I was really hesitating to actually review this until i could at the very least burn a CD backup of it and play it on my actual dreamcast which right now isn't working the best but honestly this version of GTA2 was so bad that i physically couldn't justify playing it for longer than about 10 minutes, which is a damn shame considering how fun the PC/PSX versions of the game are and how great a dreamcast version sounds!
GTA2 Overview
Grand Theft Auto 2 or as its officially called (GTA2) is considered the odd one out of the series, instead of taking place in the (at least then) present day like GTAV, GTAIV, GTAIII, The Original GTA etc or in a set point in the past like GTA Vice City, GTA London, GTALCS, GTA San Andreas etc GTA2 takes place in a undisclosed time (either 1999, 2013 or just anytime three weeks into the future according to official sources) set in "Anywhere USA" with a mix of mid-20th Century retro-futurism and Y2K era Cyberpunk aesthetics, GTA2 doesn't have much to compare itself to even within its series of games.
instead of a set storyline where you work for some specific gang (and then after a certain mission or something some rival gang will just try to kill you if you go to their territory, which honestly felt annoying) in GTA2 you were your own boss, you choose which gangs you work for (if a gang likes you enough not only do you unlock harder missions but if you're being chased by cops they might lend a hand and try to get them off your tail) and which ones will despise you (if a gang hates you well enough they might use truly OP weapons to take you down if they see you)
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this game imo can be truly tough as nails sometimes, in a kind of classic NES game way. Which is fun! And when compared to GTA1 (which was honestly a pretty meh game generally) GTA2 basically feels like a total refinement of a Top Down 2D GTA entry! The only thing keeping it from being a masterpiece is the tank controls, when honestly a twin stick style would have fit this game much better! But still its a classic on the PC and PS1 and even with the tank controls it manages to feel Fast Paced and totally Arcade-esque! i would give GTA2 on PC/PSX an 8/10, its just great fun even with some flaws!Now you may be thinking... "This sounds great! I'm hoping since the Dreamcast is a generational leap from the PSX that it would be near PC quality! Imagine being able to see your respect or mission goals on the VMU! Imagine the PC's Online Multiplayer streamlined for Dreamcast! Imagine the larger crowds of the PC version on a console! This could be a hidden gem, a true classic!" and thats what i thought when i first tried GTA2 on Dreamcast, i tried it on an emulator, it was the first dreamcast game i had ever played and... it was... not good... It felt off, it felt wrong, it felt like a chore playing this version. And it might just be one of the worst games on the system! But surely i just didnt give it a chance. So tonight i booted it up with the hope that i could prove myself wrong and perhaps dub it the best version of GTA2 on consoles. Lets just say i'd be surprised if i went longer than 5-10 minutes, but for me it might as well have felt like hours
Grand Theft Auto 2 on Sega Dreamcast
So how bad was it? Well booting it up i was greeted by the intro videos, but they just seemed highly compressed (i was playing off a GDI file on flycast) so i looked up gameplay from the PC version and it was lower quality on DC! But maybe that isnt fair so i checked the PSX version online and it seems to be about the same quality as that one, so maybe i was just bitter about this version from when i first tried it so lets forget that for a second... I remembered that i thought the controls were awful so i checked the settings and i was greeted with a few, odd presets. Movement is mapped the same way for on foot and in a car, so using the triggers for the car feels natural, but on foot it feels weird, and since this is a PC/PSX game you may thing this would work best with D-Pad controls, but you can only use the analog stick for left and right, the dpad is only used for "special inputs" and guess what? In game it doesnt matter how far or how little you move the stick, left or right you move the same as you would with a digital input! Why they force you to use the analog stick for a game that wont use it properly is out of my thought process. So i just set it to something random because i couldn't find anything really satisfying anyways and not even tolerably sensical like the "Reverse Peace-Walker" scheme of Half-Life DC.
So now i had to finally jump into a new game and immediately i am faced with the said "useless forced analog tank controls" but i must press forward and jack a car and do some missions! I went to the loony territory and did Radio Za-Za, speaking of the radio. The radio repeats every single time you enter your car, so get used to hearing "69 to 89 FM" or "SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZ FUNBAGS" and not much else, the radio is usually one of the best parts of the GTA games, but since it always repeats from the beginning it just gets annoying after awhile, and what also gets a bit annoying is when the game sometimes slows down when you're at high speeds nearby pretty crowded people and traffic, which is better than the PSX version, but GTA2 works best when its truly fast and breakneck. I know the dreamcast kind of suffered in performance when it came to that 16MB of ram and i could have turned on 32MB on Flycast or something but i was already tired of this game after a few minutes to bother with it, surely even with all the graphical improvements they could have been able to put in enough traffic and people to prevent this amount of slowdown (i dont think its a deal-breaker but its the combination of everything that makes this port terrible to where every little detail makes you go mad) but after radio za-za i went to do the Pizza Cake mission, and thats when i noticed that for me the cop heads that appear when you get a wanted level look oddly glitchy... i checked a few other (pretty low quality) videos of the DC version and it seems even there its like that, so its not an emulation issue to my knowledge!
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i just went to do my favorite kill frenzyshow spoiler»
normally i could spend dozens of minutes on this one racking up points but here i just gave up when some cops busted me and i just had to stop there.GTA2 on Dreamcast was not that fun, it was a genuine chore to go through even that short amount of time i had with it, i dont even like saying a game is "bad" or anything, but this absolutely sucked the life out of me. But it seemed really strange to me, it almost felt like a really rushed port, so i looked into this and i found a hidden palace article on a prototype build made only 16 WHOLE DAYS before the final build and it had overlapping text glitches and NO PLAYABLE RADIO STATIONS, so it seems to me that this was rushed out the door for a Spring 2000 release, way before this would have been ready! This explains so many problems with this port! People at stores were basically paying for a RUSHED BETA of this game... almost sounds like a certain other GTA related release that came out pretty recently its absolutely horrible and i feel sorry for the team who probably had to work overtime to get this out in time.
I imagine people gave up on the Dreamcast when they played this in 2000 and then one year later saw GTAIII on the PS2, i imagine many people my age who didnt grow up with the Dreamcast only heard about it second hand and maybe have only tried stuff like this and wrote off the Dreamcast, i myself am surprised that i managed to get into this system a couple years after i first tried this game on nullDC on my pc for about 10 minutes. Theres a lot more mildly infuriating small details found by people here on this site and more, but i had to just mention the worst of the worst.
But i see lots of comments and testimonies from people of the time who loved this version, and i dont want this review to make you feel like you're wrong or anything at all, your feelings on this title are completely valid. But this game burned me, and it nearly burned me on the Sega Dreamcast as a whole until i could try stuff like the Excellent Tony Hawk 2 Port, Sonic Adventure, Tokyo Xtreme Racer, ETC. I would only reccomend playing this on an emulator or burning it on a CD and only playing it to go wild on a shooting spree (preferably with the TV muted and while you play something else on in the background)
If i have to rate this mess i would give it a 3.5 out of 10 (3 if i cant give it any half points) i had more fun with the impressive but finnicky to control Game Boy Color port of GTA2, this port deserved better, imagine if... if this had online play, better performance, non looping radio, configurable controls, KB+M support, better VMU use ETC. This would be an all time classic! But instead we have what is essentially a Prototype that was sold to stores. Truly one of my least favorites on the system so far. Or maybe i'm just too critical, perhaps... Perhaps i'll someday burn it onto a CD and try it on real hardware, spend more than 10 minutes on it. But for now i am thankful to not be playing this anymore.
