Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 2: Grand Theft Auto: Dionysian Simulator

In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.

“Kenny has left some ‘Acid’ for you. Transfer all of it to your Holdall by touching the appropriate drug icon.

You could vary the amount of ‘Acid’ to transfer to your Holdall by touching the up and down arrows, but, as Kenny wants you to sell all of it, touch the checkmark to confirm the full amount.

Touch EXIT to leave your drug stash.”—instructions, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

There’s rarely a time where Grand Theft Auto isn’t riding high, but the end of the 2000s was especially keen. 2008 saw the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, one of the biggest video games of its time and an absolute cultural touchstone. The tragic epic of ex-Serbian war criminal Niko Bellic sold tens of millions of copies. Its fictionalized twist on New York City set a standard for realistic, immersive sandboxes. The licensed songs on the in-game radio stations, a standard of the series, were a smorgasbord of excellent music. You could have a terrifying shootout, segue into a car chase with Tangerine Dream blaring in the background, and wait for the heat to die down by taking in an in-game Katt Williams standup set, all in the span of a few minutes. It was the success for the late Aughts, the thing to which all games were inevitably compared. After years of expansion, innovation, and controversy, Rockstar Games earned something rare: true prestige.

Of course, that’s merely the data of sales numbers and review scores. If we look into the immutable world of Discourse, it didn’t take long for 2008’s biggest game to face a sizable backlash over its irritating side characters, dour plot, and atmosphere of abyssal pessimism. GTA4 is a great game, and it captures the fatigue and overwhelm of post-9/11 America better than almost any other work of art I’ve experienced. But the way it sent players through deliberately unpleasant material for the sake of making an artistic point was flawed, ungainly, and very much a novelty then. Future prestige games, including Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption duology, would marshall this trope more effectively. But this gives Niko’s Liberty City adventure an odd legacy. It was one of the main culprits of joyless gritty blockbusters, but by the same token it was also too artsy and narratively challenging for its devil may care brand. It’s too big to be any kind of underdog, and too major a step in the story of modern Triple-A bloat. Today, it feels like a man without a country, which is a shame.

At least from the outside, the very next entry—not counting GTA4’s expansions The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, which iterate on this in their own ways—could appear a blunt course correction. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a bizarre spinoff. The most inexplicable marquee Nintendo DS title of 2009 was, notably, the last of the top down GTA games, the series’ original style before going 3D in Grand Theft Auto III. It was also the first one released for family friendly Nintendo since the unmemorable Grand Theft Auto Advance, albeit with a PSP port waiting in the wings, and probably the first game on any of the Big N’s systems that let you run a drug trafficking ring. The dissonance was probably the biggest selling point, not any differences from its HD brethren. After all, while Nintendo had been courting M-rated games for several years, it wasn’t so long ago that Rockstar was DMA Design, a small Scottish studio buckling under complaints about the violence in the N64 flop Body Harvest.

Image: Vgchartz. I have no way of taking or uploading screenshots from my Nintendo DS Lite, so official screenshots made by Rockstar and published by Vgchartz are my only option. It’s rather hard to get images from 2009 games.

So it was exciting, having this high profile spinoff of a popular, notoriously M-rated franchise on a Nintendo console. I was excited as an eighteen-year-old, too—at least until a few too many offensive jokes and struggles with the controls made me give up, not too far in (Chinatown Wars doesn’t seem to note play time in its save files). I should note, as an aside, that I have played only three of the twelve games planned for this series to any extent, and only for a bit, though I’m using this as an opportunity to give them another go and cut even a bit through my backlog. For the most part, these are going to be entirely new experiences.

I’m also not going to pretend that it isn’t weird for this collaboration to exist. It is. Extremely so. The game is utterly awash in racism, transphobia, and ableism to a degree that is shocking even for 2009 and horrifying to see on a tiny Nintendo screen. Characters make gross, splotchy noises when you run them over. There’s a touchscreen dial for chucking Molotov cocktails at bodegas and cars. You get instructions like “release the Korean gangbangers’ vehicle from the tow truck” that precede a gimmicky touch screen prompt. If there was ever an attempt to sand off the series’ edges, it’s imperceptible in the final product. It’s a truly odd duck, Chinatown Wars, and I think it reveals a great deal about the era in which it was released. It shows us a titanic franchise mid-transformation, a culture replete in tastelessness, and what people were getting out of the lovely, Dual Screened handheld.

Image: Vgchartz. Another oddity of gaming publicity screenshots in 2009 is the inclusion of weird additions like developer commentary. But, since most lines of dialogue in this have some kind of slur, using this is probably for the best anyway.

Though the plot? Not so interesting. It’s bog standard: a young gun starts off with nothing and works his way to the top of the organized crime food chain. This time around, it’s Huang Lee, a privileged and painfully obnoxious Triad whose visit to the Liberty City branch sets off a cascading chain of mob hijinks. The main divergences involve hackneyed themes of honor, a story based far more around revenge than the accumulation of power, and a quest to recover a ceremonial sword of some political weight. The focus on Asian gangsters obsessed with honor and saving face is embarrassing, especially when characters repeatedly lampshade it, and a sword that’s explicitly said to have no historical value is a poor MacGuffin. It’s all coated in a darker, vengeance-heavy tone that reads like a poor attempt to ape classic Nineties Hong Kong crime dramas, much like how older entries copied American mob films. I don’t think it works at all. Our antihero is a nothing of a character, spiteful and insulting yet ever dutiful.

Despite that, and the entire idea of a Nintendo DS GTA spinoff, this is no quick and cheap act of brand extension. It was co-developed by Rockstar North, the company’s original Edinburgh studio, it has a co-writer credit by one of the Houser Brothers, and it’s got a large sandbox that recreates all four boroughs of Liberty City in shocking detail (the ersatz-New Jersey state of Alderney is missing, officially because it lacks a Triad presence and most likely because this is a huge map as it is). To account for the limited graphics, the art style has this pulpy cel shading that mimics the franchise’s iconic box art. Perhaps the most notable sign is the perspective. Instead of just mimicking the top down view of GTA1, it has this dynamic camera to create a cinematic atmosphere. It doesn’t work, since the camera swivels constantly and takes the controls with it, but it’s shocking to see something this sophisticated on a DS. By 2009, even Nintendo had stopped pushing the console’s hardware this much. The game is also shockingly long; Rockstar claimed that a casual playthrough would be under twelve hours, but it took me far longer. That’s not great, since the levels drag when they go on for more than two or three minutes—or attempts—but they’re still full of the mayhem you’d get in a proper entry.

That’s what’s rather amazing here, that it’s far less of a compromise than you might expect. There’s a plethora of racial stereotypes, tons of unique missions, the controls suck, your email address is under the auspices of Weazel News, and the music… well, it’s not their full vocal songs, but you do get instrumental versions of music by Deadmau5 and Ticklah, and the main theme was by Ghostface Killah and MF Doom. It’s GTA! On DS! The translation into this teeny tiny handheld is remarkable if nothing else. It fails to be my platonic ideal of the franchise (i.e. driving around in a stolen car, listening to Miles Davis, and philosophizing about the American Dream), but it captures the aesthetics and the essence of the franchise remarkably well. They actually did it. Of course, that only furthers the surreality of it all.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the neat ways it follows the series is through the manual, which presents itself as a thick, thorough brochure for immigrants coming to Liberty City—map included. GTA4 had something similar, and it was cool then, too. I’ve had this since I first got the game, all the way back when it first released.

Many of these things are tacky, as they are in every Grand Theft Auto. It’s a series that thrives on tackiness. And that reflects the decade in which it got big. The Aughts were an era teeming in cheapness and lacking in shame, and that was especially true for games, the funhouse mirror of the entertainment industry. Hell, just look at how Geoff Keighley, Mister Industry Insider himself, used to produce his award shows. Some of Chinatown Wars’ contributions on this front have aged better than others. The dialogue is universally tiresome, but Ammu-Nation and the silly “WASTED!” sign when you die are as charming as they’ve always been. It’s just odd to see it in the ecosystem of a corporation trying to be so welcoming (and to be clear, Nintendo of America’s marketing participated in this wholesale before mostly rebranding with the Wii, lest we forget “touching is good” or the ad comparing the Game Boy Pocket to a throbbing penis). Stuff like this feels utterly alien today, which is for the best, but it feels especially so with this game. It’s certainly hard to imagine the upcoming GTA6 having a mission where you rescue a man named Chan from a carjacking… and naming it “Jackin’ Chan.”

This disconnect can be seen in the main new feature, it’s the drug dealing. Typically in this series, narcotics are little more than a reason for you to go from one goon to the next. Here, they’re the main event for Huang—and the supporting cast, apparently, as offscreen orgiastic bacchanalia are brought up constantly. Less a playground than a night market, Liberty City has become an elaborate network of suppliers and purchasers. You have to juggle six types of drugs, get the lowest cost and highest profit, and use that to purchase guns, safehouses, and fees to certain missions. Letting you peddle drugs so directly was the game’s main controversy, as all true GTA installments must have, but it’s rather hilarious in practice. The icons for your heroin and weed and the emails you get about time sensitive deals are adorable. It’s basically the Animal Crossing stalk market, and while that actively works against the anarchic ethos and pacing, it feels right for a DS game. Very management-focused.

Image: Vgchartz. It’s staggeringly weird seeing these cute images for hard drugs—and that one of them is simply named “Downers.” Pro tip: the weed gets you barely anything; focus on the others.

And you may need that cash. Despite what contemporary reviews argued, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a hard game. It’s pretty much impossible to drive too far without getting into a collision, but the cars rarely feel powerful enough for the car chases that ensue from those collisions. Whatever money I made schlepping LSD from the Irish-American Killers to the Midtown Gangsters was lost paying my bail and hospital bills as I kept losing missions again and again. One of the more frustrating, “Flatliner,” forces you to steal an ambulance from the airport, escape a high Wanted Level, and repeatedly tap the touch screen to keep up the heartbeat of your passenger—who gets murdered by the person who gave you the quest once it’s complete anyway. Its own delightful creativity makes it annoying; the same is true for missions like “Dragon Haul Z” (where you struggle through a mini-game to hide bank robbers in a dance puppet) and “The Offshore Offroad” (in which you rescue arrested Triads and flee from an army of cops—in a stretch limo in my case). And exploiting the market takes so much time driving across the city that could, and perhaps should, be spent in other ways.

Does Huang Lee’s quest for familial justice pan out? No, not really. The mission structure means that the supporting cast comprises nothing but loathsome quest givers, and far too much time is spent in a hunt for a traitor that goes everywhere but somewhere. Its insanely over the top climax and sudden ending feel true enough to a crackerjack Chow Yun-Fat picture, but lacking any of the emotional weight. By the end, with every NPC dead save Heston the drugged out cop, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to take. GTA has always been a puddle-shallow mashup of classic crime films and modern Americana satire. This is that, too, but the darker moments tease aspirations let down by poor writing and edgy comedy.

So it’s not about the destination but the journey, which is to say that the game is at least excellent at providing missions that vary wildly in goal and execution. Snipe a target from a hotel. Drive a leaky oil tanker while a flame from your crude discharge gets closer and closer. Fight off an entire army in over a few blocks. Steal an impounded car, fill it with drugs, get into a shootout with the cops, and drop the car by a precinct. Protect Chan, the most irritatingly Dionysian faction leader, from an armada of jet skiing gangsters. Hack the ~~FBI~~ FIB building. My favorite is the one where you’re the driver in a series of drive-bys, largely because A) it’s a weird inversion of those omnipresent turret sections in games at the time (which also show up here) and B) because the game helpfully points out that you can help your buddy by running over the enemies yourself. I’m contributing!

Image: Vgchartz. A standard firefight. Since the cops confiscate your weapons after arresting you, failing a mission after accumulating guns and ammo costs quite a bit.

Despite riding the coattails of an immensely successful franchise and coming out on one of the best selling consoles of all time, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars didn’t come close to matching its big, 3D siblings. It underperformed on the Nintendo DS; on PSP (which already had several GTA spinoffs) it did significantly worse. I’m not quite sure why. It can’t be that Nintendo fans were unreceptive if they took to it more than Sony ones. Nor do I think any backlash to the big game affected it. One guess is that by some point, probably the release of IV, Grand Theft Auto had crossed some sort of rubicon that made it too big and respectable for this kind of small, vaguely retro release. But Chinatown Wars was still critically acclaimed as an encapsulation of the GTA experience that did right by its series and its console. Not bad in a time where the former was having a minor reckoning and the latter was running out of steam.

Actually, looking at lists of late-era DS games, by the end of the Aughts it really was mostly Pokémon and a low tier Zelda buttressing a few quirky cult classics and plenty of shovelware. The Nintendo DS was a phenomenal system. It had space for games like Elite Beat Agents and Professor Layton. It popularized visual novels, helped whole franchises establish themselves, and crossed that blue ocean of casual gamers Nintendo had been chasing. But the last few years of its life cycle were mostly a vacuum before the Nintendo 3DS replaced it. Chinatown Wars was not the last important DS game, but it feels like it should be. It’s big, it’s loud, and it’s chock-full of fun, gimmicky touch screen prompts like assembling a sniper rifle or hotwiring a car. There’s even one for pickpocketing someone you’ve beheaded! The only thing missing is one of those silly subtitles that had a “D.S.” acronym, like Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow or Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword. Perhaps that was it; GTA came just a few years too late, when interest in the system—and Nintendo as a whole—was slowing to a near halt.

Image: Google Play. Chinatown Wars on mobile does look clearer and crisper, but also blander. The tiny sprites added a surprising grit that this lacks.

While Rockstar would funnel GTA4’s more subdued, tragic storytelling into the Red Dead games to greater acclaim, the even more successful Grand Theft Auto V was another uncomfortable compromise between its dark and madcap tones. And when the series would finally return to a Nintendo console in 2021, with the House of Mario even publishing a physical release, it would be through the castigated Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. As for Chinatown Wars? Well, in 2014 a port was released for mobile devices, where it appears eminently playable. It’s a curio these days, a relic of an era where Rockstar could have experimental side projects instead of just these gigantic development cycles that are hopefully escaping the worst of crunch culture.

Chinatown Wars is, for however poorly it has aged and problematic as it always was, a great show pony for Nintendo’s Dual Screen. And while it’s a technical marvel indeed, what I mean by that is that it captures the essence of the Nintendo DS better than almost any DS game I’ve seen—even most of Nintendo’s. The element of organization, the touch screen gimmicks, the dual screen gimmicks, the imaginative missions… This is what the console became: a land of charming oddities that pushed innovation. And while the 3DS had plenty of innovators and a commendable lineup, it lacked the chaotic atmosphere that led to major releases like this. That’s why the mobile port just feels wrong. Huang’s stupid escapade demands a stylus, and a system that isn’t neck deep in scam games. So while it may be milquetoast for GTA, and as a product of 2009 it has aged no better than Old Dogs or The Blind Side, it’s rather perfect as an example of just how wild the DS could be.

Next game: Plants vs. Zombies

Read all of “Gun Metal Gaming” here.