Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City drops you into 1986: neon signs, pastel suits, palm-lined boulevards and a city that never seems to turn the music down. You play Tommy Vercetti, a mobster fresh out of prison who gets sent south to oversee a drug deal, only to watch it go wrong in the first few minutes. Broke and in trouble with his bosses back home, Tommy has to find out who set him up - and he ends up building his own empire along the way. This page runs a browser port of the full game, built from the open-source reVC engine, so the whole island is playable without installing anything.

Give the Game About 30 Seconds to Load

Vice City is a big game, and the browser has to download its world data before the menu appears. When you open the page you will see a LOADING... counter and then a progress bar - please wait roughly 30 seconds (a little longer on slow Wi-Fi) and do not refresh halfway through. When the screen says Click to continue, click once and the main menu with Start Game, Options and Quit Game appears. The downloaded data is cached by your browser, so the next visit starts noticeably faster. Radio music and some sounds stream in while you play, which is why a station can take a moment to kick in the first time you tune to it.

Controls on Keyboard and Mouse

One click on the picture captures the mouse pointer; after that:

• W A S D - walk and run, or accelerate, brake and steer in a vehicle.
• Mouse - look around and aim; left click fires.
• Left Shift - sprint on foot, horn in a car.
• Space - jump on foot, handbrake in a vehicle (perfect for power slides).
• F or Enter - get in or out of a vehicle.
• Q / E or the mouse wheel - switch weapons; right click locks onto a target.
• R - change radio station; V - change camera view; C - crouch.
• Tab - answer the phone; Esc - pause menu, map and settings.

On a phone or tablet the port shows on-screen buttons and two virtual sticks, one for moving and one for the camera.

The Story Missions

The game opens with a cutscene in a smoky office full of champagne bottles before Tommy steps off the plane into Ocean Beach. Little yellow and pink markers on the radar lead to the characters who hand out work: the lawyer Ken Rosenberg, the retired colonel Cortez on his yacht, the dangerous Ricardo Diaz and plenty of others. Early jobs are simple deliveries and chases, but they quickly grow into heists, shootouts and getaways. Later in the story you can buy properties around the city - a film studio, an ice-cream factory, a taxi firm, a nightclub - and each one unlocks its own chain of missions and a steady income.

A City Built for Messing Around

You do not have to follow the story at all. Vice City is split into two islands joined by bridges, and both are packed with things to do between missions:

• Vehicles everywhere - sports cars, sedans, police cruisers, trucks, motorbikes, boats and even helicopters. Motorbikes are new compared to Grand Theft Auto 3 and make wheelies and stunt jumps easy.
• Side jobs - steal a taxi, ambulance, police car or fire truck and press the mission button to start paid side work.
• Hidden packages and stunt jumps - tucked into alleys and rooftops for the explorers.
• Wanted stars - cause chaos and the stars at the top right start filling up, from street cops all the way to the army. Paint shops reset them.

The Radio Is Half the Fun

Hop into any car and the radio starts playing one of nine stations. Flash FM plays pop hits, V-Rock blasts hair metal, Fever 105 is all disco, Wave 103 covers new wave, Wildstyle brings early hip-hop, Emotion 98.3 does power ballads and Espantoso plays Latin music. K-Chat and VCPR are talk stations full of jokes about the decade. Press R to cycle through them - finding your favourite station for a long drive is part of the experience.

Tips for Your First Hour

• Your first safehouse is the hotel in Ocean Beach; walk into the save marker there to keep your progress in this browser.
• Pink markers are missions, blue icons on the radar show shops - visit the gun shops once you have some cash.
• Use the handbrake (Space) for sharp corners instead of slamming into walls at full speed.
• If the police are on you, a quick trip through a Pay 'n' Spray garage clears your wanted level.
• Lower the draw distance in Options if the game feels slow on an older laptop.

More Open-World Action

If you want more crime-city chaos after Vice City, try Grand Theft Auto 3 for the grittier Liberty City that came before it, or GTA for another take on the series. For pure driving without the police chasing you, Drift Hunters is a great place to practise your handbrake turns.