I can't believe there hasn't been more mention of this. Chinatown Wars is fantastic. Here's a review I wrote for another forum:
First of all think of the original GTA games. Now pan the camera back a touch and add an amazingly good looking cell shaded liberty city that's teeming with cars, pedestrians, bikes, and cops. That's what it looks like. Now cram in everything that's been fun about the GTA series from the first to no. 4 and remove the boring and repetitive stuff. Now you get some idea how it plays. There is no downtime in Chinatown Wars. It's been refined, honed, and there's always something to keep you engaged. The controls, once you get used to running around and car handling (it's different to GTA 1 & 2), are great. You'll be zooming around the city and weaving through traffic in 10 minutes. The addtion of the stylus into gameplay is even better. My heart sinks as much as anybody's when it comes to the tacked on stylus mini games that plague so many DS titles, but this is not at all the case here. They couldn't be less tacked on. While these new gameplay elements are not intergral to the GTA experience, the game would certainly be worse without them.
*quickly opens a dumpster, throws out rubbish bags and finds stashed gun*
The drug dealing element to Chinatown Wars has been mentioned in most reviews. It's partly this that means there's always something to do (I suspect every GTA from now on will have something similar). Think Dope Wars, but actually fun. There's dealers all over the city and nearly always a rush to get drug x to dealer y before z happens. This'll likely be your main source of income. Sometimes the deal goes smooth, sometimes the cops will come flying in and try to ruin everything. This brings me to the cops. Forget running away or going to the spray shop (you can still do this if you lack testicles), now we get to **** them up. If you have a wanted level of two (two little cop car icons on the top right), you can get away by destroying two cop cars that are chasing you. This puts a very nice twist on affairs - you'll still be running away as they can pull you out of cars easier than ever and bust you, but now you're ramming them into walls at high speeds and generally smacking them about. How you like me now piggy?!
The PDA has also been much improved.Toggling between emails, contacts, the map, sat nav, plotting routes etc is seemless. It is MUCH better with stylus control. Navigating to and from missions, to dealers, or any location, is a breeze. You'll never have trouble finding the safehouse/s, which is where you save the game, stash drugs, cars, and replay any mission you like on the notice board (another great additon I suspect every GTA will adopt). The missions, so far, are more varied than previous games in the series. One of my major gripes with GTA 4 (other than the slow pace, silly levels of downtime and babysitting missions), was the lack of variety in missions. There's still the usual go here and do that, or get here before the time runs out etc, but now there's more variety - from throwing boxes off the back of a lorry into a following truck to sabotauging a street race by taking out competitors so a friend can win. All the staple and fun distractions are still here too - rampage missions and stunts are present and correct.
Of course, some things have been lost with the move to the DS. Mostly cosmetic - the radio now simply plays music and the cool cutscenes from GTA 4 have been replaced with comic book storyboards - and nothing that detracts from the experience. For example, the pace of GTA4 is suited to driving around, taking in the sights and listening to the radio. The pace of Chinatown Wars isn't. There's pigs to kill and drugs to sell!
In short, Chinatown Wars is everything a fan of GTA 1 & 2 could want. It's expanded on that formula and borrowed much of the sophistication from the later games, which is why fans of those games will love it too. As a sandbox game it works much better than GTA4 and the story missions are every bit as good, if not better. There are minor niggles - pushing R won't always lock onto the target you want and sometimes you have to manually center the camera (L button) as it's at the wrong angle - but these are very minor and eclipsed by everything the game does so right. Quality wise we're talking Nintendo flagship game levels of polish and there is little doubt in my mind that this is the best game on the DS and a strong goty contender. For me, after two days of play, it's the closest Rockstar have got to the perfect GTA. See, we can have a good mission based GTA that is also a good fast and frantic sandbox game.
First of all think of the original GTA games. Now pan the camera back a touch and add an amazingly good looking cell shaded liberty city that's teeming with cars, pedestrians, bikes, and cops. That's what it looks like. Now cram in everything that's been fun about the GTA series from the first to no. 4 and remove the boring and repetitive stuff. Now you get some idea how it plays. There is no downtime in Chinatown Wars. It's been refined, honed, and there's always something to keep you engaged. The controls, once you get used to running around and car handling (it's different to GTA 1 & 2), are great. You'll be zooming around the city and weaving through traffic in 10 minutes. The addtion of the stylus into gameplay is even better. My heart sinks as much as anybody's when it comes to the tacked on stylus mini games that plague so many DS titles, but this is not at all the case here. They couldn't be less tacked on. While these new gameplay elements are not intergral to the GTA experience, the game would certainly be worse without them.
*quickly opens a dumpster, throws out rubbish bags and finds stashed gun*
The drug dealing element to Chinatown Wars has been mentioned in most reviews. It's partly this that means there's always something to do (I suspect every GTA from now on will have something similar). Think Dope Wars, but actually fun. There's dealers all over the city and nearly always a rush to get drug x to dealer y before z happens. This'll likely be your main source of income. Sometimes the deal goes smooth, sometimes the cops will come flying in and try to ruin everything. This brings me to the cops. Forget running away or going to the spray shop (you can still do this if you lack testicles), now we get to **** them up. If you have a wanted level of two (two little cop car icons on the top right), you can get away by destroying two cop cars that are chasing you. This puts a very nice twist on affairs - you'll still be running away as they can pull you out of cars easier than ever and bust you, but now you're ramming them into walls at high speeds and generally smacking them about. How you like me now piggy?!
The PDA has also been much improved.Toggling between emails, contacts, the map, sat nav, plotting routes etc is seemless. It is MUCH better with stylus control. Navigating to and from missions, to dealers, or any location, is a breeze. You'll never have trouble finding the safehouse/s, which is where you save the game, stash drugs, cars, and replay any mission you like on the notice board (another great additon I suspect every GTA will adopt). The missions, so far, are more varied than previous games in the series. One of my major gripes with GTA 4 (other than the slow pace, silly levels of downtime and babysitting missions), was the lack of variety in missions. There's still the usual go here and do that, or get here before the time runs out etc, but now there's more variety - from throwing boxes off the back of a lorry into a following truck to sabotauging a street race by taking out competitors so a friend can win. All the staple and fun distractions are still here too - rampage missions and stunts are present and correct.
Of course, some things have been lost with the move to the DS. Mostly cosmetic - the radio now simply plays music and the cool cutscenes from GTA 4 have been replaced with comic book storyboards - and nothing that detracts from the experience. For example, the pace of GTA4 is suited to driving around, taking in the sights and listening to the radio. The pace of Chinatown Wars isn't. There's pigs to kill and drugs to sell!
In short, Chinatown Wars is everything a fan of GTA 1 & 2 could want. It's expanded on that formula and borrowed much of the sophistication from the later games, which is why fans of those games will love it too. As a sandbox game it works much better than GTA4 and the story missions are every bit as good, if not better. There are minor niggles - pushing R won't always lock onto the target you want and sometimes you have to manually center the camera (L button) as it's at the wrong angle - but these are very minor and eclipsed by everything the game does so right. Quality wise we're talking Nintendo flagship game levels of polish and there is little doubt in my mind that this is the best game on the DS and a strong goty contender. For me, after two days of play, it's the closest Rockstar have got to the perfect GTA. See, we can have a good mission based GTA that is also a good fast and frantic sandbox game.
It's good to see that first hand users are giving it equally good feedback. 
) DS for a while .. its awesome 
