Another new touch is the concept of property ownership. Around halfway through the story it becomes possible, as part of your bid to take over Vice City, to begin buying property. Some properties simply provide you with more save points and garages to save cars in. But others offer more lucrative rewards. Complete a few missions for the newly accquired property and it then becomes a money making enterprise which pays a daily stipend to you. This makes affording some of the more expensive properties much easier to achieve as well as tying the missions to more concrete goals and allowing for a few unique ones too. It seems that most businesses have a dark side in Vice City and a lot of the missions get back to being quite criminal once again.

Police Helicopters make a good way
to get back to base after being busted.

Ah well, you are a crimeloard wannabe after all. Perhaps the biggest refinement Vice City brings is a main character who is vocal. Tommy Vercetti has a definite attitude and isn't afraid to express it. The game is structured in such a way that mission clusters are available at a time - allowing you to select freely who you want to work for next but only after you have completed key ones will the story advance and open up the next cluster of missions.

The game's story is an amusing pastiche of various gangster films with betrayals, intrigue and naturally one or two femme fatal types around. What gives it some gravitas is the uniformly excellent voice acting featuring a fairly noteable cast of film, TV and video actors as well as some musicians too. Underscoring it is a set of music featuring a lot of very well known tunes of the 1980's.

Welcome to my humble new home.
I call it living on the cheap y'know.

All in all the audio is one of the strongest plus points of the game. EAX3 is used to provide multi-speaker support (and 5.1 mode is a whole heap of gaming goodness here) as well as doppler effects, reverb and a bit of occlusion modelling. Other PC only goodies are high definition textures, reflective surfaces and a draw distance (assuming your PC is up to it) that is considerably better than the PS2 version and makes avoiding upcoming traffic easier. Combine it with the implicit advantage mouse aiming gives and you have a gaming experience that is markedly different from the PS2 version of the game. Although if you want you can hook in a gamepad to your PC, we think you would be crazy to give up the mouse.

All of the above is not enough to warrant buying the PC version of Vice City if you already own the PS2 version but it's enough to bring a happy smile PC owners who waited patiently for it's release. Even nicer is that if you have a powerful enough graphics card you can enjoy the game with high levels of FSAA. We have been running it at 1024x768 with 4xFSAA and 16xAF - it has to be said it looks extremely sharp. Resolution can be scaled all the way up to 1600x1200 too, naturally in 32bit colour. You will need quite the beast for that though.

Cornering at speed.
Bikes are a lot of fun.

There are two very minor niggles. Firstly sometimes with the graphics when textured objects overlay you get an odd transparency effect which allows you to see through the objects at what is on the other side. This seems to affect trees the most and might be an issue with the ATi cards alone but it doesn't harm or hinder gameplay in the slightest. It may well be a side effect of the FSAA due to the way ATi cards handle alpha blended textures. Secondly the install disc we received was a bit reluctant to work. We worked around the problem and suspect it is probably just an issue with the copy we received (the disc had scratches on it as supplied).

This bike is stuck in the fence.
Little physics glitches like this do still crop up.

Other than that this game is simply gaming nirvana. Free form and as complex or as simple as you want it to be. Even after completing the story a lot of value remains with the hunt for all the hidden nooks and crannies in the game or just the odd whirl to play tag with the police. It is very definitely an adult game and we thankfully get the full uncensored version here. What are you waiting for? If you have a PC over the minimum spec (which seem to be fairly accurate, note Celeron or Dureon processors need to be 1.2 GHz as a minimum) then get out there and grab it, gaming doesn't get much better.