The Stack

Given the effort that I devoted to getting the right analog stick to work in this game, the results are disappointing. It seems that the game is treating my custom bindings as on/off switches, like a keyboard, rather than as analog values. When on foot, you can’t turn carefully. You’re either turning or you’re not, and that’s all there is to it.

Fortunately, this doesn’t usually make a difference. The left analog stick works fine, and that’s the one you use for steering vehicles. Since there’s no chance that you’ll skid and flip over when you’re on foot, fine movement is less crucial then. It becomes somewhat more important in a firefight, because you use the right stick for aiming your weapon, but I’ve managed to muddle through a third of the game with awkward aiming. I find that I can afford to take a few seconds to adjust my aim if I’m only facing two or three assailants, and if I’m facing more than that, I can usually just put my gun away and get in a car. (Not necessarily to flee; used correctly, automobiles are the deadliest weapons in the game.)

But the second-to-last mission in Portland (the first of the three islands that comprise Liberty City) makes this impossible. The goal of this mission is to protect your friend 8-Ball, an explosives expert, as he plants a bomb on a ship that serves as a rival gang’s headquarters. You’re given a sniper rifle to eliminate the sentries guarding the ship, and a safe vantage point to do it from. But you have to do it fast: the moment you fire the first shot, 8-Ball goes charging in, trusting you to dispatch any threats before they kill him. It’s nigh impossible to aim quickly and accurately enough with a gamepad.

Fortunately, there’s another option. After failing the mission three or four times, I tried aiming with my trackball mouse. The mission became all but trivial.

Now, GTA3 was clearly designed for the PS2 and only grudgingly ported to the PC. But even when a game prefers a console, I prefer a computer, mainly for three reasons: finer graphics, greater ease of modding, and wider range of input devices. This game reminds me that this last point isn’t just about choosing the right device for a game: different subsections of a game can have different needs. Still, I have to admit that this is a case of the PC version solving a problem that the PC version caused in the first place.

Acting on the advice of many, I finally gave up and bought a different PSX-to-USB adaptor that has a better driver, one that allows me to arbitrarily reassign axes. Such devices are not expensive, but still, it rankles, because I didn’t really want or need a different adaptor. In terms of hardware, my new adaptor can’t be very different from my old one. Both devices take the same kind of signal, and produce the same kind of signal. All I really needed was a better driver. The driver for the new device was available for free download on the web, but Windows wouldn’t allow me to use it with the old adaptor.

I know very little about Windows device drivers, and less about USB, but presumably the two devices send some kind of signature that lets the USB host figure out which device it is. So it should be possible to hack the new driver to work with the old device by changing the signature it looks for. But figuring out how to do this would have involved more work than it took to earn the money I used to pay for the new adaptor.

Anyway, at least I should be able to play GTA3 properly now.

Surely, Grand Theft Auto 3 is one of the games that any game-literate person must know, one of the defining games of this decade. Not only has it been tremendously influential to the industry, it’s controversial enough to have become one of the few games that even non-gamers have heard of. It’s even been satirized in a soda commercial. Strange to think that it’s taken me this long to get around to playing it.

My reasons for not playing it yet are not good ones. They stem from my completist leanings: I don’t like to play series out of order if I can help it. Thus, I didn’t want to start GTA3 until I had finished GTA2, even though there’s no continuity of story or anything like that. And it took me a while to get around to playing through GTA2 simply because it wasn’t all that good. Its faction system was an interesting experiment, but it encouraged somewhat tedious gameplay. The easiest way to complete many of the missions was to pacify the gang whose turf you’d be invading in advance, which you could do by killing your unresisting allies in the target gang’s rival gang. Still, I finished GTA2 a few months ago, and then took a months-long break from the series.

Even now, I haven’t really made a serious go of it. I’m having some difficulty getting it to work properly with my joystick, a PS2 Dualshock controller connected to my PC via a PSX-to-USB adaptor from Radio Shack. The problems I’m having are problems I’ve had before: the right analog stick seems to have its axes swapped, so that pressing forward and back rotates the camera and pressing left and right zooms in and out. Various websites suggest registry hacks to fix this, but nothing has worked yet. I suppose I could just go to keyboard/mouse controls, but that just seems wrong for something that’s primarily a PS2 game.