GTA: Chinatown Wars PSP - Hands On Preview

If you look back at the Liberty City and Vice City Stories games that Rockstar Leeds developed for PSP, both of these handheld titles were later ported onto the PS2 and were left largely untouched in the process. Sure, the visuals were scaled-up for use on the home console, but the full game remained largely the same. Very little elbow grease was applied to polish the games before their transition onto the PS2 and, as a result, they were far less of an upgraded edition and much more of an offering to obsessive GTA fans that had to play every last second of GTA action but didn't own a PSP.

With this in mind, perhaps you'd expect the DS to PSP port of GTA: Chinatown Wars to follow the same pattern - the controls would need to be tweaked a little for the transition, but the fundamental experience would be largely the same. However, we've learnt over the years that Rockstar Leeds should never be underestimated. After all, this is a development studio that specialises on the handheld platforms, producing one of the most critically acclaimed DS titles in existence with Chinatown Wars when it launched on DS earlier this year.

The game's arrival on PSP will bring with it a flurry of new content. This will include a handful of new story missions, additional side-missions (e.g. Rampages and Turret Rampages) that weren't on DS, and a journalist character called Melanie Mallard that Huang now roles with in some of the new missions. Music has also been revamped, with the PSP's higher spec audio allowing Rockstar Leeds to uncompress the original DS game's music, making it both clearer and richer. A few classics came on the radio during our hands on and the improvement was instantly noticeable, like the difference between watching a movie in standard and high definition.

Seven new radio stations will provide a total of over 100 minutes of new music for the PSP game, which is encouraging but will it convince the average PSP user to part with their money for a game that originated on the graphically inferior DS? Probably not. Rockstar Leeds needs to pull a lot more out of its hat to convince such discerning gamers, who will have the likes of Gran Turismo PSP to chose from when GTA: CTW launches on October 23rd. Graphics are the critical factor here... while CTW may have been a visual master class on the DS, it would struggle to achieve plaudits on the PSP despite the charms of its isometric perspective and retro styled visuals.

Thankfully, Rockstar Leeds has not simply taken the DS code and applied some concealer here and a little eyeliner there to doll up CTW in the hope that PSP owners won't notice. Instead, the visuals have been fully revamped with what Rockstar describes as "dynamic real-time lighting" and "bloom self-shadowing". Whatever it is, it's certainly made this version look at home on the PSP, with subtler shades on the vehicles and smoother contours across Liberty City's buildings that refine and blend the environment into a more wholesome graphical display all-round.

Where the PSP version may come unstuck a little though, is with its interpretations of CTW's various mini-games. In the DS game, Rockstar Leeds cleverly utilised Nintendo's touch screen to engross gamers with mini-games that had them filling up Molotov cocktails at petrol stations, hotwiring cars, and putting together sniper rifles. We've gone hands on with some of the hotwiring mini-games on PSP and we've got to say that a lot has been lost in translation between the DS and PSP controls.

Limited to one analogue stick and an array of buttons, it's clear that Rockstar Leeds hasn't been able to stretch its legs creatively with CTW's controls on the PSP. Two of the basic hotwiring games we played simply consisted of circular motions on the analogue stick, which pale in comparison to the same type of actions via the touch screen. While it's true that we haven't seen any of the other mini-games, we're nonetheless concerned that they will follow a similar format to the hotwiring sections we've played so far, which lack the vitality and dynamism of their DS counterparts.

Having said this about the mini-games, the controls held up elsewhere across CTW's gameplay. If anything, they'll actually streamline the gameplay and make actions such as flicking between weapons easier, while having access to an analogue stick will obviously make for more responsive controls while free-roaming and driving. We played through a couple of missions, one of which had us wreaking havoc with a tank ('Deadly Xin') as well as another that had us driving a machine gunner ('Driven To Destruction'), and the controls lost nothing over the DS game in this regard.

From what we've played of GTA: Chinatown Wars so far, Rockstar Leeds appears to have thrown in a good portion of new content while sprucing up the visuals and audio suitably enough to make the game well worth a punt for PSP owners. It may not be a PS2 emulating Stories game, but it certainly looks like CTW will sit proudly and justly on the PSP when it arrives next month.