GTA: Chinatown Wars review embargo lifts – “It’s good,” says internet

With this and Retro Game Challenge out I think I picked a bad time to sell my DS :-/

I can’t say at this point that it’s the best DS game ever but it is by far the most accomplished. That alone puts it in the 9+ territory.

It is good.

Given the scores, I’d assume it is. I don’t know because my promised copy never arrived.

*hot tears of pain*

I thought it was great. The graphics work really well, which is something you don’t really get from the screenshots, you kind of have to see it in motion yourself to ‘get’ it.

There’s still a fair bit of detail in all that cell shading. The cars are fully 3D right down to the bonnets and doors being armatured and detaching. It also looks like it is frame rate locked around 25-30, it could probably at times run at 60 fps but it does drop the odd frame so the fixed refresh is a pertinent decision. Having a fluctuating frame rate would have been distracting.

I’ve had the odd texture pop-in but it never lasts more than a frame or two, with respect to what the game is doing, it’s not surprising. I can’t imagine the DS having a fat pipeline for streaming textures so the fact that it doesn’t start chugging while it’s acquiring assets is nothing short of amazing.

GTA has a new home!

I also love that many – if not all – of the areas in the two included islands from GTA4 have been recreated faithfully. I realised they’d done this when I was driving in an area that felt familiar down in the docks, turned a corner and up a ramp and saw exactly what I was hoping to see; Roman’s taxi garage.

This is very good to hear. 10/10 on Eurogamer is just a tiny but too much though – but hey, R* allegedly offer good incentives.

I look forward to an even better version of this on the DSi.