One of the key additions to Chinatown Wars is a buy/sell/trade sideline activity in which you can deal drugs. Introduced in a mission called "Tricks of the Triad," Huang's Uncle Kenny demands that Huang help him out by slinging some drugs and helps out by giving Huang a small sample batch and hooking him up with a dealer. Once Huang visits the dealer and delivers the drugs, he can enter the drug trade more thoroughly by seeking out new dealers and bargaining with them; selling drugs for profit here and buying at a discount there.
On a mechanics level, this portion of Chinatown Wars is almost identical to the old online game Dope Wars in that you travel around town selling where prices are high and buying where prices are low, kind of like an itinerant merchant of drugs.
Chinatown Wars adds some new wrinkles in that the ever-vigilant Liberty City police force has set up surveillance cameras at various locations around town. That doesn't mean that you can't deal in those areas, but it does mean that the risk of getting pinched is higher and, as such, the prices of drugs soar in those areas. Consequently, although you can destroy the surveillance cameras, you may not want to, since they enable you to peddle your wares at a more extravagant rate. Balancing the financial benefit of the surveillance cameras is, of course, the increased risk to both your dealer and you and if you're caught with drugs in your duffel bag (you have a main stash at your apartment from re-upping), the cops will confiscate them. Plus, destroying cameras is akin to shooting the pigeons in GTA4 or discovering packages in previous iterations of the series, so you will need to smash all the cameras if you want to complete the game with a 100%.
On the Lam
Chinatown Wars tweaks the methodology behind losing the cops just a bit. As opposed to previous games in the series, it's not enough to simply outrun the police if you want to clear a two-star wanted level. Once you earn that second star, you'll have to disable the cops on your tail in order to get them to stop chasing you. Note that you want to disable them, not destroy them (because killing the police will only increase your wanted level). So, you're going to need to perform some fancy driving to run cop cars off the road or into obstructions if you want to ditch them.
Fortunately, Chinatown Wars gives you a nicely-tuned auto-assist to help you navigate corners. It's not super-noticeable (which is a plus), but it's always there to straighten you out a bit in order to keep you from over-correcting. We found this aid very helpful because the small screen of the DS doesn't afford a lot of reaction time to react to important things like oncoming traffic or pedestrians, until it's too late. Granted, you're probably going to mow down your fair share of random pedestrians anyway, but that's to be expected in a GTA game.
With the vastness of Liberty City contained inside of Chinatown Wars, it already seems a bit bigger than any Nintendo DS game has a right to be. Pile on the copious mini-games and drug-trading activity and Chinatown Wars feels like a Grand Theft Auto bounty. Wrapped around all of this is a unique look thanks to the quasi-cel shaded art style that, although clearly compensating for the DS's reduced processing power, is both reminiscent of the top-down perspective in the original PlayStation Grand Theft Auto games and also fairly innovative with its slightly-canted camera that never lets you forget that everything is being rendered in full 3D. Like nearly every Grand Theft Auto, there's clearly more to Chinatown Wars than shooting cops and making time with prostitutes... let's just hope Rockstar Leeds can shoehorn it all onto a DS card.
