GTA 3 (and some later installments) - Ambulance. The best mini-games
Table of Contents
INFORMATION
- What game: Grand Theft Auto series, installments from III to Chinatown Wars, excluding GTA IV.
- Type of additional entertainment: minigames available in the open world
In addition to moving the classic series to three-dimensional formula (and thus "by the way" revolutionizing the open-world adventure game genre), Grand Theft Auto 3 gave us something else. A series of minigames that allow players to make amends for murders and robberies. By driving fire trucks, one could get on with putting out the fires. By driving police vehicles, one could chase criminals. And finally, players were able to save lives when driving an ambulance.
The rules are simple but not easy to follow. We need to get to the patients, get them in our ambulance, and get them to the nearest hospital – all within the time limit. With each level, the number of sick people increases by one. Because the vehicle can accommodate up to three patients, it's soon not enough to take all of them at once. The problem is also the vehicle itself: the ambulance in the GTA is prone to rolling over, and players can neither replace it nor fix it, so they have to do what seems unimaginable in this series – try to drive safely. Failure means having to start all over again, but it's worth lasting until the end, because the reward for getting to the 12th level is being able to sprint without using stamina.
Playing as a paramedic can be frustrating, especially when it's not one's fault you lose just before winning the coveted prize. But it's also addictive and rewarding to win. This mini-game returned in all subsequent parts of the series from the 3D era, including Vice City, San Andreas, Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, and was also included in a modified form in the Chinatown Wars and GTA Advance spin-offs. However, the mini-game fell victim to Rockstar's tendency to make gameplay more realistic – ever since GTAIV, players can no longer play it.
