Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

I realize the timing of this retrospective could be better, as the real-life Vice City stares across the Atlantic Ocean at one of the worst hurricanes in living memory, but I wanted to check in on Grand Theft Auto one last time before I decide where I'm at with this series. An hour spent with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is hardly sufficient, as I'm still being shown the ropes - and the Colts and the brass knucks and the SMGs - of the game via the introductory missions. I've seen enough to establish what's going on: Tommy Vercetti, our hero, is betrayed on a drug deal with Colombians and has his mob boss Sonny breathing down his neck to recover the money and drugs before he sends the boys around. Tommy's now on the clock to figure out where in Vice City all the drugs went, making new contacts in unexpected places as well as working with the nervous crooked lawyer Ken Rosenberg who set up the deal, never quite sure who to trust.

It's some typical GTA business as usual, though a big change is how Vice City quickly establishes a time and place: a familiar subtropical East Coast city in 1986, replete with short-sleeved jackets and brightly-painted speedboats. The change between the generic metropolis of Liberty City and the sun- and pastel-dappled buildings of Vice City is striking, and the designers had an evident amount of fun building a world, a story, a rogue's gallery of ne'er-do-wells and a group of radio stations to represent the era. Like most things Rockstar, it's less about the verisimilitude to the real-life locations it borrows from (though I'm sure they did their research to get the city's geography right) and more about our perception of same as viewed through a lens of tacky movies and TV shows. Rockstar's big deal is and always has been that they want to make games that feel like you're living in a movie, and all the silly logical inconsistencies, flamboyant characters and cartoon violence that involves.

It's also fair to say that Rockstar put some work into the evolution of their fledgling 3D open-world action-shooter-driving game blueprint from Grand Theft Auto III to Vice City, with a multitude of quality-of-life enhancements (I missed you, world map) and a doubling down on GTA3's smarter ideas. I've only played a snippet of both games, of course - this feature was my opportunity to finally dive back into the middle games of this series, since I missed them the first time around - but it's remarkable how much more I'm enjoying Vice City and I don't think it's entirely due to "the whole 80s thing". I also like Tommy more as a character, since he's willing to speak his mind instead of just mutely emoting at people, and while he's still an inveterate criminal I'm hoping the game finds something like an arc for the guy. I also had to stop and check IMDB a few times while the game was introducing its extended cast in an early mission: Tommy is played by Hollywood tough guy Killian Rayne Smith himself, while other voice roles are taken by numerous prolific "oh hey it's that person!"s from William Fitchner, Tom Sizemore, Gary Busey, Fairuza Balk, British TV cockney-for-hire Danny Dyer, and some Latinx acting talent in the form of Luis Guzman, Danny Trejo and Robert Davi for the game's wide assortment of Colombians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and other Latin Americans that call Vice City their home (or, at least, their base of operations within the US).

However, I can't help but feel that I may have missed the boat on this one. It's a relatively archaic example of a video game genre that has had something like 15 years to evolve since the release of Rockstar's blockbuster trilogy of III/Vice City/San Andreas, and there's more than a handful of modern iterations of this formula I have sitting in a pile of shame somewhere demanding some urgency. There's also the fact that the game is available on PC in a much more convenient (and mod-ready) format, with various graphical improvements that I hope mitigates the game's nauseating levels of motion blur. If I'm saying goodbye to the PS2 with this Top Shelf feature - and it'll be the type of goodbye that won't stick at all as soon as another long-desired PS2 game makes its way to PSN's Classics range - I don't think I'd be leaving Vice City behind. It's timeless in a truer sense of the word: it holds so much significance that I can't imagine it won't ever be available for a modern gaming audience in some shape or form, even if modern open-world games (like GTAV, among others) continue to eclipse it.

All the same, this might be one of those games I'll put aside for October as part of a "clean-up" series along with Stella Deus. I would like to spend more than an hour with it, getting to know more of the game's cast and trying out all the different mission types and side-activities. It all depends on how many more times I'm faced with this "well, an hour's definitely not enough" sentiment as Shelftember continues.

Result: Progresses to Round Three.

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