I can not believe it it’s been more than 20 years since Grand Theft Auto III has been released. I’m old enough to remember playing the first 2D top-down game on my first PC, but it was GTA 3 on PlayStation 2 transformed the series into a flagship device.
The game features a 3D view of the action and refreshing freedom that ushered in a new era of open world gaming. Its influence is hard to overstate, but two decades is a long time in gaming and its age shows. To update this classic and create a remake worthy of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition Labels will need patience, care and skill. Sadly, Rockstar gave the task to Grove Street Games and it seems they didn’t have the time or resources to do it fairly.
Back in the casual streets of Free City (based on New York), I felt immediately at home in designer pants and a leather jacket as I splurged on a Banshee and headed to work for the Leone family. . You play the silent Claude in GTA 3, the introduction to the trilogy includes Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and San Andreas. Past the first nostalgic pleasure of burning rubber and flipping through the radio stations, I was struck by how raw everything was — the humour, of course, but also the mission design, setting thread and the art of retouching.
You can watch the sophistication grow as you go from the prototype GTA 3 through the dream of the neon craze of ’80s action movies Town, complete with licensed musical hits from Blondie and the voice of Ray Liotta, about the gripping story, gang warfare, character development, and depth of San Andreas. The chain gets bigger and better with every step, and conquer all GTA DRAW owed a great debt to its predecessors. So it’s sad to see them being handled so carelessly.
There are a lot of errors right out of the gate in all three headers. Too many to mention, but the highlights include more than one crash into the PS5 menu, falling through the map, motorbike riding while swerving sideways on the street, NPCs running in endless circles end, a cloud of burning zombies hovers in midair after a helicopter explosion and a multicolored CJ rides a bike defying the laws of physics. I’ve been playing on PS5, but there seem to be more issues with the PC and Switch versions. Truth be told, these GTA games are always buggy, but you’d forgive weird physics or exploding cars because the scale of the open world was so impressive at the time. But this is no longer true, and besides, a lot of these bugs are new.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Photo: Rockstar Games
