To celebrate the Chinese New Year, Rockstar Games are discounting Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the iPhone and iPod touch by 30% until Sunday, the 14th of February.

GTA: Chinatown Wars is the most critically acclaimed PSP game to date.

 

It's not often that one of the best games for a particular platform fails to achieve sales expectations.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars was an exemplary title for Nintendo's DS handheld - it had action, complexity, additive traits and detail never before seen in a DS game. Unfortunately for developers Rockstar, it was also entirely lacking in Italian plumbers, which could explain the apathy of DS owners worldwide. They're a fickle bunch, you see. Take away your heavily licensed stereotypes, and you may as well just game on an iPhone.

We trust no such platform snobbery exists within the realm of Sony's PlayStation Portable user base. It's a development avenue that Rockstar have ambled down before, with their excellent Leeds development studio producing such classics as Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, so it was always on the cards that PSP owners would get a punt at Chinatown Wars eventually. The only real issue here is whether Rockstar have managed to capitalise on the extra processing power, screen resolution and storage space that the PSP brings to the party.

 

Rockstar have today announced the development of Chinatown Wars and Beaterator for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch platforms. Both titles are expected to be released this spring for the PlayStation Portable device as well, with Chinatown Wars currently available on the Nintendo DS.

Both titles are being developed by Rockstar's Leeds division, who previously worked on mobile titles such as Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, and recently picked up the 2009 Develop Award for Best Handheld Game Studio.

We'll be bringing you our findings on the PSP versions of both Chinatown Wars and Beaterator later in the week.

 

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is coming to PSP later this year, Rockstar Games announced today. It will be available on UMD and as a download from PSN this spring (northern "fall").

With a Metacritic score of 94, Chinatown Wars is the highest rated game available for the Nintendo DS. Yet it has been a flop in terms of retail sales, reaching only about half a million copies sold in the six months since its release. (If half a million sounds respectable, bear in mind that Nintendogs has sold over 22 million.)

Considering the different audiences that the two handheld platforms attract, bringing Chinatown Wars to PSP could well make a lot of sense. The two previous GTA games for PSP, Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, were the highest selling games on the platform.