I missed my subway stop twice on the way to work during the first week I owned Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

The first time it happened while I was selling drugs. One of the dealers I knew needed to get a hold of ecstasy for some rich clientele's party, and emailed asking if I could help him out. Luckily, I had a large stash from a previous deal. A short stop at one of the half-dozen apartments I'd acquired by that point, and I was off to make a quick (and hopefully hefty) profit.

That is, I would have if a cop hadn't seen me jack a sports car when I left my apartment (this particular one didn't have a garage) -- the chase escalated to a three-star wanted level before I was able to total enough police cars to get them off my tail. I finally made it to the dealer just a few hours before his offer expired and left with a nice sum of cash and a sense of relief knowing that I wouldn't have a few grand's worth of drugs confiscated were I to run into cop trouble again.

Sometime during this adventure, the 8th Street - NYU stop on the R line came and went. The lesson didn't stick though; the same thing happened a few days later while I was engaged in a high-seas shootout against waves of baddies on boats. Needless to say, this game is addictive.

In some ways, Chinatown Wars is exactly what you'd expect out of a GTA game: you play as an up-and-coming gang member completing missions for a colorful cast of allies and enemies (and allies who become enemies) in an open-world environment peppered with the series' signature police showdowns and general havoc-wreaking.

But in other ways Chinatown Wars departs from recent GTA entries, and it's in these areas that the game's developers at Rockstar Leeds surprise and excel. The relatively short missions, compounded with plenty of activities, encourage and reward exploration in a way that larger-scale games such as GTA IV make difficult. The compact Liberty City of Chinatown Wars in fact made its streets and pedestrians more lively and present, its dealers, side missions and challenges more easily discovered and therefore more tempting.

There were times I would decide to tackle a mission and start driving towards the waypoint -- with the help of a revamped GPS displaying a path directly on the pavement in front of my car -- when I'd get an email from a dealer with an enticing trade offer. Or I'd be leading cops on a five-star chase when I'd notice a still-intact security camera and stop to destroy it (shooting down all 100 is akin to tracking down the 200 pigeons in GTA IV). Other times I'd spend the entire game session addicted to scratch cards in an attempt to win a new apartment. I rarely found myself unsure or uninterested in what I was doing, and that's part of what makes Chinatown Wars such an accomplishment -- that I'd find such immersiveness and adventure in that dinky DS cartridge.

That's not to say the title is without flaws. The most frustrating parts of Chinatown Wars occur during car chases and heated gunfights, where the DS's lack of an analog stick (or perhaps my lack of a third hand) made it a struggle to shoot, use grenades and navigate simultaneously. Nevertheless, it's difficult to suggest where an improvement might have been made to accommodate the control limitations, given the variety of actions and options packed in the game.

GTA: Chinatown Wars came out over three months ago, and if you're a DS owner who for whatever reason is still holding out on purchasing it, please let me add my hat to the pile of other reviewers' in recommending that you go buy it immediately. Whether you end up drug dealing, causing mayhem, taxiing city passengers around or simply completing the missions, it's likely that your only moment of disappointment will come when you realize how dangerously close you are to finishing the game -- at which point you should note that there are an additional set of missions to be unlocked by tracking down two (very well) hidden Golden Lions after the main storyline ends. Happy hunting!