Impersonating Tommy Vercetti with such acuity that he’s gestural nuances and speech patterns were mimicked more than was healthy for me.
The addiction became so prominent that I actually began enacting the scenes as they happened on-screen. I received it as a Christmas present along with the PS2 that my mother generously saved for, and I subsequently devoted the entire festive period to its completion. I didn’t just adore this game, I lived it. Nowhere is that lunacy more perceptible than in the series most commercially volatile editions: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
Above all GTA is daft entertainment, with its absurdity only matched by its gratuity. Controversy embroiled it, defines it, imbuing it with a sense of vigour that allows it to flourish in spite of the continued sneers, directed by tabloid dirt rags and periodicals that simply look to incite fear rather than understand a game that relishes in the madness of violence and criminality.
With narratives both satirical and breathlessly irreverent GTA has endured despite constantly being undermined as a series for “casual” and perennially censured as the cause for teenage suicide. The Grand Theft Auto series has had an expansive wealth of aberrant iterations, some more distinctive than others.
