Grand Theft Auto (thing)

Grand Theft Auto

Creating fervor in mid 1998 was Paradigm's (PDM) Grand Theft Auto, a game that brought in an entirely new genre. Take a seat behind your computer, launch Grand Theft Auto and prepare to be immersed in a world of action, violence and crime. Work for the big guns in the crime scene, from sterotypical Mafia bosses to crooked cops, to make it to the top and become known as the "baddest motherfucker" on the streets; and in the meantime boost cars, murder innocents and cause general chaos.

The game is divided up into three cities, two levels to each city. The player progresses to the next level once a certain amount of money is acquired. This can be accomplished by succesfully completing jobs for crime bosses, or by carrying out any destructive task. For example, running around shooting pedestrians, ramming other cars, blowing things up, are all actions which will result in an increase in points (money).

Graphics were never brilliant, and by today's standards the graphics are incredibly lacking. With a maximum resolution of 800x600x32 alot is going on off screen, and to that note once things go off screen they have a tendency to "slip from memory" and dissappear. This is quite infuriating when you are chasing after a good car, for example, as a few seconds after it slips off screen it is mysteriously no where to be found. Sound is another matter altogether, for such a dated game it is surprisingly clear and the soundtrack itself is great and quite often amusing.

The cities themselves are of reasonable size and quite large enough to get lost in. There is a fairly large number of different car types, however the density of cars on screen at any given time is fairly low. Diversity is aplenty, each suburb within the city has some variation from the last, however the visual aspect of the suburbs is fairly uniform in each individual city. Searching through the suburbs is often a rewarding task, revealing Kill Frenzies and various powerups such as super weapons (flamethrower, rocket launcher), speed increase, slowmo etc.

One downfall of the game is that muliplayer is relatively non-existant. Although multiplayer does exist, it is incredibly buggy, and there was never anyone online, especcially since the release of Grand Theft Auto 2. LAN and IPX were also available, however they were still buggy.

Overall, Grand Theft Auto was a brilliant game for its time, and still remains to be a nice little game, however, if this is your type of game I would suggest looking into Grand Theft Auto 2 or the new Grand Theft Auto 3. If you insist on the original, however, it can be downloaded from just about any abandon ware site.

Final Verdict: