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Vice City remains one of the best open-world games ever made, not just because the amount of freedom it offered the player at the time of the game's release was astonishing but also because, unlike most contemporary open-world games, its openness made sense thematically. It gives you a giant virtual playground, designed to let you do what you want to do when you want to do it, and that fitted with the context of the era, one that produced works of fiction obsessed with the search of happiness in a world of decadence and excess. All the same, Vice City never rises above paying tribute to its influences. It doesn't ever muse on the cyclical tragedy of Miami's drug scene or the city's racism against Haitians and Columbians. But few would have expected it to. Besides being an 80s theme park, this is Grand Theft Auto we're talking about, a series that occasionally shoots for the stars (GTA IV's plot about an immigrant selling the remnants of his soul for a stability that doesn't exist is still a master class of writing in video games) but is mostly content to roll about in the gutter and tell dick jokes.More nostalgia on Motherboard: These 1980s McDonald's Ads Perfectly Predicted Our Future
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