Thought I’d let you guys get away without a Vice City related post, eh?

Turns out I got a phone call from the folks at GameStop yesterday around two minutes to 4PM letting me know that they were getting a shipment in around 7PM and if I wanted to come in early I could pick it up then. If? Can you believe they actually asked if I wanted to come in early to pick up my game? No, no, I had my heart set on waiting till midnight when I wouldn’t have any time left to play the damn thing. Of COURSE I wanted to come in early and get my game.

I was cool, though, when I got home I still helped Courtney carve her pumpkin into a fine looking Jack-O-Lantern before she headed to bed and gave my wonderful wife the option of maintaining control over the TV for as long as she wanted. Fortunately for me I think Anne sensed my impending self-immolation from anticipation about to set in and surrendered the TV after Courtney went to bed.

So I got to set in upon the game around 9PM last night and got enough playing in to make it to bed around 11:30PM feeling quite pleased. How is it? It’s everything I loved about GTA III and then some. I did a few of the early missions to get into how the game worked and then I settled down into exploring the map and figuring out what items I could launch the various vehicles off of. At first I was a little troubled as I couldn’t seem to find any long stretches of road to really open up the throttle on, but I soon located the long stretches of road and spent some time just seeing how many different ways I could launch my character off of his motorcycle after speeding headlong into various objects.

My favorite part of the first game was all the little ramps and jumps you could find scattered around the city that made for a very cinematic show whenever you hit them properly and VC doesn’t disappoint in this area. The placement of the ramps can be a lot more subtle in this game than the first one, however, and I found myself not realizing something was a jump the first several times I drove past it. For example, one of them is actually part of a parking structure that allows you to jump from the top of the structure to the roof of the building on the other side of the road. That one is not immediately obvious and I only found it because I was driving at insane speed at the time and launched off by accident. Three of the jumps I’ve found so far can only be done on the newly added motorcycles too.

In a nutshell this new version of GTA should keep me pretty occupied until Christmas.