The Stack

OK, it’s been more than a month since my last post. The seasonal Steam Sale distracted me. It did this even before the sale proper began, by means of special promotional trading cards that kicked off a predictable trading frenzy which, for my part, hasn’t completely dissipated yet. Steam trading cards are essentially a metagame — a game that contains other games — and, as such, they easily take the place of the other chief metagame in my life, this blog. But since the card metagame is the chief game that’s occupying my attention lately, I guess I should blog about it a little.

Steam trading cards were introduced a little over a year ago. I, like many Steam users, didn’t pay them much attention until they were made the centerpiece of the promotion surrounding last year’s Summer Sale. Previous seasonal promotions had been more ad-hoc, involving special content in specific games — new themed levels, holiday-wrapped gift boxes dropped by monsters — and special tasks relating to this content that could earn you vanity items such as limited-edition hats for use in Team Fortress 2. I kind of miss that, but Valve seems to have regarded the cards as an improvement, because they’ve used the card system in every sale promotion since then.

Each participating game — and participation is completely optional — has its own set of virtual cards, with anywhere from 5 to 15 distinct cards in a set, featuring art provided by the game’s makers. The art varies considerably from game to game — some have concept art from the game’s development, some have screenshots, some have illustrations or cartoons inspired by the game, a few even have character stats on them like a baseball card. Obviously the art isn’t the appeal to the collectors here, though. If you just wanted to look at the pictures, they’re all easily found on the Web. No, if you’re collecting cards, it’s simply because collecting cards appeals to you. Because you’re an obsessive completist, or because you like the implicit trading game involved.

To summarize the rules of this game: Collected cards can be crafted into badges, which give you experience points, which help you get more cards, in a self-reinforcing cycle. I’ve heard people ridicule the whole system on that basis alone, asking “What’s the point?”, even as they happily play other games that are just as circular, just as pointless.

The cards initially come into the system as a result of people playing games they own on Steam. While you’re playing a game that has cards, you’ll just spontaneously receive a card once in a while. You only get a limited number of these drops, though, and the limit is equal to half the number of cards in the set, rounded up. Usually it takes a few hours to exhaust the drops (which, in some cases, may be enough to finish the game — I think of McPixel as an especially egregious example here), but once you’ve done that, you’re eligible for booster packs for that game. Boosters contain three cards, regardless of how many cards are in the set, and are just given out to random eligible users once in a while. Exactly how Valve decides when to give out boosters is unknown — all we know is that it’s linked to the rate at which players make badges, which may or may not mean that they try to keep a constant number of cards in circulation. When boosters are issued, your chance of being chosen to receive one is affected by your Steam account’s “level”, which is a concept that came in with the card system. There’s this whole system of XP, with levels taking arithmetically-increasing amounts of XP to attain. And that’s what badges are for: they’re the source of XP. A complete set of cards can be turned into a game-specific badge, or used to upgrade a badge you already have (normal badges can be upgraded four times), yielding 100 XP each time, which is enough to earn you an entire level at the lower tiers. Crafting a badge also gives you a couple of minor vanity items and a discount coupon for another game, but I consider these inconsequential — goodness knows there’s a glut of both out there. There exist badges that aren’t card-based — player profile attributes from older promotions got turned into badges so that they could also contribute XP — but cards are by far the dominant badge source. Cards can be traded between players, or bought and sold on the Steam marketplace, but badges are permanently linked to a single account.

There are a few other wrinkles, like “foil cards”, and how the system deals with free-to-play-games, but we’ll ignore those for now. I should probably say something about the promotional cards that kicked off this post. Each of the major seasonal sales (summer and winter) since Summer 2013 has had its own card set. There were several ways to earn these cards, but the most significant one for this discussion is this: starting about a week before the sale, crafting a badge for any game would give you a promotional card in the place of the coupon. (The coupons would have been pretty useless during the sale, due to not being combinable with other discounts.) The Summer 2013 cards worked pretty much like normal game cards, with a five-level badge and all, but subsequent promotions added two extra twists: there’s no limit to how many times you can upgrade the event badge, and any unbadged cards vanish when the sale is over. Thus, the sale produces a flurry of limited-opportunity card-trading and badge-making, and the limited availability of the promotional cards was enough to make a lot of users, including myself, hold off on pursuing badges while the Summer 2014 sale was approaching, so as to maximize our sale badge XP.

Now, before I start tearing this system apart, I’d like to acknowledge the ways in which it’s kind of brilliant. First of all, it links getting cards to actually playing games, which is good for the players, because it gives them an extra motivation to actually try out all the extra games they got in sales or bundles, and good for the developers, because having people play their games to get the cards stimulates interest in them. What’s more, it links cards to their games in a very content-agnostic way. If I had been asked to devise a trading-card system linked to playing games, I probably would have tried to link it to progress in the game — say, one card for every level you complete or something — but any such scheme would assume a lot about the sort of game it is. You can’t even really say “You get all your cards when you reach the ending”, because not all games have endings. The existing system only assumes that games are played in distinct sessions of nonzero duration — which may not be a safe assumption about games in general, but it’s fine for the sort of games Steam supports.

Secondly, it encourages player interaction, even in games that don’t encourage it otherwise. Booster packs come rarely enough that you’re unlikely to complete many badges without trading, and the interface for viewing your progress on a badge helpfully tells you which people on your Friends list own the cards you’re missing, to facilitate deal-making. Mind you, trading away cards effectively means giving up on one badge to complete another, which can be a tough decision: it’s natural to want badges for the games you like, so consequently giving up cards for a game feels like a statement that you don’t like that game so much, even though the very fact that you have those cards in the first place means you probably do. At any rate, trading means exposing your card inventory, which communicates something about your game preferences. Engines of commerce such as Steam are always trying to get customers to endorse products by rating them or reviewing them or “liking” them, but the card system gets something of the same effect without coming off as asking for an unpaid favor.

Tomorrow, I’ll post about some things I don’t like about the system.

I seem to have won. Tommy Vercetti is now undisputed master of Vice City, which is basically what he’s been acting like all along, taking any vehicle he wants and so forth. He’s the player avatar, and the city itself is literally your plaything. Few games acknowledge this, somehow.

Most of the missions in the later part of the game are, for once, part of a larger pattern. You buy a business, then you do one or more missions or other special activities relating to that business, and when you’re done, it becomes a source of cash, which accumulates at a pick-up point in front, building up to a maximum that varies from business to business. Picking up this free money becomes a chore reminiscent of the daily resource pickups in Heroes of Might and Magic and its ilk, except that you can’t keep a separate hero stack devoted to the pickups, as your only hero is Tommy himself. (Expanding the scope of your operations does produce gang members on your side, wandering the streets near your holdings, wearing an imitation of Tommy’s trademark Hawaiian shirt. But you have absolutely no control over them.) You then use this money to buy more businesses. Occasionally you get increasingly agitated phone calls from Forelli, accusing Tommy of cutting him out, which is completely accurate. I should have seen this coming. Recovering the money, the original impetus for the whole enterprise, isn’t even a factor any more. It’s now about who’s in control, and Tommy, having tasted power, isn’t interested in going back to being someone else’s lackey.

The endgame becomes available before you’ve finished all the available business missions, giving you some leeway to refuse missions you find too difficult. It consists of two missions. First, Forelli sends his men on motorcycles to collect the “taxes” from your holdings, and you have to stop them, which is most easily accomplished by staking out one business and waiting for them. This done, there’s a showdown at Vercetti Manor (formerly Diaz Manor), involving waves of goons charging into your minigun. (By this point I had unlocked the next Hidden Package weapon, the rocket launcher ¹The rocket launcher was the final unlockable in GTA3, but there’s three more levels here that I haven’t even reached. Apparently one is called a “Rhino”, but it’s actually a kind of tank, rather than a rhinoceros you can ride around the streets, because this isn’t Saints Row. , but the minigun is still the best weapon.) It’s an old story: an absentee lord tries to claim someone else’s spoils, and a rebellious hero refuses, goes to war with the old power, and wins. Americans will see the legend of their own nation’s origins here, but it’s an even better fit to certain older versions of the King Arthur myth, with Rome in the Forelli role, returning after years to demand tribute after Arthur’s knights subdued the invading Saxons without their help. Except I’ve never seen a version of the Arthur myth that was quite this crass.

Despite its mythic resonance, the final battle feels kind of spare and anticlimactic. It’s a pure shooting mission, and shooting is not a very deep or rich activity in this game, or at least not once you’ve finished experimenting and settled on a preferred gun. Also, the absence of music works against it. I’m not saying that climactic battles in games always need to have music, but you spend a great deal of your time in this game in various vehicles, and no matter what’s on the car radio, it somehow always seems to complement the action, whether you’re evading police cars to a mambo or aiming for a sweet motorcycle jump to Flock of Seagulls. This is the game’s soundtrack, and its absence in the final stretch is noticeable. They should really do a GTA where the end boss is a driving mission, if they haven’t already. Driving is more what the game’s about anyway.

Much of my last session was spent airborne. First, I found the solution to my problems with that seaplane: switching back to joystick controls. There’s pretty definitely something going wrong with the keyboard input there, because getting into the air was a cinch once I was using a device that the game recognized consistently.

After that, the same mission source (a movie studio, now making porn at Tommy’s behest) gave me a multi-stage mission that involved tailing a limousine without getting too close to it, and while the mission didn’t require that I use a helicopter, it provided one and suggested that I use it. Good thing, too, because the final stage of the mission got me in deep trouble with the cops, and, as before, the easiest way to deal with this is to dash to the helicopter you parked nearby. This has become my go-to technique for evading police in missions that give you a high Wanted rating, which, in this late part of the game, is most of them. The police have helicopters too, but it’s a lot easier to evade them than to dodge all the traffic you’d encounter on the ground.

The final porn mission’s goal was to mess with some searchlights on a rooftop. Considering that it’s already been established that the studio has access to both a plane and a helicopter, you might think this would simply be a matter of flying to the relevant rooftop, but no, you’re supposed to ride a motorcycle into a tall building, up the elevator, through a plate glass window into an adjacent building, and finally over a long sequence of ramps and rooftops, with checkpoints all along the path to guide you. I wound up using a helicopter anyway. I tried to do the motorcycle thing, but fell off and lost my bike after a few jumps, and found it simpler to go back to a nearby safehouse and pick up a helicopter than to find another bike. The thing is, you can’t just go directly to the searchlights. You have to go through all the motorcycle checkpoints, but the game doesn’t care if you’re actually on a motorcycle or not. Of all the borderline cheating I’ve done over the course of the game, flying through those checkpoints feels the cheatingest.

The experience of flying through the Vice City skyline reinforces one of the game’s greatest strengths: its sense of spatial coherence. You’re interacting with the structures of the city at a different level and a different scale than normal, ignoring the streets that channel your path on the ground, instead paying attention to the spires and towers that are your only obstacles but which you seldom look at from below. And yet, everything about the city is recognizable from the hours you’ve spent driving and walking around it. It helps that the city is fairly small. From the air, you can really feel like the whole thing is spread out around you like a gaming table.

And for what it’s worth, I found that flying in the plane produced this sensation more strongly than the helicopter. In a helicopter, you essentially levitate: you take off vertically, you have buttons to ascend and descend and can rotate in place. Accelerating means tilting the rotor and therefore losing altitute, but since you can just gain more altitude at will, this isn’t very significant. In an airplane, you swoop around madly. You have to struggle to keep the thing level, you can’t stop, you have to swerve around obstacles because you can’t rise fast enough to go over them. In short, as with cars, your control is imperfect, and this forces you to engage the environment more. This reflection really makes me regret cheating on that motorcycle mission, because it seems like I’ve missed out on more of the same thing.

I made some progress last night, and as a result all of my remaining missions involve difficult driving. I suppose this was predictable, seeing how the minigun zips me past the more combat-oriented missions. One mission is a bit like the premise of the movie Speed: you have to drive through city streets in a limousine containing a bomb that goes off if you don’t go fast enough. One is a race-a-boat-through-a-series-of-checkpoints missions, and somewhat trickier than the earlier such. And one involves piloting a seaplane with controls like GTA3‘s Dodo through a bunch of checkpoints at varying altitude. I’m having so little luck getting that seaplane in the air that I suspect I’m having input problems similar to the ice cream jingle from a few posts back.

It strikes me that part of my problem with these missions in particular is that they don’t let me choose the vehicle. The vehicle is a fixed part of the mission parameters, and that makes success purely a matter of skill, rather than of choosing the thing that makes it easier. This was a big part of some of the earlier missions, and the right vehicle isn’t always the fastest one. For example, the mission that leads into ousting Diaz involves rescuing an injured comrade in a junkyard, and taking him to the hospital. On the way out, you’re attacked by four cars driven by Diaz’s goons, which basically just ram you and make you spin around and run into walls so you can’t get anywhere. After enough of this treatment, your car explodes. Now, getting to the junkyard in time to rescue your partner requires a fast car, but once there, the simplest approach is to ditch it and switch to a garbage truck that’s conveniently nearby. It can take a lot of damage, and it’s heavy enough that it’s hard to knock off course. (It took me multiple attempts at the mission realize this, though. I kept exploding the garbage truck with my minigun on the way in just to waste the goons around it.)

That example is at least one that the designer pretty clearly set up for you. Here’s one that wasn’t: There’s a mission to blow up a store whose owner went to the police instead of giving you protection money. The place is crawling with cops, so you’re told to disguise yourself as a cop and drive a police car to the store. Once there, the bomb goes off before you can get away, and your Wanted rating immediately goes up to near maximum. Suddenly there’s police all over the place chasing you, setting up roadblocks, heading you off, etc. As always, they’ll be off your back the moment you make it to a spray shop to repaint your vehicle and give it new plates, but it’s difficult to even make it that far. Far easier if, instead of driving a cop car to the store as instructed, you bring a helicopter and simply take off into the skies, out of reach of their guns. Helicopters are very conveniently available at several of my hideouts at this point of the game.

Solutions like these take advantage of the open-world genre’s greatest strength, its freedom of action. The missions that lock you into a specific vehicle take that freedom away from you, and with it, the satisfaction of exploiting your freedom in clever ways. It strikes me that there are probably also missions where solving problems through clever weapon choice could produce similar satisfaction, but I pretty much spoiled that for myself by unlocking the minigun so early. There’s not much point in ever choosing any other gun once you have that.

Vice City consists of two parallel islands that span the map from north to south like an enormous pause button, plus a few smaller islands between them, all joined by bridges (although you can also travel between them by boat or helicopter). This layout seems to be at least partly intended to aid in memory management by dividing the city into two zones. My chief evidence for this is that, when you drive across the zone boundary, a loading screen pops up briefly. Very briefly. I assume that it tended to stay up longer on the game’s original target hardware, but on a modern gaming machine, the loading screen stays up for a mere fraction of a second, registering as just a flicker, but a highly distracting flicker. The first few times this happened to me, it was startling enough that I lost control of my car. Now, the game is good about maintaining continuity across the zone boundary: the same cars will be around you after the flicker as before. So the chief thing indicating any discontinuity is the loading screen itself. If they left that out, and simply froze the contents of the screen for the moment that it takes to load the other zone, I might not even notice.

While this might be the ideal approach for Vice City in particular, I can’t in general advocate the removal of loading screens from games where their primary purpose is unnecessary. I have played many older games where the loading screens flit by, and very often my reaction is that I wish they’d linger. A well-designed loading screen isn’t just a waiting room you have to tolerate on the way to the actual game content, it’s part of the the game content itself, whether it’s by providing extra background information or gameplay tips in text, or by adding to the atmosphere with additional art and animation. I’m not saying it’s always good, but when it is, it’s unsatisfying to lose it. If only more developers thought to throw in a “Click to Continue”! It might not be ideal when zoning as in Vice City, but letting the player decide when the level starts is a valuable corrective not just for loading screens that are too short, but also for ones that are too long and temporarily lose the player’s attention.

I once joked about a nonexistent special activity for ice cream trucks in GTA3. Well, guess what? Vice City has a special activity for ice cream trucks! Sort of. When you buy the ice cream factory, it turns out that it’s not really an ice cream factory, and that they’re using the trucks to distribute something else that slowly gets you in trouble with the police as you hand it out. The game is oddly coy about exactly what it is — one assumes drugs, but it’s only ever identified as “product”. In most games, I’d assume that they’re trying to skirt around drug stuff in order to maintain a content rating and avoid being banned in the more persnicketty nations, but that doesn’t really make sense here, because there’s been so many references to drug use and drug dealing already, starting with the premise of the whole game. I suppose it’s possible that the various ratings bodies and other moral watchdogs would be harsher on an interactive drug-dealing mission than they would be on a cutscene.

At any rate, most of the businesses available for purchase have a similar story: once you buy them, you discover that they’re already involved in crimes, even before you can exert your corrupting influence. The used car dealership deals in stolen cars, the print works does a little counterfeiting on the side, etc. This serves as a way to introduce business-specific missions where you expand these operations, but that doesn’t really require the crimes to already be in place. But I suppose that having Tommy Vercetti be the source of all crime, rather than its mere discoverer, would make the whole thing darker and less comic. As it is, no one in Vice City is innocent, and that absolves the player of a certain amount of responsibility. Tommy isn’t a monster if everyone else is just as bad as him, if the only thing that separates him from them is that he’s better at it.

I’ll note one strange technical problem I had with the ice cream distribution in particular. The game tells you to use the shift key to turn on your ice cream truck’s jingle and attract customers. This is in fact an essential part of distributing “product”; no one will come to your truck if it isn’t jingling. But somehow, I found I was usually unable to turn the jingle on, and had to try over and over again before it took. The jingle toggle uses the same key as the horn on most cars, and that works fine, so it’s not like the game was failing to register the keypress. My best guess is that the difference lies in it being a toggle, which you press to start and press again to stop, whereas the horn toots for as long as you hold the key down. This is the sort of thing that I can see being affected by framerate or CPU speed, in which case it’s probably broken forever now, and will only get worse.

I’ve mentioned the in-game radio stations a little, but not enough to really get across what an important part of the game they are. Outside of the intro cutscene and presumably the ending credits, all the music in this game is diegetic. Car radios provide the bulk of game’s soundtrack.

Every civilian vehicle ¹Police cars and fire engines and the like are excepted. Strangely, motorcycles are not. has a radio that automatically turns on when you climb inside, tuned by default to a station that’s appropriate to the stereotypical owner of that style of vehicle, although you can change the station at will. There’s a rock station, a hip-hop station, a synth-pop station, a Latin music station with Spanish-language announcements, a talk radio station, an NPR affiliate, and so forth. Eleven in all, each playing a loop more than an hour long, synchronized to real time: if you leave the car or switch to another station for a while, the radio playback keeps advancing.

Mechanically, this all proceeds from the basics set down in the original GTA, just with different content. There’s considerably more content now, for one thing; back then, some of the radio stations just looped one song repeatedly. But also, by the time of Vice City, the success of the GTA phenomenon meant that Rockstar had the wherewithal to license well-known music, turning the whole thing into a sort of 80s retro hit parade: Billy Jean, Video Killed the Radio Star, Broken Wings, 99 Luftballons. In the earlier games, most of the music was original, written for the game, and much of it was satirical. There’s still a certain amount of that going on, mind. There’s a fictional band called “Love Fist” that gets interviewed on one of the talk stations and apparently has some songs mixed in with the real 80s music. But I couldn’t tell you which songs are theirs, even though I’m sure I’ve heard them multiple times over the course of playing the game. I suppose it’s because popular music in the 80s was so frequently close to self-satire to begin with. I mean, I don’t know what I would have made of the song Poison Arrow if I had heard it for the first time in this context. (“Stupid! Stupid!”)

Now, Love Fist isn’t just a thing on the radio. Their interview mentions that they’re doing a concert in Vice City, and sure enough, you can find the arena where they’ll be performing, all festooned with concert posters. Later in the game you even meet them and do missions for them (fetching them drugs and such). So the radio isn’t just a simultaneous and parallel amusement: it’s world-building. There’s actually quite a lot of this, even on the music channels, which have ads for fictitious products endorsed by local celebrities who might or might not enter Tommy’s story at some point. And owing to the way radio works, it’s a particular sort of ambient world-building, where you get the background in small pieces and at random times while you’re paying more attention to something else. Occasionally I’m tempted to just sit in the car and listen to the radio for a while so as not to miss any information, but I remind myself that I’ll have plenty more opportunities to hear it all over the course of the remaining missions.

I’ve reached a major plot turn. There’s this crime boss named Diaz, who the player character Tommy Vercetti has good reason to believe was involved in stealing the drug money that kicked off the whole story. You do some missions for him in order to gain his trust, but, for reasons I won’t go into here, that trust is suddenly shattered, and Diaz’s men are suddenly out to kill you. So Tommy replies in kind, storming Diaz’s opulent mansion in the rich part of town and killing him first. This leaves a power vacuum in the Vice City crime scene, which Tommy immediately fills. He moves into Diaz’s mansion and sets about taking over the town.

This is a dramatic change from the way the game has gone so far, and from the way that the rest of the GTA series had gone previously. The hero had always hitherto been a lackey. With very few exceptions, the missions had always been about satisfying someone else’s needs, or even someone else’s whims, accepting whatever limitations they put on you to determine success, even if they don’t make practical sense. But now, for the first time, Tommy’s actions are mainly self-directed. He still has missions, but they’re things that he decides to do himself.

This isn’t really reflected in mechanics, mind. I mean, okay, there’s a pretty big structural change: suddenly you’re allowed to purchase all the various businesses you’ve noticed around town with “for sale” icons on them, and that means a surge of new options and new mission sources. So your rise to power is accompanied by some ability to make consequential decisions, about which properties to spend your hard-won money on. But the missions, for all practical purposes, are still just missions. You, the player, don’t have any more control over them just because the objectives are now being articulated by the player character. It’s a bit like the moment in Bioshock where you overcome the mind control, only to find that you’ve just exchanged one master for another, except that the in-fiction aspect makes it feel a great deal less cheap here.

Early in the game, Tommy is given a (big, clunky-looking, 1980s) portable phone, and from then on occasionally receives calls from various characters, mostly directing him to new mission sources. After you replace Diaz, you suddenly get calls from pretty much every surviving named NPC in rapid succession, some of them basically just checking in with you to reinforce the idea that everyone is waking up to the notion that Tommy is important. But to my mind, the strongest indicator of your change in status is a subtler one. Any place where you can pick up missions is marked on the minimap with an icon. Some of these icons are pictoral, like the voodoo doll icon that marks Auntie Poulet’s place, but others show letters, like the “D” that marked Diaz’s mansion. After you kill Diaz, his mansion’s icon changes into one that I had difficulty parsing at first: it looked to me like a pixelated and stylized rabbit head. I didn’t know what to make of that until I realized it was just a somewhat lumpy letter V, for Vercetti. All the major mob bosses had their marks on the map, and this was a very direct and automatic acknowledgment that Tommy had joined their ranks. It’s just a little thing, but all the more powerful for the lack of fanfare.

I’ve just wrapped up the Haitian/Cuban gang war subplot, and have a bottleneck mission relating directly to the main overplot before I can get any more side missions. Once again, Vice City is doing a much better job of keeping the frame relevant than GTA3 did. According to a brief and spoiler-risking look at a wiki, this means I’m something like 2/3 done with the story. But before I go on, I have some small observations about what I’ve just been through.

The gang war is something that the player character both starts and finishes, and at both ends it’s done with aggression towards the Haitian side. Starting the gang war involves conspicuously whacking a Haitian gang leaser while dressed up in Cuban gang attire and driving a stolen Cuban gang car. In a nice bit of symmetry, ending the war involves stealing a Haitian gang car, although this time the aim is to be inconspicuous: the car gains you access to a Haitian gang drug factory, so you can plant bombs.

Being a purely mercenary sort with no loyalties in this struggle, you have missions for the Haitian side as well. Curiously, however, the authors decided to imply that they’re not entirely voluntary. Whenever Tommy Vercetti visits Auntie Poulet, the voodoo priestess stereotype who gives him the Haitian-side missions, he acts muddled and confused, apparently not remembering any of his previous visits, then extremely compliant, not even mentioning payment. Auntie gives him tea, or at any rate something in a teacup, and he leaves in a daze, ready to do whatever she asked without quite knowing why he’s doing it. At one point she sends him to recover some “powders” that the feds are after because “dey tink it drugs” — implying that it’s not mundane drugs, but might be some kind of crazy voodoo mind control substance. Well, whatever it is that’s affecting Tommy here, it’s clearly capable of affecting him from just inhaling it, because he’s affected the moment he walks into the room.

And that makes me wonder about the factory explosion that closes out this section of the game. Were the Haitians making mundane drugs there, or mind control stuff? And if the latter, what’s going to happen when a building full of the stuff gets released into the atmosphere of Vice City? Well… probably nothing. Even if the authors were thinking of it in the same way as me, it probably wouldn’t lead anywhere just because that’s how most of the stories in GTA3 went: the writers set stuff up and then just kind of left it set up. It’ll be cool if I’m wrong, though.

I’ve had something of a breakthrough: I’ve recovered 60 Hidden Packages. The reward for this is a minigun permanently available at your hideout. This may sound like just another gun, and unexciting, but the minigun’s destructive power (and effective range, and ammo capacity) is so much greater than most other weapons, it renders even the most difficult combat missions all but trivial. For example, there’s one mission where you confront a couple of boats swarming with enemy gunmen, and have to kill them all before proceeding. About a half second of concentrated fire from the minigun is enough to simply sink the boats.

Now, not all missions are about killing. There’s still plenty of driving to be done. But at this moment, it looks like the driving is going to be the focus of all my actual effort from now on — which, to my mind, is entirely reasonable for a game with the word “auto” in its title. Still, this gun seems almost game-breaking. But only almost, because breaking the game is, in an open-world game of this sort, part of the game.

Really, I’ve been taking shortcuts all along. There was one early mission that was clearly set up to be a motorcycle chase: the man you’re pursuing flees the building where you find him and gets on a bike, and there’s a second bike conveniently close to the exit you follow him through. I found it much easier to steal a car and ram him with it, throwing him off the bike. There’s another mission on a golf course, where you have to check your weapons at the door. When you approach the victim, wielding a golf club with deadly intent, he leaps into a golf cart, drives around aimlessly for a while, then makes a break for the exit and escapes. Clearly you’re supposed to grab a golf cart of your own and try to catch up to him, bumping or blocking his cart until he’s forced to get out, at which point you club him to death. But you can instead just make a beeline for the exit, pick up your guns, and wait for him.

Probably the single biggest shortcut is the helicopter. I mentioned that there were toy RC helicopters that you could control remotely. Well, there’s a full-sized one you can steal on top of a skyscraper in the northern part of the city. It’s still kind of tricky to control, although it’s a breeze compared to the Dodo in GTA3. And it makes it downright trivial to get Hidden Packages in places that would otherwise require tricky sequences of motorcycle jumps. I have yet to use the helicopter in a mission, but I’m keeping an eye out for situations where it makes sense.

So, any of these things might subvert the intent behind a particular mission, but I can’t say they’re against the spirit of the game as a whole. Alternate solutions, like spending the time to hunt down 60 Hidden Packages, are intended by the designers. And if they’re not intended in particular, at least alternate solutions as a general concept are a core part of the design, and therefore cannot really be regarded as “breaking the game”. That’s one advantage of using a criminal as the hero. It effectively gives the player permission to cheat.