When Grand Theft Auto was released for the PC and PlayStation, it was obvious that it wasn’t intended to be a technological move forward. Instead, it combined some addictive gameplay with simplistic graphics that fit the idea well. While the sequel incorporated new special effects and certain 3D elements, for the most part it is primarily 2D. Because of this, it makes the perfect game to be ported to the Game Boy Color without too much trouble.
You have probably heard the setup for Grand Theft Auto before, but here it is again in summary. You are out on the street looking for work, except in the illegal sense. Grabbing various cars off the street allows you to travel from phone booth to phone booth looking for work that will help gain you respect from the gangs in the city and earning money. Not a hard concept to conjure, and it works effectively.
Visually, Grand Theft Auto is very good. On the regular Game Boy it looks nice enough, but throw on the Game Boy Color and it takes a large step up. There is good amount of the city that you can see through the Game Boy’s tiny screen, and while it can get slightly generic and repetitive at times, most of the city is varied and interesting to drive through.
Since the main idea behind the game is to grab cars right off the street and take them for a spin you would think that there would be an abundance of vehicles roaming around, right? I sure thought that, but within a few minutes I found myself lost and confused when attempting to find something that I could get in front of quick enough to get into. The character you control moves so slowly that that as soon as a car scrolled across the screen, it was too late to catch up. At times I found myself going long amounts of time before stumbling upon a car that I was capable of obtaining, and sometimes even resorted to stopping in the middle of the road, laying the Game Boy down and coming back later to see if any cars had passed by.
Once I was able to nab a vehicle, I immediately found myself struggling to take control of the car. The controls have been designed so that it everything moves so sharply it is almost impossible to go through certain alleyways. Making things worse - and frustrating - was the added fact of having my car actually get entirely stuck one time. The poor control actually disallowed me to back out my car from the diagonal position and I eventually had to restart my game. Some of the cars weren’t even all that different other than their look. Most of the cars sped along at basically the same speed, and even the exponentially large truck chugged along at an obscene pace.
As much fun as the game can be in the beginning, eventually running away from the police and following missions becomes boring. Grand Theft Auto is not really a terribly bad game, but only worth shelling out the cash for if you know that you are a fan of the game.
-- Patrick Klepek
