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The Official GTA: Chinatown Wars thread

Has anyone played and enjoyed Chinatown Wars who didn't like GTA IV? I felt like the story was contrived in GTA IV and there was a little too easy to get lost in the game and not know what I was supposed to be doing.

The art design and gameplay of Chinatown Wars looks great though, and the reviews are extremely positive. Thoughts?
 

itsinmyveins

Gets to pilot the crappy patrol labors
I've played the game for a couple of hours now and my main complaint is that I can't find a decent way to sit when I play on the NDS :/
 

Diseased Yak

Gold Member
Extollere said:
I don't understand what happened by the first time I jacked the truck I only got like a couple of shot gun rounds. Does it depend on which box you open from the back?

As far as I can discern, it is totally random. I've so far hijacked a truck with around 75 rounds of machine gun in it, one with a stubby shotgun, and one with 5 shots of a missile launcher.

Gotta love hijacking rival gang vans, though. The first first one I hijacked (after the mission-based first one) had exactly nothing inside the door after I cut it open!
 

Darklord

Banned
This game makes me want to replay GTA: SA and download Lost and Damned.

One thing I hate is how bad the FPS are when it gets slightly busy or crowded on screen. Also there are too many "You'll get the info...after you do this" "Ok you can have the info now...just after you kill this guy" "Yeah I know who has the info but he wants you to go a mission first".

I laughed when I saw
the Italian mob guy cross dressing
. It was a massive WTF moment. I wasn't expecting it.:lol
 

Mrbob

Member
I love the character interaction in this title. The more light hearted nature is great.

Still early in the game, but dealing with Uncle Kenny is hilarious. The best part are the retorts from Huang on some of the things Kenny will say. Also, bailing Chan out and then having him attempt to bitch at you after was great. Such small touches it makes the storyline much more enjoyable to follow.

Yes, I am one who didn't like the super serious nature of GTA4 but love chinatown wars. Don't get me wrong, there is still a ton of violence and some serious settings (it is a mature rated game after all) but this feels like the Kill Bill of GTA games. Where the violence is whacky and over the top.

What I would do for an ultra violent cel shaded GTA on consoles which would be cartoony violence in nature of the earlier games (and CW), that would be awesome. Take the style of CW, but translate into full 3D for the 360 and PS3.
 
Really early in but enjoying it. People really need to knock of the GTA 4 comparisons though since the platforms completely different and determine a lot of the direction of the game.

I have a hard time driving. I always had that problem in the old overhead GTA's also though because of the view.
 

Darklord

Banned
Holy shit, right at the end of the game(I think?) I finally realized you don't have to start missions from the beginning. God damn.
 

Tobor

Member
Stoney Mason said:
Really early in but enjoying it. People really need to knock of the GTA 4 comparisons though since the platforms completely different and determine a lot of the direction of the game.

I have a hard time driving. I always had that problem in the old overhead GTA's also though because of the view.

Just stay in the middle lane and you'll cruise while just glancing off cars. The driving is pretty easy when you get the hang of that and learn to trust the auto correction.
 

markot

Banned
Yeah, im like 25% in, but driving is a piece of cake now.

The kind of car is the biggest factor for me, some cars you can drive really easy, others are a pain >.<
 

AstroLad

Hail to the KING baby
Tobor said:
Just stay in the middle lane and you'll cruise while just glancing off cars. The driving is pretty easy when you get the hang of that and learn to trust the auto correction.
Yeah and turn the GPS on top screen and it's like you're playing Pac-Man!

Yeah, im like 25% in, but driving is a piece of cake now.

The kind of car is the biggest factor for me, some cars you can drive really easy, others are a pain >.<
Definitely, the Dukes and the Stallion are pure shit but everything else handles pretty well with the only caveat being that the big cars aren't particularly useful.
 

Tobor

Member
AstroLad said:
Yeah and turn the GPS on top screen and it's like you're playing Pac-Man!


Definitely, the Dukes and the Stallion are pure shit but everything else handles pretty well with the only caveat being that the big cars aren't particularly useful.

I don't like the GPS on the top screen personally, but it's a nice addition for anyone having trouble.
 

AstroLad

Hail to the KING baby
Tobor said:
I don't like the GPS on the top screen personally, but it's a nice addition for anyone having trouble.
I like it. Makes me more efficient; although I can certainly see how some would consider it cheating of sorts or find it annoying because it only shows you legal routes. As to the latter, I don't follow it rigidly so I find it less troublesome in that respect.
 
The way I jack ammunation trucks:
I drive up along side in a car and drill it with the SMG, then the guy hops out and I drill him. Might be easiest with a bullet proof cabby to neutralize the guy's shotty but it doesn't matter too much since you'll be ditching it anyway.

I just finished the game.
 

Darklord

Banned
Kind of a weak ending, not the mission but the very end, it was abrupt. I still loved the game though.

With the golden lions, how do you get the 2 bonus missions? Just defeat them?
 

andthebeatgoeson

Junior Member
AstroLad said:
Yep, to put it sappily it really recaptures the magic of GTA3. It's certainly flawed in many ways, but then again so was GTA3, but that desire to keep coming back and doing different sidequests, and to just cause chaos and see what happens reminds me so much of playing GTA3 for the first time. I liked SA a lot too, but that was because of depth rather than the aforementioned magic.


I friggen love this game. It proves that there is a difference between 3 (mostly) and Vice City (somewhat) and the rest. I love just doing shit. It does have a special quality: I can't stop with the drug scene. I love it. And the only objective is to get more money. I'm gonna drop 60 hours into this and will probably keep at it later. I like fucking with the police and driving is better. I would really love if they took all the shit out of the streets that slow you down.

Gameplay-wise, sign posts and trees do nothing. Yes, it's realizm but only for realistic's sake. They need to go back to GTA3 and drive around again and realize driving recklessly at high speeds is an asset. With these big open cities, they need to encourage fast, reckless driving. It IS Grand THEFT Auto, not Sunday morning traffic jam in the country. I want to speed up, smack into a car, turn around, get a fast start, smack into the same car, hit the policeman, take off down the highway, across the entire city, throw a molotov during a drive by. It shouldn't be ridiculously easy but 20 minute chases with a 4 star wanted rating should be pretty doable. The cars shouldn't disappear. They should encourage the driving to get more stars and drive faster.

Take away all the light poles and such that slow you down. Fuck realism, for once. Fuck it in the ass. GTA soars with a great soundtrack, fast driving and lawlessness. Embrace this shit, GTA. I can drive in traffic tomorrow on the way to work. I cannot speed down the road, hit a cop and fuck a hooker.
 

Meesh

Member
skinnyrattler said:
I friggen love this game. It proves that there is a difference between 3 (mostly) and Vice City (somewhat) and the rest. I love just doing shit. It does have a special quality: I can't stop with the drug scene. I love it. And the only objective is to get more money. I'm gonna drop 60 hours into this and will probably keep at it later. I like fucking with the police and driving is better. I would really love if they took all the shit out of the streets that slow you down.

Gameplay-wise, sign posts and trees do nothing. Yes, it's realizm but only for realistic's sake. They need to go back to GTA3 and drive around again and realize driving recklessly at high speeds is an asset. With these big open cities, they need to encourage fast, reckless driving. It IS Grand THEFT Auto, not Sunday morning traffic jam in the country. I want to speed up, smack into a car, turn around, get a fast start, smack into the same car, hit the policeman, take off down the highway, across the entire city, throw a molotov during a drive by. It shouldn't be ridiculously easy but 20 minute chases with a 4 star wanted rating should be pretty doable. The cars shouldn't disappear. They should encourage the driving to get more stars and drive faster.

Take away all the light poles and such that slow you down. Fuck realism, for once. Fuck it in the ass. GTA soars with a great soundtrack, fast driving and lawlessness. Embrace this shit, GTA. I can drive in traffic tomorrow on the way to work. I cannot speed down the road, hit a cop and fuck a hooker.

I've never played any GTA, so I came in here looking for a fellow GAFers honest review to get me interested...mission accomplished. :)
 

andthebeatgoeson

Junior Member
Evilink said:
I've never played any GTA, so I came in here looking for a fellow GAFers honest review to get me interested...mission accomplished. :)
I didn't go in depth but just standing on my soapbox with the driving issue. Either way, most fun I've had with a GTA since 3 and VC. Not saying it's a better game but it does hit that sweet spot that can be summarized by finding a rocket launcher in GTA3 and spending 15 minutes on top of a parking garage and shooting cars and helicopters. GTA really nailed that down in the early part but has lost it's way. Chinatown got it back to the basics and really improved on certain aspects compared to GTA4: driving, GPS (better include onscreen GPS in all GTAs from now on), property buying and drug trade for distractions. I don't want to play darts. I want to rampage and deal drugs. I want to drive real fast. This GTA hit it real nice. If you are semi-interested, I would definitely recommend.
 
Finishing the story (and a bunch of side stuff, according to pecentage in the 60+) I thought the game was great, but definetly one of the weaker GTA games in general. I think it's maybe the second worst after the GBA one (which was pretty bad, so the gap between last and second to last is quite large). Only thing I hope they carry on from this game for other GTA game is the drug trade system, just don't make it as simple as it was here. The touch stuff was neat at first but quickly became an annoyance.

and where exactly is the car dealership? it isn't an option on the gps and I can't remember the exact area from that one mission.
 

Forkball

Member
The car dealership is actually a gas station named BOABA. There's the normal gas fillup and then a blue entrance door that leads to all the different cars. Even though I beat the game I still don't have all of them.

So like I said before, I just beat the game.
The ending was a bit predictable. I wasn't sure who the rat was, but when both Chen and Zhou were accused of being the rats, I knew for sure they were being set up.

The last few missions are really good though. The aiming kind of screws up with so many enemies however. Now I'm looking for side missions to do. I haven't done any of the side jobs except for a few random missions from pedestrians (I wonder if I've done them all...). I heard there's a Go-Kart area so I want to check that out. I'm surprised there's no real guide for this game yet, I wanted to look up some secrets and side things I can do but I can't find anything comprehensive.
 

EatChildren

Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Caesar III said:
Yesterday I found the graveyard with a Left4Dead like Mission of Survival. This was great :lol

this game is so awesome.

HoboTron!

I laughed when I found that. Its also heaps of fun.
 

Dash Kappei

Not actually that important
ElfoMan said:
What do you mean?

I think he means that unlike previous GTAs, if you're redoing a mission after gettin' killed in the middle of it, you can just press Select to skip all the driving parts you've already done before and such.

Awesome indeed, I want it in every GTA from now on.
 

markot

Banned
I havent found the hooker one yet >.<

Pretty addictive game, especially the drug running... hehe, can make crap loads on coke!
 

joetachi

Member
markot said:
I havent found the hooker one yet >.<

Pretty addictive game, especially the drug running... hehe, can make crap loads on coke!
Make sure you have an automatic gun full of bullets. Those girls will rape you if you dont.
 

tabsina

Member
is it just me that notices the gps is useless, in that it at times would instruct you to nearly circle half an island, just to get to the next block over (i realize it only allows for legal directions, but unless turning left at lights is illegal in liberty city, it is still inefficient)..

i find myself always looking at the map as soon as i have to go somewhere, and remember where the gps was trying to direct me, so i can use that as a guide for the way i'm actually going to go
 
joetachi said:
Make sure you have an automatic gun full of bullets. Those girls will rape you if you dont.
I did not know what happens first, I had no weapon at all so I had to chainsaw the first bunch of them :D
 

Darklord

Banned
I just realized something. There are no female characters. None. Except the one at the very start who dies in like 1 minute. It's weird.

ElfoMan said:
What do you mean?

Every time I failed a mission I had to restart the whole thing but when I pressed select it jumped me to the second part of it where I failed.
 

mujun

Member
i dug this game but after a while it started to drag, probably was around the halfway mark.

at the
sniping to protect the mob guy
mission, bout 5 missions from the end i gave up and sold it off.
 

AstroLad

Hail to the KING baby
that's weird i beat it and my only complaints were that it was a tad short and easy. never thought it dragged at all though
 

mattso

Member
picked this up yesterday

it seems everytime I play a gta all I want to do at first are the cab missions. This one is no different.
 

mujun

Member
AstroLad said:
that's weird i beat it and my only complaints were that it was a tad short and easy. never thought it dragged at all though

the gameplay (despite the great variety in what the missions had you doing touch screen wise.. go figure) got repetitive to me and despite how cool the writing and story is the limitations of the device meant i just couldnt get into that much.

add to that that as a gta game it lacked some of the main things i love about gta, exploring the world by base jumping or flying, driving really fast and doing crazy jumps (made difficult by the perspective in this one), etc.

still some of the new elements are downright awesome. the drug dealing of course, the home delivery ammunation, etc.

if they carry over the best design philosophies of this game to gta 5 it will be an amazing game id bet.
 

Skorp

Neo Member
GTA at its best. The very few complaints I have aren't worth mentioning because the overall package delivers like very few games do these days. This game is pure giddy fun.

I was somewhat disappointed as well with GTA IV. I expected to be amazed and I suppose I was, the game was beautiful, but it just lacked fun. Things felt like a chore at times. I missed a lot of the things that made San Andreas so much fun. Chinatown Wars is exactly what I wanted GTA IV to be.

FlyinJ said:
How do purchased cars work in this? If you buy one and lose it, is it gone for good?

One of the few things I dislike about this game is that it retains the old-school GTA garage system. Why would I ever buy an expensive car, when I can't retain it? I could understand if it was something like "well, you destroyed it so it's gone", but half the time you bring a car to a mission and you have to leave it behind and it's lost.

Yeah if you lose it, its gone. Cars are relatively inexpensive to buy though. They range from 500-10000. Most of them are around 1000. The tank is 10000. Most of your money comes from drug trading and if you do it a decent amount its not hard to make oodles of cash.

I always loved the garage system actually. You don't take out cars you buy or love to go on a mission. You take it out to drive to a drug trade or to do some jumps or something.
 

Shinjitsu

Banned
Anyone else hope this game is as testbed for GTA4 DLC? Or better yet GTA5? So many things in this game that I love compared to pass GTA games: Drug Trading, Cop Chases, Ammo Delivery, I'm sure I could think of more but the whiskey is talking now:D
PLEASE Rockstar carry some of this over to new releases of GTA.
 

Jedeye Sniv

Banned
crispyben said:
So, did anybody figure out what these whirly blue things mean/are/trigger?

Yes. :lol

I just realised that the music in this game is actually buy real bands - look up Deadmau5 on iTunes and there's a whole raft of stuff by him. Haven't looked for the songs from the game yet though, I hope I can find them though, they're awesome.

EDIT: actually, only one track is by Deadmau5, it's 'Hi friend (instrumental)'. the rest on his station are by BSOD.

The game keeps on surprising me too. Yesterday I found a street racing building (in Steinway I think) that I don't think had ever been mentioned by the game. And if you find the Hearse (also in Steinway) there's a racing mini-game there as well. It's awesome how all this stuff if packed in. I don't want to finish the game yet, I just want to dick about and see what else there is. I still haven't found this prostitute either, where abouts is she?

The swirly blue things are for when the game is finished. I think there's bonus missions and such around there. It's been mentioned in this thread already.

Also, I think it was Benjamin asking upthread what the friend codes are for - I looked in the manual (yes, I know!) and it seems you can stat-trade and maybe even trade goods of some kind over the internets. I'm 335199023327 if anyone wants to give it a go. I've added Wizpig as a test, seems to work but i can't tell what i can do with it just yet.
 
Just came to say, this is pretty much my fav GTA game by far. Everything I liked about the 2D originals, mixed with only the good elements of the 3D versions...sans the crap.
 
Just came to say, this is pretty much my fav GTA game by far. Everything I liked about the 2D originals, mixed with only the good elements of the 3D versions...sans the crap.
 
2igm0p2.jpg


There's supposed to be a good game buried somewhere beneath all those stickers. Can you find out which?

Anyway, starting to play now :D
 
I really do love the atmosphere and the diversity and the tone of this game but holy cow the controls on the cars are atrocious. Is there an ebrake button because turning is ridiculous. I just tried to do Wheelman this morning and ran out of time.

It's like the third mission!

:(
 
BenjaminBirdie said:
I really do love the atmosphere and the diversity and the tone of this game but holy cow the controls on the cars are atrocious. Is there an ebrake button because turning is ridiculous. I just tried to do Wheelman this morning and ran out of time.

It's like the third mission!

:(

R is the handbrake like in the PS2 GTA games (pre-trigger support)

And by default the game has it so that your car is on tracks, so it basically locks onto the road, like a very light version of Tron. You can turn that off in the menu if you want it to be more free.
 
Linkzg said:
R is the handbrake like in the PS2 GTA games (pre-trigger support)

And by default the game has it so that your car is on tracks, so it basically locks onto the road, like a very light version of Tron. You can turn that off in the menu if you want it to be more free.

That will probably help a lot. I'd prefer it of it was locked to the road, not taking these ridiculous wide-ass turns into hot dog stands and shit.
 
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