It's little wonder that I've found myself hankering after a classic Grand Theft Auto experience recently. News on the release of (and subsequent negative reaction to) the remastered "Definitive Edition" of the trilogy has been ubiquitous in the games press, reigniting a desire within me to return to the games that caused me to fall in love with the franchise almost two decades ago. They are ostensibly the video game equivalent of comfort food to me at this point. Selecting a game to play proved difficult, however. I've played all three games in the core "3D Universe" canon in recent years, most recently earning 100% completion and the Platinum Trophy in the now-delisted PS2 Classics version of San Andreas back in the summer. My solution was to boot up my PS Vita and hop into 2005's Liberty City Stories, allowing me to return to the familiar streets of Rockstar's first three-dimensional approximation of America through the slightly less familiar eyes of a different playable character.

I say slightly less familiar because where I've played Grand Theft Auto III to completion at least half a dozen times in the last twenty years and can recall pretty much every one of its main characters and pivotal story missions, I've only ever played Liberty City Stories once, all the way back in 2006 when the PlayStation 2port was released. Consequently, of the fifteen or so hours I've played of it thus far, very little of it has rung bells in the deep recesses of my memory. I don't remember dealing with characters like J.D. O'Toole or Leon McAffrey, and pretty much every single mission has failed to trigger any sense of déjà-vu, the only exception so far being the very unique set-up of The Portland Chainsaw Masquerade. I'm not sure how much of this can be attributed to the fact I played through this game just once over fifteen years ago, and how much of it boils down to most of these missions being short in length and wholly unremarkable in their design, likely due to the game being developed for short play sessions on a handheld console.

And yet, there is an almost unsettling sense of familiarity I get when playing Liberty City Stories. Some of that is certainly down to the game's open world. LCS uses the same rendition of Liberty City that debuted in GTA III, a game that I have spent a cumulative total of hundreds of hours with over the past twenty years. I know the road layouts of Portland, Staunton Island and Shoreside Vale almost as well as I know my own hometown. Consequently, while the missions themselves feel unfamiliar to me, the locations in which they take place are practically home at this point. Another aspect of that familiarity may come from the game's handful of returning characters, like mob boss Salvatore Leone and media mogul Donald Love. I don't remember most of the specific interactions I've had with them in this game, but their roles in GTA III and the wider "3D Universe" canon make them feel like old friends nonetheless. Even LCS's protagonist Toni Cipriani was himself a mission-giver in GTA III, and while he may not be voiced by Michael Madsen this time around, his interactions with those around him (particularly his perpetually disappointed mother) make him feel consistent with his original rendition.

What makes the familiarity unsettling, though, is the game's radio stations. Where pretty much the entirety of LCS's original content triggers no deeply buried memories whatsoever, the radio chatter is another matter entirely. From the first moment I hopped into a vehicle with the radio tuned to talk station LCFR, something awoke deep in my mind. I found myself remembering several of the segments almost verbatim The talk-show parody of Heartland Values with Nurse Bob, the forward-thinking technology magazine format of The Electron Zone, the violently gruesome cooking show Coq au Vin - skits that I haven't heard for almost half my life all came back to me as clear as if I'd last heard it only yesterday.

So how can it be that a game I barely remember playing has left such a deep-rooted impact on my unconscious brain? My guess comes down to Liberty City Stories being the last Grand Theft Auto game that I played to 100% completion. This theory is corroborated by my other clear memory of playing LCS being the time I spent thumbing through its official Brady Games strategy guide in pursuit of every last hidden package and unique stunt jump. Consequently, I don't have experience of repeatedly playing its missions to the point where I could play out several of them in my mind step-by-step, like I could with the missions of GTA III, Vice City or San Andreas. What I do have, though, is several dozens of hours' worth of gameplay time sitting in long-dormant receptors at the back of my brain - hours spent cruising streets that I already knew like the back of my hand, searching for collectibles, and listening to fictional self-help gurus, tech buffs and murderous chefs making jokes that have arguably aged even more terribly than the gameplay itself. Liberty City Stories may not be the most familiar game in the GTA series to me, but it feels like coming home nonetheless. In that respect, it's serving its purpose as video game comfort food perfectly.

I'm not entirely sure what prompted me to write this. There are tons of games I've played in between my previous blog and this one that would probably have been better suited to a think-piece of this nature. I could have written about finally making it through PS2 adventure game Primal and how it was ultimately worth slogging through its slow start. I could have written about Dragon Quest V and how I think it deserves to be held in the same high regard as its SNES contemporaries Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger as one of the best Japanese RPGs of its era. I could have written about Super Metroid and how its incredible world design and compelling mechanics saw me through the entire adventure in just three sittings across a single weekend. I could have written about Alan Wake and how my decision to revisit the remastered version as this year's "Halloween game" has vindicated my decision to rank it as one of my all-time favourites. I have, indeed, tried to write every single one of those blogs at various points over the last two months, but none of them have quite stuck the landing. This one did, and I feel it's important to put it out there as a result. Hopefully more attempts will stick the landing and make it to publication in the future.

All that remains to be said at this stage is to thank you for reading and making it this far. Part of sharing these experiences is that I'm interested in finding out if others feel similarly about other games, so if you have a video game equivalent of comfort food, or a game that you've found yourself remembering for very specific reasons years after playing it, please sound off with a comment below as I'd love to hear about it. Until next time, take care and I'll see you around.

Daniel