David’s Retro Rewind | GTA: Vice City

Ah, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The last mainline GTA title that had to work ever so slightly harder to cause moral panics the old-fashioned way, before the absolute nothing-burger that was “Hot Coffee” in San Andreas. Set in the year 1986 in the titular Vice City (a parody of basically the entire state of Florida), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City puts players in the shoes (and very comfortable-looking shirt) of one Tommy Vercetti. Good ol’ Tommy Boy has been basically left to rot in Vice City after serving 15 years in prison to protect his crime boss, Sonny Forelli.

Sonny and his cohorts, above Tommy in the family hierarchy, put Tommy in contact with Ken Rosenberg, an extremely high-strung lawyer whom I strongly suspect got his law degree as a prize from inside a cereal box. Nevertheless, Ken has some connections to the criminal underworld that can at least help Tommy get some income flowing, provided everything goes according to plan. Of course, precisely nothing goes according to plan. Sonny instructs Tommy, Ken, and another fellow named Lance Vance to conduct a major drug deal with a local Cuban gang, with Sonny assuring the trio that nothing could possibly go wrong.

As we all undoubtedly remember from the September 1986 issue of Entirely Predictable Plot Twists Quarterly, the deal turns out to be a setup. The Cubans open fire on Tommy and the lads, end up killing Lance’s brother (who was also in on the deal), and make off with both the precious cargo and the cash Sonny had provided to facilitate the transaction. Tommy explains to Sonny that it wasn’t his fault the deal went sour, but Sonny clearly doesn’t care about anything other than recovering both his money and the drugs for which he intended to exchange it.

Setup or not, as far as Sonny is concerned, Tommy has just painted a target on his own back. The Forelli crime family isn’t exactly the largest or most influential of its kind in Vice City, but Tommy has sense enough to know it’s still unwise to cross them. Thus, Tommy and Ken find themselves having to scramble to find a solution before Sonny’s patience runs dry. Ken starts out by having Tommy engage in a tiny, harmless bit of jury intimidation to protect one of Sonny’s relatives from a likely prison sentence as a means of temporarily mollifying Sonny.

Ken then puts Tommy in contact with Avery Carrington, a ruthless real estate mogul who enlists Tommy’s help in eliminating some problematic people (and labor unions) who are standing in the way of Avery obtaining some prime land he wants to develop. Not long thereafter, Tommy is introduced to a retired colonel and fellow drug lord who’s associated with a man named Ricardo Diaz. Tommy figures out that Diaz was the guy who orchestrated the setup on the drug deal that kicked off the events of GTA: Vice City. Both Tommy and Lance want revenge on Diaz for different reasons.

Lance wants to avenge his slain brother, while Tommy wants to both punish Diaz for his transgressions and (hopefully) get Sonny off his back. Tommy does a fair bit of work for Diaz to earn Diaz’s trust and, with any luck, lull the notoriously paranoid Diaz into a false sense of security. Lance follows in Tommy’s stead, but eventually grows impatient and tries to eliminate Diaz before what Tommy thinks is the right moment to strike. Lance fails, gets captured, taken to the city’s scrapyard, and tortured until Tommy manages to gun down a legion or two of Diaz’s goons and rescue him.

Tommy ensures Lance’s immediate safety, and then promptly tells Lance off for allowing his impatience to ruin Tommy’s careful planning. The two know Diaz isn’t going to take that insult lying down, so they have to join forces to eliminate Diaz before he does the same to them. The pair blast their way into Diaz’s fortified mansion on the exclusive Starfish Island and eventually manage to kill Diaz. Thereafter, Tommy takes ownership of Diaz’s mansion, somehow. That’s not explained at all, but I guess murder is a perfectly legal way to officially change possession of real estate in Vice City.

Tommy uses his new estate as a base of operations from which he and his allies intend to commandeer Diaz’s former protection rackets and, eventually, the entire criminal underbelly of Vice City alongside them. If Tommy can pull that off, he’ll simultaneously make himself obscenely wealthy and be easily able to pay Sonny however much money he demands to forget about the doomed drug deal and stop threatening Tommy. This point in the campaign is where you might abruptly hit a wall of confusion if you haven’t played through GTA: Vice City before. At least, I did until I looked up a guide.

After completing the mission called “Shakedown,” which you can do immediately after acquiring the newly rechristened “Vercetti Estate,” you’re informed that you can now begin purchasing properties throughout Vice City. The potential sticking point is that you’ll find there are no more mission markers on the map, which might leave you wondering how you can continue progressing the story. It turns out that in order to unlock the final set of story missions, you must purchase at least six businesses and complete any required missions to turn them into fully-fledged financial assets. Then they, along with Vercetti Estate, will periodically generate money for you.

Assuming the guide I followed is accurate, two of those six businesses you purchase must be specifically the Print Works and the Malibu Club. To my disappointment, I haven’t been able to personally confirm that or to finish GTA: Vice City due to technical issues. I’ve gotten close to that point twice now, but both times, my save file somehow became corrupted, even despite my efforts to keep backups of them. I don’t particularly want to restart Vice City for a third time in order to finish it, especially since I can’t guarantee I won’t lose yet another save file.

Since I’d been playing the original PC version of GTA: Vice City from 2003 (which is part of the original trilogy that has since been delisted from Steam), I can’t entirely fault the game itself for that. Not even community-made mods and patches could address every single issue with the original version of Vice City. That’s just part of the “fun” of trying to get such old games to cooperate with modern hardware and software. That, and I refuse to purchase the much-maligned laughingstock that is the so-called “Definitive Edition” trilogy. I refuse to encourage Rockstar’s insulting efforts on that front.

In light of all that, I don’t really feel any desire to jump through the hoops necessary to even potentially finish playing through Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The fact that I had to strongly rely on cheat codes to curb the campaign’s difficulty enough that it was accessible for me also really didn’t help matters. Though I enjoyed much of my attempted playthroughs, my personal accessibility concerns combined with the technical limitations that kneecap the original PC version of Vice City have led me to decide that I’d rather just watch the final few missions on YouTube and call that good enough.