14 DAY TRIAL // Rockstar has announced that it plans to release Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the Sony’s PlayStation Portable on October 20. The date has only been confirmed for the United States and comes from the Twitter feed that Rockstar maintains. Initially, Chinatown Wars was released for the Nintendo DS way back in March this year, with a rating of M for Mature and was sold for the price of 34.99 dollars.
The game was put together by the Rockstar Leeds studio and the PSP version was not even in the cards. Rockstar was saying that it planned to create Chinatown Wars specifically for the DS, taking advantage of the touch screen controls and delivering a GTA experience that conformed with the graphical possibilities of the Nintendo-made handheld.
Rockstar has not yet said how it plans to update the control scheme for the game and the graphical quality in order to take advantage of the greater power of the PSP and to work around the lack of a touch screen on Sony’s device.
GTA: Chinatown Wars for the PlayStation Portable will be delivered both via UMD disk, for the now available versions of the device and via a digital distribution service for all those who plan to pick up a PSP Go when it becomes available this fall, on October 1.
The swift move to bring GTA Chinatown Wars to the PSP might have partly been a result of the rather dismal results that the game has on the Nintendo DS.
On the first month on sale, it solely moved 90,000 units, despite critical acclaim and the lifetime total in the United States only surpassed 228,000 copies. By comparison, Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, the two GTA games that Rockstar put together specifically for the PSP, moved 1.6 million units and 960,000 units, respectively.