深入体验 GTA：罪恶都市与 GTA：圣安地列斯

This article—call it a review, if you’d like—is the second part of my tour through Rockstar Games’ biggest franchise. Part one was about GTA III.

Early in 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the player’s character, the ascendant amoral criminal Tommy Vercetti, is given a weapon to kill someone. It’s a chainsaw. You could use other weapons to murder the guy, but it’s clear which one Vice City’s developers at Rockstar prefer.

In another early mission, Tommy is tasked with attacking a man on a golf course. Tommy reaches the greens via a country club. The country club has a security checkpoint that strips Tommy of his guns. He dresses in a tacky golf outfit. There’s a golf cart nearby. All of this increases the chance the player will complete this hit either by running the guy over with a golf cart or by clanging him with a golf club. That’s the spectacle Rockstar has set up for the player.

In another mission, Tommy has to stand lookout during a back-alley deal. It’s ambushed by gangsters, and Tommy has to give chase. The attackers try to escape on motorcycles, but one crashes as the other speeds down an alley. The signal to the player is clear: prop up the crashed motorcycle and race down the alley after the other guy.

Again, it’s a good spectacle, and the one Rockstar has clearly set up.

In the 25 years since Grand Theft Auto broke out as one of video game’s biggest franchises, each new release has tested the balance between Rockstar making a game that pushes you to play it their way and making one that gives you greater freedom to play it as you’d like.

In Vice City, player freedom takes a hit.

GTA III had broken through by offering players unprecedented freedom. It was a mayhem simulator that catered to its player’s prerogatives. A GTA III player might have to complete a hit or survive an ambush, and they would be left to figure out the best way to do it. Block the alleys with cars, steal a tank, run over an ally to slow him down while getting into position… whatever it took to get the crime done.

Vice City’s different. This past week, I played the game for the first time in some 20 years. It still felt wild, but was more clearly a wild game on Rockstar’s terms. They had a script for me, had things for me to do.

That was a simple enough sequence to follow. GTA III, an open-ended silent-protagonist game, followed by GTA Vice City, a game designed to feel more like an interactive movie.

And then I revisited Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. That one blew me away. I’d remembered parts of it, but I’d forgotten how unusual it was, what a radical detour it was from Vice City. I also saw something I couldn’t have seen back then: how it was a set-up for where it now seems Rockstar Games is going with Grand Theft Auto VI. As this thought crystallized, I also wound up with an entirely new appreciation for the notorious sex scene that was never officially unlocked in the game.

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