GTA Chinatown Wars drops the f-bomb at least five times within the first three minutes.

And somehow, because you have to read it via subtitles (the cutscenes have no voice acting), it seems even dirtier. We’ve all heard the GameStop horror stories of parents who buy M-rated console games for their under-M kids with nothing more than an impatient wave for the clerk’s warning. So I can’t help but wonder how many more copies of Chinatown Wars will fall into the hands of kids, given the DS’s incomparable sellthrough to the younger set.

Anyway, this is one astonishing DS game. For reasons beyond simple script vulgarity. I really don’t think Rockstar was kidding when they started hyping how they intended to fit a full-scale GTA game inside the DS. Although this Liberty City lacks the westmost island (Alderney), it seems just as alive and detailed as GTAIV… relative to graphical fidelity, of course. There is a lot of texture pixelization, but nothing that truly comes off as ugly or cheap. What is impressive is the little touches: letters exploding out of a rammed mailbox, random audio samples of chatty passers-by, the slight screen-shake when the El rumbles overhead. And that attention to detail (Weazel News billboards!) makes it all feel like Liberty City, not just a generic copy/paste collection of city patterns. I’m very interested to fire up GTAIV and see how well the maps match up, because I definitely recognize plenty of landmarks and building locations.

I’m still adjusting to the controls. Not because there’s fewer buttons on a DS compared to a Dual Shock, but because things seem faster than I expect. Huang Lee runs pretty quickly and most of the cars I’ve jacked seem really speedy. It’s a testament to the smoothness of the game’s engine, I suppose. But I run into walls a lot. There is an optional auto-correct which makes cars re-align themselves to the road, and that takes some getting used to. I think it also applies to Huang on foot, which is plain weird. I may turn the auto-correct off and see if I like that any better.

No, you do not have to get through some silly touchscreen minigame on every car you steal. So far, I’d guess it happens about 25% of the time (on parked cars, not cars with drivers, obviously), and more if the mission requires hotwiring for dramatic purposes. There are at least three hotwiring mini-games, so even that is nicely varied. You also run into touchscreen games when you buy a scratch-off lottery card, tattoo somebody, or make Molotov cocktails at the local gas station.

The in-game PDA is incredibly sweet. It definitely makes things feel modern, because you use your PDA for instant email, map tracking, ordering weapons from Ammu-Nation, instant messaging with Friends, etc. In short, exactly the kind of stuff you would do with your iPhone. In GTAIV, Rockstar skimped on technology like this due to Niko Bellic being unfamiliar to that sort of thing (and of course, the PS2 GTAs were able to sidestep this by virtue of being set in the recent past.) But Huang Lee, being a spoiled twenty-something, is totally up on tech.

So far, the plot seems to be following the usual GTA standard of Work for Guy A, Meet Guy B, Betray Guy A to Guy C, Work for Guy C. The writing is top notch; Huang is actually really sarcastic and blithely annoyed by the goings-on in Liberty. He particularly enjoys snidely jabbing at his family’s faked “ancient traditions.” Although I’d love to see (and hear) the mission debriefs in movie cutscenes, I’ll give a pass on that since there’s obviously so much detail elsewhere in the game.

Eager to play more. Liberty City 4 Life.