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The long awaited installment of the GTA series has finally arrived on our shores. One might be forgiven for being a bit dubious about transferring this classic franchise onto a portable console, but Liberty City Stories (LCS) on the PSP is instantly addictive.

The plot of the game revolves around Toni Ciprini, a crook that went into hiding for three years after taking out a mob boss (not in the social sense). He arrives back in town to find himself smack bang in the middle of a mob war. He is immediately taken under the wing by Don Salvatore Leone, the new crime boss.

And so the carnage begins.

In a sense this is nothing new from the GTA brand, having the main character as a mobster, carrying out tasks for local gangs, corrupt cops and other unsavory characters offering a quick few thousand bucks to take care of their dirty work. The aim of the game as with the previous efforts, is to complete missions, which increase in difficulty and remuneration as the game advances. As well as increasing a property portfolio, levels of respect, a collection of weaponry consistent of that used in the early 90s to occupy Iraq and sadistically eradicate any nasty geezers that get in your way.

The game is divided up into missions. Some of these missions will help you to advance through the game, while some missions, like 'borrowing' a taxi and delivering good folk to their required destination, will earn you money and some missions such as the rampages are just to get the body count into the triple figures. The new missions appear as you proceed through the game. With each new character that is acquainted to Toni, a number of new missions and tasks become available. Some missions are tough to find but half of the fun of this game is discovering where all of the Bonus Jumps are or seeing how many pizzas you can deliver in 3 minutes.

Aim of the game aside, what will take up hours of your time is the fun stuff. For example, stealing fast cars and then reversing over the owner of said car in case they give any back-talk. Stealing police cars, fire engines and SWAT trucks, shooting down helicopters because the pilot may have had indecent thoughts about your younger sister (any excuse to use the Minigun), indiscriminately ploughing through innocent groups of pedestrians while driving a bus, hitting cars head on in your (stolen) Humvee and causing multi-car pile ups and then finish off by doing a drive by on some hookers with your Uzi. You can do all of that good stuff before even attempting the first mission!!!

A nice new touch that the makers have added is to make a lot of the pedestrians true Americans by arming them to the teeth, tongue and throat with semi-automatic weapons, and you're not afraid to use them. God forbid any lowly mobster who attempts to steal the wrong car. He'll find himself staring down the working end of a Soviet made Cuban AK47.

Not surprisingly, LCS runs pretty well on the PSP. The frame rate remains constant throughout the game, even with scores of civilians roaming the streets and dozens of cars screaming around. It's not perfect, of course, and it never really exceeds 30 frames per second, but it's still mighty impressive. Occasionally the game pushes so much on the screen at once that slowdown is inevitable, but it's forgivable. Even at its worst, the PSP manages to keep proceedings running well enough to keep you playing relatively unhindered by the burdens of portable technology. As for the load times, well, they're quite remarkable also. The game only loads on start-up, when loading a save or during cut scenes. Apart from this, there's absolutely no loading when driving around town, except of course, when going from one island to the next where there's a five-second pause, but that's very understandable. Battery life is also impressive and clocks in at around four hours.

The handling of the vehicles is worthy of the PS2 if no even slightly improved. There are over 70 vehicles in LCS and each one handles differently. Be warned though, because of the lack of the full range of PS2 controls some of the maneuvering requires use of more fingers than you have on your hand and will inflict cramp on your thumb for weeks to come.

In summary, this is a worthy addition to the GTA franchise with great stories, colourful characters, fantastic playability, a kick ass soundtrack that goes up to 11, and guns, lots of guns.

Review kindly written by: Stephen Arundel

The long awaited installment of the GTA series has finally arrived on our shores. A worthy addition to the GTA franchise with great stories, colourful characters, fantastic playability, a kick ass soundtrack that goes up to 11, and guns, lots of guns.

This tutorial explains how to stream your music collection streaming to your PSP via iTunes.

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