Consume Thy Flesh, GTA II Style, on 86Box Part 2 (Win98, Voodoo 3)
You're in a dark alley. It's very gritty and dirty. Your next to a church that has the words "Jesus Saves". This is very fortunate as you're going to need lots of Salvation for the acts that your about to commit! Especially with that electric taser that can blow up crap!
This isn't the nicest of analogies, but GTA II is essentially the mid-child of GTA games. What I mean by that is that while GTA II was a significant improvement over the original, because it's sandwiched in between two juggernauts, it has been widely forgotten. GTA I, despite its flaws, will be forever remembered as being the game that started the franchise, unless one, completely ignorant of the franchise history, don't see the franchise starting until GTA III, and yes, people like that exist. As someone who consumed these types of games, I can tell you that while it was out, GTA II was a very popular game, but it seemed like the very second GTA III came out, it appeared as if people (me included) seemed to have forgotten that GTA II existed, and in retrospect, despite it being an improvement in the series, it just have flown under the radar to the point of irrelevance.
The gameplay received major refinement. The player can now be in a gang now performing their activities. There is a meter that measures your respect among the various gangs. Not surprisingly, the more work you do for one gang will contribute to being disliked and distrusted among the other gangs. The game also introduced side missions that allowed you to become a taxi, bus, and semi-truck driver that retrieving packages. The player can ride on trains in this version of the game.
One point of annoyance was that while the game still kept the top-down view, the PC port switched to 3D acceleration via Direct3D on Windows, meaning that if one wanted to play GTA II, they needed a Voodoo or other accelerator. That meant that my Toshiba laptop with SVGA was out of the question. Ditching software rendering meant that GTA II could improve on rendering, which made the graphics move more smoothly, with various graphical enhancements and tweaks throughout.
A part of me thinks that given that GTA II still used the CPU friendlier top-down interface, the game should have been playable on much more forgiving hardware, and adding GPU acceleration as a system requirement meant that the PC release would never gain mainstream usage like the PS1 version. It would hurt the adoption of GTA II on the PC. One has to remember that GPU's in the late 90's were not mainstream in PC's like they are now. They were still considered a expensive luxury item, and thus, not a everyday thing yet. I never had this complaint with GTA III as one couldn't really make a game like purely in software mode. GTA III had to make use of 3D acceleration in order for it to be feasible. I'm making the assumption that far more gamers played GTA II on the PS1 than on the PC.
And yes, I do have the invincibility cheat enabled!
86Box is emulating a multimedia PC with a Shuttle HOT-557 Socket 7 (Dual Voltage) i430VX motherboard with an IDT WinCHip2 Processor running at 233MHz, 64MB's of RAM, and a 3DFX Voodoo 3 1000 GPU. Windows is running at 1024 by 768, 32-bit color depth. A Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 is also installed, along with a CD-ROM drive. The Dell OEM version of Windows 98 is running.