The release of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories is mere weeks away, and it's looking to be a huge improvement over the series' first PSP effort, Liberty City Stories. Not only does it sport a bigger city, longer missions and the ability to commandeer helicopters, but it also improves on that game's kickass multiplayer with a whopping 10 modes of ad-hoc play. We recently got a chance to play two of these for ourselves: Vice City Survivor and Might of the Hunter.

Vice City Survivor is the same straight-up deathmatch action that rocked Liberty City Stories, and in a GTA game, "straight-up deathmatch" means something special. With six players, Survivor is literally a riot, with you and your friends to run amok in a sizable chunk of Vice City (six neighborhoods are available as battlegrounds) teeming with almost the same level of pedestrian and vehicle traffic as the single-player mode. So in addition to ramming bullets and rockets down each other's throats, you can jack cars and motorcycles and run your friends over when they least expect it.

As a pure free-for-all (or in teams, if that's your thing), Vice City Survivor is insanely entertaining. As is true for most multiplayer games, screaming trash talk at the buddy who just took off your head with a sniper rifle is almost as fun as vengefully backing over him a few times with a stolen truck. The game performs pretty well with six players, too, and we only occasionally ran into bugs - choppy animation, temporarily invisible opponents - during our session with it. We even saw some cool blurring effects when we got up some speed on motorcycles.