Ever since the official trailer for Vice City Stories dropped on us, Rockstar has been very actively hyping this PSP-exclusive follow-up to the insanely successful Liberty City Stories. (Of course Rockstar doesn't have much of a choice: this game may be the only thing that saves the company from financial ruin.) IGN recently had a chance to talk to Gordon Hall from Rockstar, and Mr. Hall (obviously) has a lot of good things to tell us:
- Game features twice the number of polygons and a new radiosity lighting model.
- A new way to have the CPU and GPU communicate to each other was developed so that improvements could be made across the board. A new streaming process and lossless animation streaming allows the game to load more data at once.
- "With the Jet Ski you can dive under water and come bursting back up, you can really feel it bounce off the waves as the weather conditions change, you can turn on a dime and really send the water spraying." (Sounds like they packed in an entire water racing game in our GTA!)
- "The combat system has more depth to it than any other Grand Theft Auto game." Targeting and combat has been tweaked just a bit: you can now fight unarmed and do grappling moves and throws.
- "The soundtrack has over 100 tracks, and is probably the best, deepest collection of songs ever assembled for any one project -- TV, Film, or Game." (But the game includes Custom Soundtracks too if you don't like retro music.)
