TEST – It’s releases like this that make me sincerely wish that after 1983, the games industry would collapse again and go up in flames like a Russian garbage can. Yes, the metal box that, when you kick it, makes a sound the whole apartment block can hear. These versions are not definitive; they are degenerative, shoddy iterations.

It’s all a text edition of a dialogue. Then I’ll be scolded to rewrite it, but since we’re playing “here’s the next one after this one” again (and I bet there’ll be another one right after that), I’m going to deliver it this way. At least it’s unique. I’ll get to the news after this, trolololo.

-I-

– Anyway, I want to talk about this GTA trilogy.

– Oh, dear. *picks up a bag of chips*

– Are you seriously going to chew into the microphone?

– *opens it*

– OK, you’re going to have to mute, because if you keep it on, I’ll throw something at you…

– OK. [Laughs]

– Where do I begin? For example, the original Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are no longer available to buy on Steam… well, they weren’t exactly the original versions either, but they were moddable, and a middle finger to Take-Two [cursing has been removed altogether] for their disregard for their consumers. It’s already a big WTF because whoever has it on Steam can download it and mod it, e.g. the Chaos mod for San Andreas on Twitch is huge… *pours a glass of soda water*

That was the lead-up. You’d think these new versions would be good quality in return then. Hah! Not. Do you know how crappy these three editions are? OK, maybe it will get better later, but I didn’t like the fact that in the pre-release marketing, they showed almost none of the three games that were Frankensteined onto Unreal Engine 4 because they still have the Renderware middleware engine in them. I’d put money on that. So we saw no gameplay video. And then the Switch images came. Here, I knew it was going to be a horror, and lo and behold; Rockstar did release such a scandalous piece of crap that I think it was again the management rushing to get it out there and saying, “Get this done by the deadline, no back talk.” Wait, I just remembered, it’s out on Nintendo Switch (I’m glad for that), PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 (not that you can play them through PS2 Classics emulation… sorry, you COULD because they aren’t on the PlayStation Store)… and San Andreas is backwards compatible on Xbox One and Xbox One, with the other two on 360. But San Andreas is the best of the three because the formula was perfected after the first two games.

-II-

– You could also talk about the quality.

– [here’s an excellent twenty-word swearing], it’s so awful.

– *laughs*

– But don’t laugh, I’m starting to list: in San Andreas, I was freaked out by the mere fact that I drank from the vending machine, which then crashed the game after a while. HOW? And then the rain looks scandalous, flying through the air upside down and falling UPWARDS. It’s so distracting that you can’t see where you’re going at night because the rain looks more like milk than natural precipitation, which, moreover, disappears when it falls on the sea, for example. But if that was the only problem… it’s not a stable 60 FPS on PlayStation 5. You see, a console released last year can’t run three 15+-year-old games ported to a newer engine without frame drops. I don’t think Grove Street Games got much time to develop, but they also did the mobile releases back in the day, which led to the PS3 and Xbox 360 releases of San Andreas. What else, let me think… *chugs soda*

Yeah, like moving the car like slaloming, as if I was warming up the tyres behind the safety car in an F1 race, that made the car bigger and bigger. What else… the character models are terrible in many places (e.g. no body behind fat CJ’s pants), distorted in some areas, in many cases unnecessarily changing their looks (Denise, Old Reece? maybe I got his name wrong, the hairdresser), the road markings glitch around bends, there are invisible walls here and there, the second letter E is missing from the “Welcome to Vice City” sign, the fog that obscured the technical limitations but gave it ambience is missing, so the visibility may have become too high (mood-destroying), some cheats are missing (supposedly for technical reasons), and I’m sure more of this nonsense will be discovered by the community as time goes on.

Oh, and my favourite: the PC edition was not even playable for a day because the Rockstar Games Launcher was down for a good 18 hours, and since this is the only place to get the trilogy there, paying users were unable to access the products they paid for. Then there’s the music in OGG format, and they don’t have licenses for several songs, they’ve cut the soundtrack from the original, the Hot Coffee mod from San Andreas is there, and then they’ve left source code for some missions, and there are comments from the developers. It’s fantastic, and we could go on, but then the dialogue would go on until eight o’clock at night…

-III-

– But how can you rate it on a scale of 1-10?

– The re-releases? OK, let’s be clear that the core games are serious works. I’d give Grand Theft Auto III a 10/10 because of the revolutionary innovations that DMA Design came up with because there was no Rockstar Games back then. Vice City, I think, is an 8.5 because there wasn’t that much new in it. And San Andreas is another 10/10 because it was full of content and innovations, and you can swim in it. Not much innovation in the degenerative edition, I might add.

– And the trilogy?

– You know what? As it stands, it’s 1/10. The Nintendo Switch release is a positive, but I recall there were homebrew ports for that before, so besides the mods, there was more love here than from Grove Street Games. Once again, the modders have to fix the game. It’s unbelievable. It’s the biggest disappointment of the year. It was unnecessary, OK, on Xbox, III and Vice City had no BC, but seriously, on a PC today, the original trio runs smooth, and you can get better-looking visuals out of them. After all this, I can’t wait for the games industry to run into the abyss because the westerners (EA, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, even CD Projekt) are screwing up big time. The lighting and the textures have mostly improved, but on their own, that isn’t enough. Not even the PlayStation 4 Pro or the Xbox One X can run it on 1080p, which is a joke. On Xbox Series X, we might get the most stable 60 FPS, or if you run the PlayStation 4 Pro version on PlayStation 5. On Switch, the performance is shoddy even with a 648p docked resolution.

– Won’t that be too harsh?

– I don’t care; I was told not to hold back. I didn’t.

– Won’t that be too vitriolic?

– IDGAF, I’m sending this trilogy to hell in a gonzo way. Since you can’t buy the FIRST editions on Steam anymore, I recommend purchasing the disc versions, or maybe PIRATE THEM if you already have the trilogy if there’s no other option. (It’s not your fault you can’t BUY it. Maybe G2A… let Take-Two suck it; they’re pushing GTA Online anyway.) Oh, one more thing, the newest re-release of Grand Theft Auto V is garbage; you can tell already. That’s enough. I’ll deal with the news now… I’ll live if I have time: goodnight, my patient.

– *laughs*

– I hope that gets stuck in your throat, goddamnit…

-V-

Publisher: Take-Two

Developer: Grove Street Games

Genre: Action-adventure

Release date: November 11, 2021