What are the limits of the Nintendo DS? Before playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, you'll probably have one set of parameters in mind. After spending time in this version of Liberty City, whatever notions you had will be blown to pieces. Like a grandly detailed ship in a bottle, Chinatown Wars is an amazing technical achievement, a near-perfect replication of the console GTA experience. More impressive is the variety of ways in which Rockstar Leeds has employed unique features of the Nintendo DS to improve upon aspects of GTA IV.

You're incarnated as Huang Lee, son of a murdered Triad boss, who is kidnapped and left for dead when he arrives in Liberty City. Soon Huang is working with and against other would-be Chinese crime lords, corrupt cops and other shady Liberty City figures. The ostensible goal is recovering the stolen family sword, but, as usual, it's really all about power.

One example of the many touch-screen mini-games and interactions. Some are simple?

The story beats will be familiar -- murder, sabotage, double-crosses, contraband -- but the mechanics are a bit different. More than anything else, mini-games characterize the gameplay of this palm-sized GTA. Not that there's a mini-game for everything, but many small pieces of character/world interaction that you'd normally never play -- actually twisting together wires when hotwiring a car, for example -- are now brought to the fore.

So, when stealing an ambulance that is carrying an unhealthy figure of ill repute, you might have to jumpstart the guy's heart by tapping stylus to touch-screen. You'll draw frantic circles to lower a car from a tow truck bed. You'll scratch lottery tickets, inscribe gang tattoos, fill Molotov cocktails, dumpster-dive for weapons, and hotwire a hundred cars, all via the touch-screen.

Given the success of past mini-game "enhancements" on the DS, this is where you're justifiably thinking of buying a copy of ? well, anything else. Wait! Not only do the mini-games work well on their own, they add much-needed variety to the mission structure.

?and some are complex. Disarming bombs is based on a detailed but intuitive little game.

GTA IV was fairly simple-minded when it came to missions in the main storyline. You might even say "numbingly monotonous" and not be too far off the mark. Characters and dialogue substituted for varied in-game mission content. In Chinatown Wars, the touch-screen mini-games keep things interesting, to the extent that it already feels odd going back to play The Lost and Damned without them.

That's the big upside to this incarnation. What's the low point? There isn't one, as such. OK, aiming weapons is back to the old GTA III "sorta-reliable" mode, but firefights aren't particularly difficult.

No, what you'll find is that driving is more difficult than before. As a 3-D version of the top-down game we saw in GTA and GTA 2, Chinatown Wars is an ambitious update. But throwing all that detail in there, and the need to keep the Liberty City map to some sort of scale, necessitates narrow streets and a short visibility range. And, perhaps because of the small scale, the streets now seem more crowded than ever before.

So you'll rarely race off towards the horizon with the mad abandon that makes the console GTA games so much fun. And while hidden jumps are to be found, they take a lot of practice and negotiation to pull off.

You'll find wild stuff in dumpsters ? pistols, shotguns, ten-spots, sandwiches. Maybe even a rubber.

These points haven't been entirely lost on Rockstar, which added a few helpful tools. One is driving assist, which automatically keeps your car (or bike, or bulldozer) in line with the road you're on. It won't avoid traffic -- and there's a lot of traffic -- but it'll keep you in line so that small nudges will maneuver around other cars. A GPS overlay can also be turned on, so that you'll see directional arrows on the street pointing to your destination.

Bottom line: Use those tools and you'll arrive at destinations sooner, in better condition, and without ramming as many cops. That means fewer unintentional high-speed pursuits. Which is good, because with cops on your tail, the classic GTA "run and hide" trick won't always work. For this iteration, Rockstar made the cops more aware and tenacious, and you'll have to literally run them off the road to shear stars off your wanted level.

There's more reason than ever to avoid the fuzz, because more than likely, you're carrying drugs. A big percentage of Chinatown's gameplay is based around drug deals, and there's nothing quite as frustrating as losing a hundred grand's worth of heroin because you got stuck behind the hotwiring mini-game when trying to escape a deal gone bad.

The touch-screen carries a wealth of info: radio station, map, equipped weapons, email notifications and loads more.

In concert with this, the minis then have quite a serious effect on gameplay. You'll approach car theft with more caution. In fact, when carrying a big load of skag you'll approach just about everything with more caution. That's something I love about this GTA. When I'm trying to jump into a car after running from cops, realizing the whole time that I've got $50K worth of drugs in my bag, I don't just grab the first parked car on-screen. It's a subtle strategic change, but an effective one.

Also worth highlighting is the game's PDA interface, which replaces GTA IV's cell phone. Everything you need can be quickly accessed from the PDA: Order guns from Ammu-Nation, check a map of gang territories that shows their influence and preferred drug traffic, or just set waypoints on the GPS map to note the hiding spots for weapons and armor.

(Waypoints are essential, especially when you find security cameras -- the game's version of hidden packages -- and have no tools to destroy them. Killing the cameras helps your drug trade, so marking them on the map is madly helpful. And Rockstar goes one better, as cameras you've destroyed are automatically given a map marker, so you can more easily scour other city areas for ones you've missed.)

I could go on about more -- how the animated look is smooth and well suited for the DS, the ways in which violence is ? colorfully rendered, the recognizable cars and landmarks, the density of city detail; how the drug trade, enhanced by e-mail tips and simple legwork, can become an involving game all on its own, and plenty more.

Instead, I'll rein in and leave it at this: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a staggeringly impressive game that improves the GTA design document in unexpected and welcome ways. Rather than feeling compromised on the tiny Nintendo DS, Liberty City feels more fully realized than before. Compared to the immersive sprawl of GTA IV, that's a hell of a thing.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.