Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories -- Final Opinion.

I come away from Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories with mixed feelings. There is an awful lot to like about the game. Just the fact that it is truly the full console Grand Theft Auto experience in your hands is quite impressive. Everything from the series is there. The whole of Liberty City with some new additions. The hidden packages. The minigames like firefighter, vigilante, pizza delivery, street racing, RC racing, the dirt bike racing, the ambulance and taxis, and more. Graphically it's impressive for being the ugly PS2 Grand Theft Auto visuals on the PSP, if you catch my drift. The characterization is as it ever was. Rockstar's sense of humor is in place, whatever you might make of that. The voice acting is on par with everything that's come before it minus the celebrities. The custom soundtrack makes a massive difference for the better. There are a couple of sore spots though. A few of them come from it being the full Grand Theft Auto experience. The mission designs have mostly been seen before. The load times are horrendous, partially do to the PSP, partially do to Rockstar's game design. The actual story part of Liberty City Stories is mostly ho-hum been there done that before. A couple of characters from Vice City show up and a few others have their fates permanently decided. That's it as far as anything cool about the stories themselves. They just don't pop. It's cool to be back in Liberty City and to see some older characters, but nothing great comes of any of it.  The other problem is the real problem. The controls have a hideous learning curve, at least for me. It took me a very long time to finally adjust to them. Once I did the game became fully playable, but it did cause more than a little frustration overall. This version is probably the least glitchy of games I've played in the series. Every now and again something would mess up but nothing on the level of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, or San Andreas. In the end, it's still fun, still as frustrating as the series whole, and technically impressive.  I'm going to give Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories an 8.5.