Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars arrived on the Nintendo DS in March 2009 with a problem built into its name. The series had just sold millions on the strength of a ground-level camera and a city you could mistake for real. Here, Rockstar Leeds and Rockstar North pulled the camera up and angled it down, then drew the whole thing in cel-shaded polygons with black outlines. Liberty City became a comic book.
Trailer, via Rockstar Games.
Huang Lee and the Yu Jian
The story follows Huang Lee, the spoiled son of a murdered Triad boss. He lands in Liberty City carrying Yu Jian, a sword his father won in a poker game, meant as a gift for his uncle Wu “Kenny” Lee. Assassins kill his escorts, shoot him, steal the sword and dump him in the water. Huang survives and tells Kenny the sword is gone.
Kenny had planned to hand Yu Jian to Hsin Jaoming, the aging head of the Liberty City Triads, to secure his place as Hsin’s successor. The loss leaves him dishonored and reduced. Huang spends the game working for Kenny, for Hsin’s son Chan Jaoming, and for an underboss named Zhou Ming, while a corrupt LCPD detective named Wade Heston trades help finding the sword for help clearing his name.
A Drug Trade in Your Pocket
The touch screen drives the game. You buy from suppliers and sell to dealers, reading market conditions by geography and moving heroin, acid, ecstasy, marijuana, cocaine and depressants around the city. CCTV cameras replace the series’ hidden packages — destroy one with a Molotov or a grenade and drug deals get safer and discounts open up. Ammu-Nation returns as an in-game website, with weapons ordered through the PDA and delivered to your safehouse.
- Buy low from suppliers, sell high to dealers
- Destroy CCTV cameras for safer deals and discounts
- Lose wanted stars by wrecking police cars, not by fleeing a zone
That last change matters. At six stars, you must take out six police cars to drop to five.
What the Scale Costs
The drug-dealing subplot drew controversy after release, which is a strange complaint about a game whose whole subject is crime. The mechanic is the best thing here. It turns a handheld screen into a small market, and it makes the city’s geography mean something beyond scenery.
The tradeoff is scale. This Liberty City is a scaled-down version of the one in Grand Theft Auto IV, and Alderney is missing entirely. The rotatable camera and the comic outlines give Chinatown Wars a look no other entry in the series has, but they also keep the player at a distance. The thirteenth entry and the first handheld release since 2006’s Vice City Stories, it reads as a deliberate experiment rather than a stopgap.
It holds up. The presentation is a choice, the drug economy is a real system, and Huang’s hunt for a stolen sword keeps the whole thing moving.
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