After a couple of successful Grand Theft Autos on the PSP, Rockstar Leeds has turned its attention towards Nintendo's handheld. The hope is that the pedigreed portable developer can mimic the trademark GTA console experience on the Nintendo DS while still taking advantage of the unique opportunities afforded by the touch screen. After our brief contact with GTA: Chinatown Wars it would seem that everything is proceeding as Rockstar has foreseen it and Chinatown Wars is packing an absurd amount of gameplay into the tiny machine.

The Huang Way

Chinatown Wars follows the story of a young ne'er-do-well named Huang Lee who arrives in Liberty City after his father dies (was killed?) in Hong Kong. With Huang's father dead, he carries the family's ancient sword called Yu Jian to his Uncle Wu "Kenny" Lee, but everything falls apart once Huang actually reaches Liberty City.

Ambushed at the airport and left for dead, Huang loses the sword and must escape a locked car after his assailants push it into the Humbold River. Here we get Chinatown Wars' first stylus-based mini-games as Huang busts through the glass of the back of the car in order to get free. Stabbing the rear window with the stylus, cracks and fractures erupt with each poke until the window shatters and Huang can swim to safety.


As it turns out, Uncle Kenny had planned on delivering the sword to Triad leader Hsin Jaoming as a gift in the hopes of cementing his place in the ranks of the Liberty City arm of the Chinese crime syndicate, so he's naturally furious that Huang lost it, regardless of the fact that Huang himself narrowly escaped death. Of course, this puts Huang in a bad spot with his Uncle Kenny, and in order to repay the debt, he's got to run unseemly and illegal jobs for the old coot.

Subsequent missions are largely standard GTA fare with plenty of shooting and driving, but the occasional mini-game interlude breaks up the action and adds a new dimension to the usual illicit activities. In one mission titled "Street of Rage," Huang had to save an undercover agent friend from the clutches of a group of Korean assassins by lobbing grenades at the chaingun-toting antagonists. "One Shot, One Kill" is a sniping mission in which Huang must cap a stool pigeon from the balcony of a hotel, but before he can do so, he must retrieve a briefcase containing the sniper rifle and assemble it in one of Chinatown Wars' better mini-games.

But aside from the usual crop of GTA crimes, Chinatown Wars provides a couple of other diversions to keep you busy and give you plenty of reasons to explore Liberty City... and there really is a lot to explore, considering that the entire city is open to you (with the exception of Alderney, which didn't make it into Chinatown Wars.