Vice City was Grand Theft Auto's faithful recreation of 1980s Miami. Vice City Stories first appeared as a spin-off PSP game, bringing handheld players their first chance at romping around a Miami Vice flashback. Now, Vice City Stories makes it over to the PS2 so the circle of 80s drama can be considered complete.

The original Vice City, on the PS2, followed the fortunes of Tommy Vercetti, an unapologetic homage to Scarface. The game detailed Tommy's career from the depths of the drug world up to a huge empire. VCS is a prequel to that story, centered around Vic Vance, brother to Vice City character Lance Vance. Vic is the one part of VCS that consistently strays from the GTA formula.

Vic has just joined the army to help support his family and he shows very few of the typical tendencies found in crime bosses. He's actually presented as a sympathetic good guy, someone uncomfortable with crime as a career choice. But the minute a mission comes up that involves rampant killing, he jumps right in like that was the plan all along. Story has always been at least one of the endearing traits of the GTA games - not that the main characters were deep, easy to relate to or good natured, but they were entertaining and made some sense. This time, you're presented with someone every bit as skilled at the art of drug dealing and mass murder as any character, but you're asked to believe he is somehow conflicted. It just doesn't fit and his tune gets older every time he sings it.

Vice City Stories is more GTA action, so anyone's who's played the other games knows what to expect. Basic fighting up close - using your fists or baseball bats or whatever is handy - is just as clunky as ever. If you're presented with an enemy at close range and you try to overcome the odds with a gun, good luck. You'll have to run away and turn around to get some distance or you're done for.

The map and mini-map for Vice City are basically the same, and that means they are pretty big. Unless you spent a lot of recent time running around the city, you'll definitely be wishing for some cues to get you from point A to B. Any addition would have been nice - even the occasional arrow pointing the way.

But crime empire building is still pretty logical. Once you clear out the rival gang members at a given business, like a whorehouse or drug den, you can go in and make it your own. Businesses produce a certain amount of revenue and act as save points, so the more you have the better off you are. You can also upgrade businesses by spending money on them or doing more missions, but the missions are so repetitive and the rewards so minimal that it's really not worth it. Instead of spending your leisure time running errand after errand after errand, you're better off just taking the default intake for the business and moving on to something more interesting.

If there's one thing that made Vice City a keeper it was the setting, and that carries over to VCS perfectly. Everything that made the 80s great - pastel suits, Ferrari knockoffs and synthesized music is here in spades. Even though it's a PSP game blown up for your TV, it still looks good enough - provided the 80s looked good to you in the first place.

Of course, that means the music fits the setting, including all the tunes you could imagine in a Time-Life collection: Phil Collins, Pat Benatar, Hall & Oates, Rick Springfield, Blondie - you name it. Phillip Michael Thomas even lends his voice to one of the main characters - and if you don't recognize that voice you clearly weren't around when it mattered.

If you didn't get a chance to play it on the PSP and haven't had your fill of Miami in the 1980s, Vice City Stories is only $20 and should more than quench your thirst for more GTA. But it's also got all the quirky baggage of the other GTA games - control issues, mediocre graphics and, this time, a story that falls short of the bar set by others in the series. It also doesn't include the multiplayer modes found on the PSP version, but there are helicopters. Life as a drug dealer is full of tradeoffs.