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It looks like Liberty City is HUGE in the DS version of Grand Theft Auto. Bigger than anything the PSP has seen at least.

Rockstar Leeds President Gordon Hall has some pretty nice words about the scope of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, and we dug up a rumor about the map size in relation to GTAIV.

Read more... for all the juicy bites

“Chinatown Wars is much bigger than anything we have ever done before [in terms of scope]: more odd jobs, deeper missions, and more moments of over-the-top action. We have a huge interaction with the Rockstar Social Club, a massive [narcotics trafficking] game that would stand alone on its own. The list goes on and on; this thing is huge. We are very proud of all of the PSP games we have made, especially the two GTA games, but this game is far bigger.” - Rockstar Leeds president Gordon Hall

Rockstar Leeds definitely seems to be a capable of replicating the GTA experience on the DS, even though this is their first experience with the system. Still, I’m a bit shocked that Mr. Hall has stated that Chinatown Wars is bigger than the company’s work on the PSP titles.
- via Nintendo Power Magazine

I can spend literally days just building up my criminal empire without touching a mission at all. But that aside, in classical terms, I think, for an average player, we’ve got around 20 to 30 hours of gameplay just to complete the story missions — that gets you through about 28 percent to 30 percent of the total game. The narcotics dealing takes up much more of your time, and we have more side missions, odd jobs, and one-off characters with their own mission strands to meet around this world than you’d ever expect. I’d say to get to 100 percent stats complete, you’d be looking at around 70 to 80 hours of play. This still doesn’t mean you’ve seen everything. You still have multiplayer and the entire online and Social Club content to dabble with.

Even though many people believed that Chinatown Wars would develop only in the Chinese neighborhood the game uses nearly the whole map that appears in GTA IV. The districts that appear are: Dukes (Queens), Bohan (Bronx), Broker (Brooklyn) and Algonquin (Manhattan). The only neighborhood from GTA IV that doesn’t appear is Alderney (Jersey City).

- Spanish Magazine Rumor