The spectacular nature of these claims propelled lawyer Jack Thompson into the limelight, and turned him into a special kind of video game culture villain, the bogeyman who still gets invoked when people are afraid anyone is going to touch their video games. GTA 3 and Vice City were at the center of a resurrected set of arguments about video game violence, and how it would turn kids into mass killers. They each fueled moral panics in their own way. Is is just juicing up the graphics and making the main characters a little more detailed? Or could there be something more to it? I’ve been living with these games since they were first released. More than anything else, playing this trilogy in 2021 forced me to consider what a “remaster” is on a fundamental level. Why are some artistic decisions set in stone and others easily thrown under the bus? These games live and die on their aesthetic qualities, and these remasters have torpedoed those strengths.
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A slimy, gritty Liberty City, full of smeary textures and lights that seem to drip light, is where the magic really happens. This is, I guess, the price of “progress.” Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition is another victim of developers and property-rights holders not understanding that the magic is in the details. The “remastered” lighting systems in all three titles makes things too dark and too blown out in equal measure, meaning that sometimes (especially in San Andreas) I ended up seeing some high-quality HDR blobs on the screen. Everyone in San Andreas looks like a caricature of a caricature of someone trying to remake Boyz n the Hood. GTA 3 is crammed full of bulbous denizens upscaled from the early 2000s. The best word for these gaps is “weird.” Definitive Edition Tommy Vercetti is a smooth, plastic hunk that looks less like an ex-con and more like a knockoff party-time variant of a G.I. Social media has been ablaze with glitches, mismatched textures, and comparisons between the Definitive Edition assets and the originals. They run full speed into a brick wall, however, when it comes to capturing what the games looked and sounded like. In the realm of what you do and how you do it, the Definitive Edition games are mostly successful. You get in cars and drive around these miniature cities, shooting enemies or avoiding the police or trying to find all the secret items, much like I did when playing these games for the first time on PlayStation 2. Having played both GTA 3 and Vice City, I can confidently say that the games “feel right,” in the sense that they are clearly designed and sometimes punishingly hard. These things remain relatively unchanged. While GTA 3 borrowed from the crime movies of the ’90s and 2000s, Vice City and San Andreas pulled even more heavily from their inspirational media (coked-up ’80s Miami films and early ’90s American Black cinema, respectively) to the point of parody.
At the core, each of the games are doing what they always did: asking you to do crime stuff mission-by-mission as you build a gangster empire.
Your ability to enjoy them will rest firmly on your tolerance for 20-year-old game design ideas, the humor of the early 2000s, and the strange graphical updates that developer Grove Street Games have made to the Rockstar classics. These games fused into the spine of the video game worlds that we play in here in 2021, and Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition has brought them all together in one place, on modern consoles. Grand Theft Auto 3 popularized the action-oriented open worlds that dominate games today Vice City injected an ironic ’80s sensibility and showed that, sometimes, a soundtrack can make a game and San Andreas honed these strategies to create a lived-in story about CJ and his rise to power in the early ’90s. It is not an overstatement to say we live in a world that Grand Theft Auto has made for us.