The Double-A Team: Miami Vice on PSP was a bloomy slice of the future
Take cover!
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There's something rather special about Miami Vice on PSP, but it's only special to me. Years back, when the PSP was a force, that screen so wide and dreamy, that weight, that complicated heft, Miami Vice on PSP was the first game I ever reviewed. Rebellion! Of course the first game I ever reviewed was made by Rebellion. Perfect.
What do I remember now? Two things. Firstly when you loaded up Miami Vice you were given a choice: Crockett or Tubbs? Clearly one of the greatest choices in any video game ever. Secondly, when you played Miami Vice - this was 2006 - you were chucked into one of the very first cover shooters.
Not the first - that was Killswitch I want to say? - but definitely pre-Gears, which was also 2006, but I really think hadn't yet come out. I bumbled through Miami Vice thinking, this is interesting! Cover! Not realising that I was about to be drowned in cover for the next ten years at least, bombarded by cover in Gears, Uncharted, and everything else.
![](https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/ulus_10109_game_ss_2.jpg?width=690&quality=75&format=jpg&auto=webp)
Interestingly, Miami Vice had cover you could clip to, but it didn't do much in the way of making your general movement work with cover. This is Gears' great trick, I think, the whole horizontal platformer thing where you basically slide from one piece of cover to the next. Miami Vice was a lot more clunky, but this worked if you ask me, because it made you feel - well - like Crockett or Tubbs, dashing through one firefight to the next, feeling a bit ragged and exposed.
It also had really beautiful lighting. The whole world of Miami was shot through with this golden, peachy fuzz of sky: godlike smog, lit from within, as if the sun was setting on a thousand meth labs burning. Looking at a trailer now I also see boat sections - I definitely remember something was there to break up all the cover-shooting - but I can't remember them with any precision.
What I remember was inching around tables and chairs, risking the odd headshot, feeling that here was shooting but also stealth and something that felt a bit like a newish approach to traversal. Overall, I felt like Crockett and or Tubbs! Thanks, Rebellion - I owe you one.