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.
