Price: £29.99 Players: 1 System Requirements (recom): Windows 98/2000/ME/XP Intel Pentium II 450Mhz (700Mhz) 96Mb RAM (128Mb) 4-speed CD-ROM (8-speed) 16Mb DirectX 8.1-compatible graphics card (32Mb) 700Mb Hard Disk Space DirectX 8.1 If you're into games, you'll know what Grand Theft Auto 3 is all about, but this time it's in 3D and the anticipation has paid off in full. The original top-down game courted controversy because you could drive about, run people over, kill cops, steal cars and trucks and do all manner of things that you could in the real world, but here there's no recourse to your actions AND you score points for doing so. But the reason all the rent-a-quote MPs got het up about it, was because the games company employed PR guru Max Clifford to phone them up and tell them about this brand new 'disgusting' game which was way over the top and deserved to be banned. Cue lots of free publicity and everyone coming over all 'Daily Mail' about it.

I started off playing GTA3 doing jobs for Luigi and Joey to earn money, but soon you'll find other missions to take, some from an occasionally-ringing phone box, all which boost the coffers upon successful completition and the hidden packages placed around town will provide you with a new weapon for every ten packages collected. And it doesn't stop there. Earn money by jumping into one of the many taxis and doing a Crazy Taxi, re-live the days of Chase HQ by stealing a police car, attempt to save people by nicking an ambulance and help others in a pilfered fire engine. The ambulance falls over too often though and it's more fun to take the cop car option but there's no music in them. Surely we could've been treated to the Blues Brothers soundtrack? :) Other hidden challenges include "Patriot Playground" - pass through 15 checkpoints quickly (I failed) when stealing a certain jeep and I had some fun at one point when I ran an ambulance off the road then watched as it tried to get back on up a steep embankment and over a wall. It completely failed and kept falling backwards. Also, another time when my vehicle exploded, a passing car kept driving along despite having caught fire, making it hilarious to watch it drive up a hill and eventually explode itself! I do have a couple of other niggles though. If you drive one way, then turn around 180o, if a car or person has left your sight at all then they won't be there when you're going back the way you've come, which is rather odd. Also, there are no replays which is unfortunate because they would be so cool to watch again and again. Effective use is made of the sound, especially when it comes to atmosphere as the cops start chasing you, for example, as well as all the bangs and crashes and the scraping of metal when you cause a pile-up, or a series of explosions after your vehicle can't take any more, catches fire and other cars in the vicinity are caught out.

Sadly, all of my above observations were from the Playstation 2 version. Could I get the PC release to work properly? No, because it's one of the most buggy pieces of software I've come across. First of all, it wouldn't work at all with my previous graphics card, a 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Ok, so I agree that that card was a bit on the old side, even if I'd only had it for two years, but it wasn't exactly compliant with games that use DirectX 8.1 drivers. So, I invested in an ATI Radeon 8500LE 64Mb card (aka 3d Prophet 8500LE 64Mb) which has worked fine for other games that didn't get along with my previous card... But, it really does not like my Radeon, nor many other kinds of cards as it turns out. The problem? It's glitchy, it's sticky, and even if you can get past all that, then when it gets dark or gets to around midday, all of a sudden the textured surfaces just disappear and it's like walking round in an intense mist, aside from a couple of bold colours like red blood. This problem doesn't go away and you have to quit out. Try the game again and you don't get too far before it kicks in again. Didn't Rockstar have a quality control dept for this PC port? I even tried patch 1.1 but to no avail. Overall, this version is completely unplayable once the problems begin and I can't think what the developers were thinking. Buy the PS2 version instead, the graphics for which still aren't perfect - and we were promised fantastic results with this conversion that didn't come true - but at least you can bloody play the thing! A review of which can be found HERE. Just a shame the PS2 got the console-exclusive for the series until 2004 as it would've looked even better on the Xbox.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2002.

This game was played on a Pentium III 600Mhz PC with 384Mb SDRAM (133Mhz) and an ATI Radeon 8500LE 64Mb AGP graphics card.