The release of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories is mere weeks away, and it's looking to be a huge improvement over the series' first PSP effort, Liberty City Stories. Not only does it sport a bigger city, longer missions and the ability to commandeer helicopters, but it also improves on that game's kickass multiplayer with a whopping 10 modes of ad-hoc play. We recently got a chance to play two of these for ourselves: Vice City Survivor and Might of the Hunter.

Vice City Survivor is the same straight-up deathmatch action that rocked Liberty City Stories, and in a GTA game, "straight-up deathmatch" means something special. With six players, Survivor is literally a riot, with you and your friends to run amok in a sizable chunk of Vice City (six neighborhoods are available as battlegrounds) teeming with almost the same level of pedestrian and vehicle traffic as the single-player mode. So in addition to ramming bullets and rockets down each other's throats, you can jack cars and motorcycles and run your friends over when they least expect it.

 

    As a pure free-for-all (or in teams, if that's your thing), Vice City Survivor is insanely entertaining. As is true for most multiplayer games, screaming trash talk at the buddy who just took off your head with a sniper rifle is almost as fun as vengefully backing over him a few times with a stolen truck. The game performs pretty well with six players, too, and we only occasionally ran into bugs - choppy animation, temporarily invisible opponents - during our session with it. We even saw some cool blurring effects when we got up some speed on motorcycles.

 

    More complicated and less rewarding was the new Might of the Hunter mode, a variation on Liberty City Stories' Tanks for the Memories game (which is also available here). The twist is that instead of every player running for a single tank that appears at some random location, you'll all be hauling ass toward a Hunter attack chopper.

 

    Blowing up opponents with the Hunter's missiles is the only way to score kills, but that's a lot tougher than it sounds. The Hunter doesn't have any sort of lock-on capabilities, and it's touchy as hell to steer, so you'll frequently find yourself struggling to point in the right direction and hoping your rockets connect

 

    You can fly low to get a better look at your targets, but then you'll open yourself up to fire from their bazookas, which they'll all magically get the second someone hops into the chopper. We can see this being fun with practice, but not so much for newbies - especially given how frequently the animation got choppy when the Hunter zoomed by.

 

Even with the lag, though, it's good to see that multiplayer is being treated with the same care and attention to detail as Vice City Stories' sprawling story mode. Assuming you have five friends who also plan to get the game, we predict this one won't be leaving your PSP for a long time - at least not until they figure out a way to squeeze San Andreas onto the handheld.