Some of the coolest aspects of the game are the vehicle-specific missions that are initiated by pressing R3. For instance, jumping in a taxi and pressing R3 will start the Taxi Driver mission, in which you pick up passengers and deliver them to their destination for cash. You get bonus bucks for speedy drop-offs and for doing consecutive safe deliveries, but passengers will bail on you if you bang up your taxi. It's like having Crazy Taxi within GTAIII for free! There are several other missions, including Vigilante (hunt down criminals in a police car), Firefighter (put out fires for cash) and Paramedic, in which you can give back to the community from which you've taken so much. These missions are well-designed and a lot of fun, and add a huge amount of extra playability to the already detailed world of Liberty City. This type of optional gameplay really gives GTAIII staying power, since you can always jump into a side mission whenever you get tired of doing the main missions or killing random people. For such deep, engaging and downright fun gameplay, DMA and Rockstar earn the Golden Gameplay Award.

Aside from a car, there are a number of weapon options available to the player. You'll start off with a standard issue baseball bat and pistol, but work your way up to a shotgun, assault rifle and even a bitchin' flamethrower. You can stop off at the neighborhood Ammu-Nation and buy an uzi or some grenades, but there are always weapons lying around in an alley or on top of a building. The game encourages exploration, and often you'll find hidden health power-ups, body armor, weapon caches or hidden packages. The latter are extremely important, as finding hidden packages will reward you with respawning weapon power-ups at your hideout. There are dozens of ways to earn money, from mugging random strangers to successfully completing the classic GTA "Rampages" to collecting a set number of cars and bringing them to certain garages. You can also earn the bling bling by pulling off crazy stunts in your car, and the game will even track the number of flips and revolutions you wrack up. There are a variety of "Unique Jumps" scattered about the city, and hitting these will net you some cool cash and a sexy slow-motion vista of your car as it hurdles through the air. There are literally dozens of things to do, and the fully-realized game world will more often than not allow you to do whatever crazy-assed things you can think of.

To see how this all comes together, let's examine a typical day I might have in Liberty City. I'll start by walking out of my Staunton Island hideout and on to the street, taking in the morning sunshine. There I'll whip out my bat and crack a few skulls to warm up. Some homeless people might try to start something with me, but I'll quickly smack their punk asses down. When the paramedics arrive I'll beat them to a bloody pulp as well, then jump on top of their ambulance and start picking off pedestrians with the sniper rifle. After head-capping a few dozen people the cops will show up, but my M-16 will make quick work of them. Now the cops are really mad, and they'll start sending helicopters to get me, but it's nothing a rocket blast can't solve. When things get really hectic I'll toss a few Molotov Cocktails, then jack a police car and speed away, dodging oncoming FBI cruisers while splattering old ladies and drunks on the sidewalk. Just when I'm about to bite it, I'll arrive at Phil's Army Surplus in Rockford, where I'll nab my favorite vehicle, the Barracks OL. With this brute, I'm barreling into oncoming traffic, knocking hapless SUVs off the overpass and sending FBI cars careening into one another. By the time I make it across the Shoreside Lift Bridge, the army is hot on my tail and sending wave after wave of tanks after me. I exit my flaming vehicle and make a mad dash for my hideout in Wichita Gardens, but a hail of military gunfire brings me down, and a host of vehicles explode as the screen fades to white. After briefly reflecting on the consequences of deadly mayhem, I check out of the local hospital and do it again.

Liberty City is one of the most immersive game environments ever conceived, and tying this fantastic world together is an unbelievably cool radio network, bursting with over five hours of audio. Every vehicle you steal is equipped with a radio (except for emergency vehicles) that you can tune to one of nine different radio stations. Each station specializes in its own unique brand of music, from rock (Head Radio) and pop (Lips 106) to reggae (K-Jah) and classical (Double Cleff). Most of the excellent music was created specifically for the game, and the few licensed tracks (from the movie Scarface, naturally) feel right at home. Real-life DJs, like Stretch Armstrong, lend their personal talents to some of the broadcasts, giving the whole operation an air of credibility and style it might not otherwise have. The transmissions are littered with faux commercials, advertising off-the-wall concepts like overnight pet delivery or "Liberty City Survivor". While it's often difficult to come across as funny in this type of context, DMA Design hits the mark again with some spot-on parodies of American pop culture.

Perhaps the crown jewel of the audio design is the talk-radio station Chatterbox, which features over an hour of riotous callers and humorous guests. You'll recognize some of the callers as characters you've met from the game, like Maria (who actually talks about you at one point) or Tony Chipriani, who insists his name ain't Tony even after introducing himself. People will call the show to weigh in with just about every sort of half-cocked opinion, from the lady advocating her group Citizens Raging Against Phones, to the redneck who insists that guns don't kill people (death does). While you'll start to hear segments repeat themselves as you play, they do stay fresh for quite a while, and the station adds yet another layer of alternative reality to an already immersive game. There were times when I simply had to pull over and listen to the radio, as it really is that engrossing. DMA really needs to be commended for their work on the audio portion of the game, so as long as I'm in the habit of tossing out awards, I'm giving this game the Sound Design Award. Excellent job, guys.

Rockstar and DMA have certainly demonstrated that they know what game players want to experience in a video game, and nothing reflects this understanding better than the excellent set of codes they've programmed into GTAIII. Once you've done all there is to do in the game (and maybe even before then), you'll be able to drastically extend the life of the game with a plethora of fun and interesting cheat codes. These range from the expected (health, ammo and wanted level cheats) to the utilitarian (better car handling, weather cheats) all the way up to over-the-top mayhem (ultimate violence, pedestrian riots, flying cars). Living in Liberty City is a very different experience with ordinary citizens gunning for you with assault rifles, or cars that take to the air as you drive down the street. If the level of violence in the game isn't up to your liking, turn on the ultimate violence cheat and blow off heads and limbs in a spurt of bloody mayhem. I feel every game should include a code set that opens up new avenues of gameplay, and this is just another area in which GTAIII hits the nail on the head. (If you're looking for these cheat codes, click here.)

Complaints are few and far between, but are pressing enough to be worth mentioning. Chief among them are the graphics. To put it bluntly, GTAIII is not in the upper echelon of PlayStation2 visuals, displaying a host of problems like fogging and pop-in, clipping errors, seam shred, low frame rate and blurry textures. Pedestrians and vehicles pop in and out of the screen with alarming regularity, and sometimes you can make objects, including policemen in hot pursuit, vanish just by looking the other way. A second-rate game with this type of visual mediocrity would summarily earn my displeasure, but with GTAIII I don't really care about the graphic deficiencies. While there is definitely room for vast improvements, I feel the visuals are "good enough" for the purposes of the game, as the developers have sacrificed detail on the micro level (texture resolution, for instance) to gain detail on the macro level (most buildings are visible at all times, even when you're on a different island). Overall I think the good outweighs the bad, but you'll find yourself wishing this game looked a whole lot better.

More troubling than the visual deficiencies are the many quirky AI problems that plague the game. Attacking police officers will do their best to use objects in the environment for cover, but often they will get stuck running in circles. While this is comical the first few times, it does grow rather tiresome and you'll find yourself wishing that the law enforcement officials would just do their job and shoot you. Compounding matters is the detailed landscape, which is easy for the player to traverse but poses significant access problems for the CPU-controlled characters. There are numerous locations where you can hide during a heated battle, and the police, FBI and Army personnel will simply not be able to get to you. These spots are often in plain sight, like on a hillside or behind a billboard. Again, it might be funny the first few times it happens, but the deficiencies in the artificial intelligence eventually made me wish that DMA Design had done a few more weeks of bug testing. While much of the game plays very smoothly, there are moments when the AI hangs itself up on a tree or wall, and the illusion of being a wanted criminal on the lam from the law is broken.

In the end the drawbacks in GTAIII do little to diminish my overall enjoyment of the title, as it is an ambitious experiment that succeeds on so many levels. The amount of play value and sheer number of things to do is staggering, to say the least, making GTAIII one of the longest and deepest gaming experiences in recent memory. The excellent mafioso storyline, free-roaming non-linear gameplay, outstanding sound design and undeniably cool sense of style propel GTAIII to rarified air among video games. And with sales of over 7 million in the US and Europe, it seems the game-playing public agrees. In a year that saw the release of some of the most heavily anticipated games of all time, it's strange that a game that flew under the radar came in and carjacked the show, but Grand Theft Auto III is undeniably the best of the best. PS2 owners need to buy this game, and the ten of you who don't own a PS2 should go get one right now, along with a copy of GTAIII. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some old ladies to beat up.

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