All in place, ta. The vehicle handling is straightforward enough: D-pad, two buttons, [B] for gas and [Y] for reverse/brake and the right-hand 'shoulder' for handbrake. There are also a variety of vehicles including bikes, boats, bulldozers, cabs, police cars, Sabres, SUVs... all of which handle slightly differently. Each one becomes recognisable quickly for their relevant merits and dismerits.
Some also require you to get them started in different, mini-game manners: anything from hotwiring to code-breaking. Once in and driving (and music blaring), it's time to do the business before totalling your ride or leaving it annoyingly parked across a box junction or bridge road in exactly the way you are not supposed to do in real life. Because Liberty City is not about Real Life. Chinatown and its honour systems, turf wars, hidden politics and cultural intricacies are about escape not documenting inner city life.
Please write in and tell me if you have had the dubious pleasure of rolling around your town armed with a chainsaw, driving a bulldozer in broad daylight.
Some of the other drivers in town were, I have to say, less than up to the mark when it comes to driving-craft. I'm not talking about the ones who dawdle in front of you when you're on a mission; nor those who pull out at an intersection at exactly the same time as you need to turn. I'm talking about the random vehicle you'll see driving into a wall, backing up and then driving into the same wall for no good reason.
My theory is that Rockstar has developed a piece of code that looks at the way I drive and flips into the odd truck or car so that it replicates one of my personal pieces of poor reversing. It's a theory. I don't honestly care what the reality is because watching AI behaving so randomly fills me with joy.
What fills me with less joy is when a vehicle is close to a wall or lampost or other human being such as the cop who is attempting to blow your tiny little body into a pavement puddle, and your character goes bonkers. He will ricochet between the person/wall/tree/car and will not be able to drive away.
Combat? Fighting? Doing bad damage to folk? Again, couple of buttons (mostly [A] actually) and a host of weapons. Simplicity itself with even an element of auto-targeting just in case you need it. Choosing your weapons occurs on the bottom screen – where you'll also access the PDA. Now, being used to the iPhone, I simply forgot about the stylus to begin with, and this didn't appear to make much of a difference to the control. These Rockstar chaps have certainly understood their hardware.
Cops? As ever, for a city this crime ridden, the place is packed with police. As ever they are, in the words of The Strokes when referring to the NYPD, 'Not so bright'. They are also brutal and not just to you but to the general citizenry. It still makes me wonder why anybody not half-mad would choose to live in Liberty City... during the console versions I mused on this while sitting in the virtual park. With CTW I mused on it while sitting in the real world park. In the case of the latter musing, however, it didn't last as long. This is mainly because I wanted to get on and play it.
