Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories -- Control is Key.

Control is key for any game, but Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories faces a major obstacle in its goal of bringing the full console Grand Theft Auto experience to a portable system. They're attempting to bring the full experience to the PlayStation Portable which just happens to be missing a second analog stick and the L2 and R2 buttons. The way they went about doing it is to add alteration keys. You don't have the right analog stick for looking and aiming. Which means you must hold the L button to trigger being able to look or aim. They call it fine aim, where you have control of aiming. They've attempted to streamline the aiming by having you press the R button to lock on to an enemy. You can then use the D-pad left or right buttons to scroll through the targets. There are a few problems with this system. For most of the weapons, you can't move the character, he's a stationary target. Secondly, the lock on feature doesn't determine any sort of threat level, so you'll lock on to a bystander and an enemy alike. If an innocent person on a motorcycle happens to be coming by when you're targeting and it happens to lock on to them, it tracks them and can have you track from left to right nearly turning you around so your back is to the people firing at you in under a second. The game seems to have mixed AI levels. They seem to be trying to compensate for this new system by having some of the enemies being unable to hit the broad side of a barn from five feet away. While other enemies can kill you in literally under a couple seconds. This is through both your life and bulletproof vest meters. Not having the second stick also changes how you see in the game. You have to stop and hold L and move the analog nub to look around. You're not really going to have the time to adjust the camera on the fly in heated situations and because of that you're left far more at the mercy of the camera than previous entries in the series. Beyond that the game controls rather familiarly. You have the character and vehicle control with the analog nub. The triangle button is used to enter and exit vehicles. The circle button attacks. The X button sprints. The square button jumps. The D-pad up will start special missions, like taxi, ambulance, firefighter, delivery, and the like. The D-pad down will start free aim after combat has been initiated with the R button lock on. The D-pad down also acts as the horn when used within a vehicle. The left and right buttons on the D-pad cycle through the weapons on foot and the radio stations in the car. I have the controls set so that within vehicles the L and R button are for the look directions in drive-by shooting. And I have it set so that X + Square is the hand brake for vehicles. This control scheme, coupled with learning the layout of the PSP has resulted in a steeper than average learning curve for me and the initial stages of the game have suffered in my opinion because of it. I am twelve hours in and about 22% complete at this point. The control has become easier in that time. I don't think the control is going to ever reach fully comfortable levels for me. The game is however fully playable. Let's see if they improve any more as I close in on the halfway point of the game...