver") It's never boring.
Conclusion: GTA:VC is the sickest, funniest, most engrossing and immersive video game ever made. It looks and plays better on the XBOX, but it's a blast on any platform. Rockstar's next GTA release, San Andreas, has immense shoes to fill.
