“Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars” released for the iPhone and iPod Touch

The venerable Grand Theft Auto series has been ported to almost every device in gadetry’s zoological garden, but few of the efforts were as superlative as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS. Realizing that the first-person style of the likes of Grand Theft Auto III and IV would be ill-suited for the DS’ control scheme and modest hardware, they instead came up with an amalgam of the frenetic, top-down 2D action of Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2 combined with the story and strong characters of the latter games in the series.

The result is a masterpiece: not just one of the best games in the handheld line Grand Theft Auto games, but the series as a whole. And now it’s available over at the App Store for $9.99.

I haven’t tried the iPhone version yet, but the screenshots look remarkably more crisp and detailed than the Nintendo DS version, although it retains the latter’s attractive cel-shaded top-down perspective. A failing of the DS version was afterthought touch gimmicks, and I imagine those have been ported wholesale to the iPhone version, but overall, if Chinatown Wars for the iPhone is as good as game as its DS counterpart, this is a must buy for Apple gamers.

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