» Profile
» Forums
» Newsletter

Grand Theft Auto: Loose ends

A look back at the unfinished stories the juggernaut series left in its wake

Words: GamesRadar US

0 Comments

Email this article

Bookmark

Bookmark this Article

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
2002 | PS2, Xbox, PC

Liberty City’s most notorious spree killer Tommy Vercetti is released after a fifteen-year stretch. The Forelli Mafia chuck a Hawaiian shirt over Tommy’s head and dispatch him to the Miami-like Vice City to oversee a drug deal. The drug deal goes sour, as drug deals are wont to do, and the rest of the game follows Vercetti, with cowardly lawyer Rosenberg in tow, as he slowly builds up a criminal empire in the city of Vice while simultaneously tracking the goons who set him up. This he achieves under the constant shadow of Sonny Forelli, who keeps threatening to come down to Vice City and whack him unless he finds the drug money - and he’s true to his word. Vice City is generally considered to be the pinnacle of the series by connoisseurs, greedily smacking their lips and licking the blood of dead hookers off their fingers as they wax lyrical about its wonderfully camp '80s soundtrack and brutally tough mission structure. We preferred GTA III, as some of VC’s missions are tougher than lighting a match on a bar of soap, but Vice City is definitely up there with the best.

Tommy Vercetti
He’s certainly not the kind of guy you’d allow to look after your kids. In fact, even let him within arm's reach and he’ll probably use a hammer to paint the sides of the cot red. It’s fair to say Tommy is a bit of a jerk. But astonishingly enough for a man whose criminal record includes slicing his way through an entire nightclub with a chainsaw, Tommy ends up becoming the most powerful man in Vice City, the leader of his own criminal organization and owning several businesses around the area. We know he’s still top dog six years later, when former associate Ken Rosenberg calls him up for a favor - but by this stage Vercetti has dumped the lawyer’s cowardly ass. If we do revisit Vice City in the next few years, expect it to be a very different place to the cheery place we visited two decades earlier. We just don’t think Tommy’s the kind of guy to run a happy-go-lucky ship, is all.