I yearn to sandbox: Grand Theft Auto Vice City

(tags game, Windows, Grand Theft Auto)

Some of the coverage on the latest Grand Theft Auto game, GTA 4, pulls me back to my mini-game taxi driving fun. Then I remembered I haven't completed GTA 3, or installed Vice City or San Andreas. My exursion into GTA 3 was probably cut down because I did the side missions at the same time as main story, which made some areas of the map very hard to traverse. I think I stopped when the third part of the world opened up. I have the game saves backed up somewhere.

Anyway, I probably have 5 years of game-time entertainment yet unlocked in my room, so I decided to chip away at that, starting with GTA Vice City.

At first, I mistakenly thought that GTA was available on Steam. I did a search inside of the Steam client but nothing showed up. While writing this post, I searched the Internet again but was surprised that "Rockstar Catalog Hits Steam" (2008-01-04), etc, but not available here. So is it purchase region locked on Steam? :-(

I am surprised at myself that the first thing I thought of was Steam, when I already have the PC version. Guess I am totally lazy. I installed this two CD-ROM set. It's been a long time since I've put a "Play" disc in my PC and already I want a no-cd for this one.

I am now 9 missions complete. I set the graphics to 1024 x 768 x 32, and its no problem. Then again this game was made in 2003. The controls are jittery sometimes. I hate my PC gaming because of this type of stuttering. Disabling some noisy gadgets like my wallpaper changer helped. Still, here I am IRC-ing, running Ubuntu on a VMWare on my other monitor, downloading torrents, and playing this 3d game on my primary. PCs have power, heh.

I like the voice acting in this series. Actually I've been English starved for a while, but still these lines don't seem over-the-top.

Okay, I'm going to try to finish this game, really.