GTA: Chinatown Wars - the best bits

The past couple of weeks we've loved our DS more than at possibly any other time. The reason? We've had Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars to play on it.

As well as simply enjoying the experience that is Rockstar Leeds's latest though, we've also been taking careful note of our favourite bits. And here they are, in no particular order. Of course, feel free to add your own in the comments section at the bottom...

Uncle Kenny is one of the first characters Huang meets on his arrival to Liberty City, and he remains a firm favourite throughout. Not just for his frequent references to his 'exotic' porn collection, but also for musings such as this one. "You're young - you'll just end up tripped out on ecstasy with a needle full of skag stuck in your eyeball and midgets blowing coke up your ass... and it'll all be my fault!"

In games, motorbikes always provide speed at the expense of the extreme likelihood of crashing. In Chinatown Wars this rule is followed to the extreme. The things are like suicide on two wheels, but even armed with this knowledge, every now and then you find yourself taking a deep breath, throwing some poor begger off their wheels and clambering astride only to experience ten seconds of eyeball twitching tension before crashing spectacularly into a wire fence.

The taxi missions are as addictive as ever, but the ambulance missions perhaps pip even those to the post in Chinatown Wars. That's because they ingeniously use the touchscreen to have you bringing the dead you're carrying back to life en-route. As well as dodging traffic and trying to reach the hospital in time, you're also listening out for your patient flat-lining. If they do, a few quick zaps with the defibrillator on the touchscreen is needed to get them beating again.

4.The foolhardiness of robbing an Ammu-Nation van

It's a stroke of genius that Chinatown Wars dangles the carrot of the Ammu-Nation robbery in front of you throughout the game. And what a carrot it is. These vans regularly pass you in the street, promising hidden delights of guns not yet seen or saved up for inside them.

The problem is, while you can rob them theoretically, in practice it's very difficult. People driving vans full of guns tend to be quite heavily armed you see. Despite this, it still takes stern willpower not to drop everything and go after the things like Benny Hill on the heels of a semi-clad young lady every single time you see one in the street, while simultaneously muttering "I'll have you this time..."

5. Scratch cards

Already this game has everything you can imagine to keep you hooked on it like one of its many drug addled characters are to crack. Then it goes and keeps adding these completely optional extras, like newsagents selling scratch cards. Wander into one and you can spend many happy minutes using the DS touchscreen to scrape off their coating and win money, guns and even the ultimate in prizes: a shiny new apartment.

When it was first revealed, drug dealing on the DS seemed like a fairly alien idea. And it is - but that doesn't stop it being great. Before very long, getting email tip offs that a dealer in Broker is offloading cheap heroin but only until Thursday is enough to get you dropping everything and scraping together your pennies to buy a whole stash.

A few days later, they're desperate for the stuff in Bohan and you're $4,000 the richer. It's almost enough to make you wonder if it'd be that easy in real life... uh, not that we'd ever replicate something illegal we'd done in a game in real life, of course.

It's always been pretty easy to nick cars in the Grand Theft Auto games. Usually you just have to chuck someone out of theirs and climb on in. Things are stepped up a notch in Chinatown Wars though.

While middle-of-the-road parked cars just require a screwdriver jamming in the ignition, the more desirable hot rods come with sweat-formingly tense immobilisers to disarm. As a timer ticks down, you have to match up numbers on a grid. Get it wrong, and you're stuck driving a car complete with flashing lights and a tooting horn that's going to attract every police patrol car in the area.

Rockstar is always generous to the extreme with cheats for the GTA games. Our favourite cheat code goes like this: press R, Up, Y, Down, Left, R, Y, Right during the game, and get yourself a chainsaw, revolver, flamethrower, carbine, SMG and dual-barrel. Just remember to use a separate save slot when you're using a cheat code because having one activated might just mess up your overall rating when you complete the game.

Open up the map of Liberty City you get with the game and you'll see that, nestled in the bottom left corner, is a lovely sounding place called Happiness Island.

'Borrow' a boat and you can pay it a visit to take in the sights of this picturesque tourist island. OR you can pay it a visit armed with a chainsaw... tourists can be really annoying after all. A few minutes of dismembering later and Happiness Island is soon reduced to less happy status, with its surrounding waters resembling police soup, and police cars piling in from thin air.

In previous Grand Theft Auto games the gags came from the spoof radio stations. Now it's all about the spam emails.

Random example:
Subject: (SPAM?) work from home
Buy into our franchise and we'll set you up with all you need to beat off men in the privacy of your own home... Click the link today and we'll throw in a month's supply of easy-clean-wipes, friction-burn-band-aids and a self help book 'Coping with Spiritual and Moral Desolation'.