Acting out crime sprees with celebrity voices

Tommy can’t swim. It’s his one weakness, an unlikely flaw for the tough guy with the Ray Liotta voice, this criminal for hire, a survivor of mobster shoot-outs and exploding sports cars. But one wrong step into the drink and he’s helpless as an infant, sinking to oblivion, hired muscle asleep with the fishes.

Tommy is the central character in “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” the sequel to “Grand Theft Auto III” released this week to PlayStation2 gamers anxious to cruise the streets of a fictional Florida resort town infested with crime. Which means Tommy is you, just out of prison after 15 years, and assigned by local mob kingpins to special errands amid sunshine and mayhem.

Much effort has been made recently in translating hit video games into feature films, with mostly disappointing results. But “Vice City” makes that struggle virtually irrelevant. The game is already a movie, or at least enough of a step in the convergence of games and film to suggest a wave of the future.

Sales of video games already rival the movie business, largely on the strength of games like “GTA III,” which in the last year has sold 7 million copies (at nearly $50 each). Game companies have already begun recruiting Hollywood talent, and “Vice City” takes things further with a cast headed by Liotta, Burt Reynolds and Dennis Hopper.

“Vice City” is not the massive step forward that “GTA III” represented, with its endless, wide-open game-play in a world heavy with detail. It merely builds on the same technology and game-playing engine that was already in place, refining and deepening storytelling experience, a true sequel in the way that “The Empire Strikes Back” was to the original “Star Wars.”

This time the story is set in the pastel ‘80s of “Miami Vice” and “Scarface,” where supercops drive Lamborghini’s and drug kingpins settle arguments with a chainsaw. Missions send players on endless drug deals and double-crosses, many of them scenes lifted lovingly from modern gangster films.

A large part of “Vice City’s” unlikely greatness comes from an obsessive attention to detail that some gamers may not immediately recognize on the road to crime and punishment. This is a fully realized world, from luxury hotels to crime-infested slums, with a range of social classes and changing weather (down to the water droplets that appear on your screen). It can also be heard in the period music and scripted talk.

In “Grand Theft Auto,” as in many other games, the player is the one-man crime wave, which has earned producer Rockstar Games a storm of criticism. But the game is clearly labeled as “mature” entertainment. In the right hands, it’s as real and as harmless as paintball, with sexual innuendo no more appalling than a typical issue of Maxim.