Shooting while driving is a fiddle too far, but it wasn't particularly well implemented in the original game either. As a result, crunching all the controls required into such a small space results in a distracting cascade of semi-transparent buttons down the side of the screen.ĭriving fares marginally better than on-foot exploration, as it only requires an accelerator, brake, left and right steering and a button for getting in and out of vehicles. The iPhone has a small screen, and that's it. There's just no getting away from the fact that this is a game that was designed around controllers with multiple buttons, each of which was capable of being used for different commands in different contexts. To be fair, GTA's mobile incarnation goes out of its way to offer a variety of control methods, but none are particularly successful. When even the most basic iPhone can pack several times more data than a DVD into its slender chassis, it was never really a question of how much of the game would survive the transition, but how it would play on a touch screen. Every radio station, every skit, every politically incorrect cut-scene: it's all here and as fun as it ever was.
Held in the palm of your hand, it's a fairly remarkable sight with one foot undeniably in the past - the angular faces, a frame rate that wobbles when things get busy, the buildings that pop into life in front of you - and the other in the future, as you realise that a game which once set the benchmark for cutting-edge games technology is now on your phone.Įven the audio, usually the first thing to be hacked away by developers keeping an eye on file sizes, has been retained. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies.
#GTA 3 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY FREE DOWNLOAD FULL#
This is the full game, exactly as it was 10 years ago, faithfully carried across an ocean measured in years and evolving hardware. This isn't some cut-down rehash bearing the same title but offering limited pleasures. The good news is that Liberty City has made the transition intact. So, have they pulled it off? Amazingly, the answer is yes. That's a lot of history, not to mention a lot of game, to cram into a platform smaller than the Dual Shock joypads used to play the original. To be told we were at liberty to go nuts in Liberty City was a pivotal moment in the evolution of game design. It wasn't just the freedom of movement, but the sense of place. What GTA did, in its leap to three fully fleshed-out dimensions, was expand the canvas.
#GTA 3 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY FREE DOWNLOAD DRIVER#
There had been open-world games before, of course, and Driver had already offered free-roaming car chase thrills only a few years earlier. Given the ubiquity of so many of its ideas, it's easy to forget just what a paradigm shift Rockstar's opus represented. It's a blue-plaque moment as far as technological change is concerned, and even though games like Infinity Blade should have convinced us that these pocket-sized devices can offer more than Snake and Minefield, the arrival of Grand Theft Auto on the iPhone is momentous enough to warrant a contemplative pause. In a moment of cultural symmetry that probably means something or other, "have they pulled it off?" is also the question that greets GTA3 in 2011, as it celebrates its 10th birthday by debuting on mobile platforms that don't even have buttons. "Have they pulled it off?" That was the question spitting incredulously from our lips back in 2001 when Grand Theft Auto made its leap from top-down 2D distraction to fully 3D, open-world game-changer.