Grand Theft Auto : Vice City

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is an open world action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It was released on 27 October 2002 for the PlayStation 2 console, on 12 May 2003 for Microsoft Windows, and on 31 October 2003 for the Xbox console. It is the sixth title in the Grand Theft Auto series, and the first main entry since 2001's Grand Theft Auto III.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is played from a third-person perspective in an open world environment, allowing the player to interact with the game world at their leisure. The game is set in 1986 within the fictional city of Vice City, which is heavily based on Miami^[c] and draws inspiration from 1980s' American culture. The single-player story follows Tommy Vercetti, a Mafia hitman who is released from prison. After his involvement in a drug deal gone wrong, Tommy seeks out those responsible while building a criminal empire and seizing power from other criminal organisations in the city.
Upon its release, the game was acclaimed by many reviewers who praised the music and gameplay, which uses a tweaked version of the game engine used in its predecessor. It became the best-selling video game of 2002, and has sold over 20 million copies as of 2011; until July 2006, it was the best-selling PlayStation 2 game of all time. The game is cited as a landmark in video games for its far-reaching influence within the industry. The success of Vice City led to the creation of a prequel, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (2006), which revisits the Vice City setting just two years prior. Vice City‍ '​s violent and sexual content has also been the source of public concern and controversy.
Its successor, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, was released on 26 October 2004, and also received critical acclaim. In December 2012, in celebration of the game's tenth anniversary, a mobile version of Vice City was released for iOS and Android. The game has also been ported to various other platforms and services, such as OS X and the PlayStation Network.

Gameplay

Screenshot of the player flying a seaplane

Because Vice City was built upon Grand Theft Auto III, the game follows a largely similar gameplay design and interface with GTA III with several tweaks and improvements over its predecessor. The gameplay is very open-ended, a characteristic of the Grand Theft Auto franchise; although missions must be completed to complete the storyline and unlock new areas of the city, the player is able to drive around and visit different parts of the city at his/her leisure and otherwise, do whatever they wish if not currently in the middle of a mission. Various items such as hidden weapons and packages are also scattered throughout the landscape, as it has been with previous GTA titles.
Players can steal vehicles, (cars, boats, motorcycles, tanks, and even helicopters) partake in drive-by shootings, robberies, and generally create chaos like destroying vehicles. However, doing so tends to generate unwanted and potentially fatal attention from the police (or, in extreme cases, the FBI and even the National Guard). Police behaviour is mostly similar to Grand Theft Auto III, although police units will now wield night sticks, deploy spike strips to puncture the tires of the player's car, as well as SWAT teams being rappelled down from flying police helicopters and undercover police units, à la-Vice Squad. Police attention can be neutralised in a variety of ways.
A new addition in the game is the ability of the player to purchase a number of properties distributed across the city. Some of these are additional hideouts (essentially locations where weapons can be collected, vehicles stored and the game saved). There are also a variety of businesses called "assets" which the player can buy. These include a film studio, a dance club, a strip club, a taxi company, an "ice-cream delivery business" (acting as a front company), a boatyard, a printing works, and a car showroom. Each commercial property has a number of missions attached to it, such as eliminating the competition or stealing equipment. Once all the missions for a given property are complete, the property will begin to generate an ongoing income, which the increasingly prosperous Vercetti may periodically collect.
Various gangs make frequent appearances in the game, some of whom are integral to story events. These gangs typically have a positive, neutral or negative opinion of the player and act accordingly by following the player or shooting at him. Shootouts between members of rival gangs can occur spontaneously and several missions involve organised fights between opposing gangs.
Vice City also includes a larger selection weapons than Grand Theft Auto III. Firearms such as the Colt Python, TEC-9, SPAS-12, Ruger Mini-14, MP5, M60 machine gun and Minigun have been added in the game. A wide variety of melee weapons has also been introduced, including the chainsaw, katana, machete, meat cleaver, screwdriver, hammer and knife.
Optional side-missions are once again included, giving the player the opportunity to make pizza deliveries, drive injured people to a hospital with an ambulance, extinguish fires with a fire truck, deliver passengers in a taxi, be a vigilante, using a police vehicle to intercept (and kill) criminals, and the ability to drive a bus, transporting fare-paying passengers. Monetary rewards and occasional gameplay advantages (e.g. increased health and armour capacity and infinite sprinting) are awarded for completing different difficulty levels of these activities. Different sums of money are awarded for landing trick jumps in motorcycles or fast cars depending on the number of flips and height achieved.