GTA3: A New Direction for Mobile Gaming?

There have also been concessions to some of the more user-friendly enhancements made to the general gameplay experience in the decade since the game first launched. The original GTA3 never auto-saved - you had to return to your hideout to save your game, but it's a simple enhancement added to the new mobile version. Also, dying in a mission would see you teleported to the nearest hospital, necessitating an often long journey back to the mission restart point. For the portable conversion, Rockstar has thoughtfully included the option to retry the mission should you fail abysmally.

Re-purposing control schemes designed for console control pads is one of the major challenges facing developers looking to bring their back catalogue titles to mobile.

In terms of how the gameplay "works" in a mobile environment, where players often snatch the odd, convenient five minutes of action as opposed to planting themselves in front of the telly for hours on end, Rockstar is fortunate in that the GTA formula transitions across well without needing any fundamental changes - a state of affairs we first saw affirmed in 2005's excellent Liberty City Stories spin-off for PSP, a game so good it transitioned seamlessly back onto PS2. The city itself offers up a range of casual challenges, while the storyline missions are self-contained and can be polished off relatively quickly.

So far, so good. However, it's clear that the control scheme is contentious - and the crux of whether a console game will work on a mobile device all hinges on the viability of the interface. It's in this respect that GTA3 doesn't quite deliver. A touchscreen based virtual joystick moves the player and context-sensitive buttons appear on-screen according to the available options. For example, if you're near a vehicle, a door icon manifests allowing you to gain entry.

It's disappointing in this respect that Rockstar couldn't come up with a touch-orientated control scheme: why not tap NPCs to shoot them, touch cars to enter them, or tap on locations to run there? We have to assume that it would have been too much trouble to retrofit into the game, or it may simply be the case that Rockstar gave it a shot during development but felt that the result wasn't quite good enough to be rolled out in the final game.

This is the single-most important challenge game-makers will face in bringing their existing back-catalogue over to mobile devices. Sure, pre-existing controls are virtualy no problem to owners of PlayStation Vita or Xperia Play and while USB pad support for Android is obviously welcome, it obviously impacts on the viable of these games as truly mobile endeavours. In terms of how GTA3 turned out, the game is still playable, but there's an obvious level of friction between player and game caused by the control method which takes some time to overcome, particularly in the all-important driving sections. It's no accident that the most popular mobile titles - the likes of Infinity Blade, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja and Flight Control - are those which play to the strengths of the touch-driven interface.

There's also the question of whether the majority of PS2-era games are actually good enough to work as modern day mobile products. In GTA3, Rockstar has a genuinely classic game - a release that defined a genre, with a storyline, characters and gameplay that remains hugely enjoyable in the modern era, working particularly well on the small screen. Having recently assessed titles like the Splinter Cell HD offerings, it's clear that many games are very much of their time and would require extensive work to be worthwhile: just the transition to "HD" alone won't cut it, especially in a market where the majority of screens are under four inches in size.

However, it is clear that triple-A development productions offer something very different and very desirable to the mobile market place. As it stands, the market is still dominated by concept-driven games - bite-sized for the most part and ultra-cheap to match - a breath of fresh air in many ways but obviously lacking the "meat" of content exhibited by titles like GTA3. There's clearly room in the market for both styles of game, and the fact that these games would have - we hope - paid for their own development costs during their original releases means that they can be offered with attractive price-points. Rockstar's GTA3 on iOS costs a mere £2.99/$3.99: it may be a ten-year-old game, but it still offers a phenomenal amount of value for money.