Rockstar have brought Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition to Steam more than a year after its disastrous launch. GTA Trilogy was originally released as a Rockstar Store exclusive, and packages together GTA III (the first 3D one), GTA: Vice City (the best one), and GTA: San Andreas (the one with CJ in it). The collection’s arrival on Steam replaces the original versions of each game on the storefront, and coincides with a publisher sale that ends February 2nd.
]]>Less than a week after Stray launched, the smash-hit cyberpunk cat adventure has dozens of mods available with new looks for our little friend. My favourites are when modders make the game's cat look like their own real cat, and show me photos of that pretty cat. Then... you have some weirder options, like turning it into Garfield (in both realistic and cartoon forms) or a horrifying quadripedal version of GTA: San Andreas star CJ.
]]>After GTA: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition had a pretty naff launch last month, Rockstar ended up giving PC remaster owners copies of the oldies for free as an apology. The devs have another freebie for those folks too now - you can claim a free copy of GTA V: Premium Edition, GTA IV: Complete Edition, LA Noire, Bully: Scholarship Edition, or Max Payne 3 over the holiday period. Ah, free festive violence.
]]>Rockstar have apologised for "the unexpected technical issues" in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition, saying the remastered versions of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas did not launch in a state with meets their standards of quality. Probably shouldn't have released them in that state, then. They say they plan to improve them, and did release a bug-fixing patch over the weekend. They will also put the original versions back on sale, and will give them to people who buy the remastered trilogy.
]]>Rockstar yesterday launched the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, a collection of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas rebuilt and remastered. Today, you cannot buy it at all on PC. Given that the Internet has been abuzz with screenshots of by how bad parts of the new versions look, it might be tempting to assume Rockstar pulled it from sale for being rubbo. However, they do seem to be having trouble with the launcher software which the game requires. Hmm! Either way, the game is a mess.
]]>A trio of vintage crimeworlds returned rebuilt today with the launch of the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, bundling GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas into one collection with an long overly name. They look fancier and more modern (the originals being from 2001, 2002, and 2004, respectively), and have control schemes which are less damn old. Unfortunately, they have also cut some of my favourite songs from the radio, boooo.
]]>After a stretch of teasing and leaking, Rockstar today revealed how they've renovated the GTA 3 trilogy for the upcoming horribly named collection, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. A new trailer and screenshots reveal that GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas still have distinctly cartoon vibes, now paired with fancy reflections and effects. Rockstar also announced a release date of November 11th and a price of... £55? Gosh. See the new look for yourself in the trailer below.
]]>Rockstar finally announced their long-rumoured Grand Theft Auto remasters a little over a week ago. Official confirmation that they were on the way hasn't stopped the leaks, however. A user of GTAForums has seemingly leaked a more detailed description of the games and their system requirements.
]]>As it was rumored, so it shall come to pass. Rockstar have just announced that they are indeed doing remasters of Grand Theft Auto III, GTA: San Andreas, and GTA: Vice City for PC and current consoles. Not just that, but they're coming this year which, now that it's October, means quite soon. They've rolled out a quick teaser trailer and just a couple details on what's getting freshened up in the trilogy remasters.
]]>Kotaku are reporting that the long-rumoured Grand Theft Auto remasters are real. According to "corroborating details from three sources," they said that remasters of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas are "currently in the final stages of development."
]]>After 21 years as a Rockstar Games big cheese, Dan Houser will leave the company in March. He's co-written almost every Rockstar game since 1999, including Grand Theft Auto from London through to V, Bully, Max Payne 3, and the Red Dead Redemptions. That's made him a big influence on the tone of Rockstar's games. I wonder how that might change once he's moved on. Where he's going and what he'll do next, we don't know. He can probably afford to eat pizza while watching Heat on loop the rest of his life, to be honest.
]]>Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas once took almost four hours to speedrun, even in the anything-goes Any% category. But that time’s been slashed down to a blink-and-you'll-miss-it 25 minutes thanks to a new trick discovered this week. It’s a breezy 40-step thing which includes instructions like “reset if no cop bike before 7:46,” “Avoid Vending Machines,” and “just get lucky loool.” Speedrunning is good. You can see the new record-setting run below.
]]>We would never do anything to hurt you. Our loyalty is beyond dispute. That’s just how trustworthy we are on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. If anyone is the spy here, it’s you. I don’t even recognise you. Have you been to this website before? You look nervous. Maybe you’re hiding something. Maybe you’re planning to stab us all in the back when we’re not looking. Traitor! Traitor! Everybody look at the traitor and not over here, at our treachery-filled podcast.
]]>I have enormous respect (and a fair amount of adoration) for the people who make unofficial patches for ageing games. With each generation of hardware and each new operating system, we lose a few more games, and these dedicated folks are working hard to keep that number as low as possible.
One of these long-running update projects is SilentPatch, a combination patch for Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and San Andreas, three games that share an engine. It updated again just yesterday, and while the change-log isn't especially huge, some of the tweaks made are quite interesting.
]]>It may be two Grand Theft Auto generations and 11 years old, but GTA: San Andreas is still very much alive. Its two most popular online multiplayer mods currently have a million or more active players between them — one, Multi Theft Auto, had 616,000 players in July (up from just 33k in February 2010), while the other, SA-MP, oscillates between about 15,000 and 50,000 concurrent players. I went to talk to members of both mod communities to find out what keeps them playing.
]]>Fail Forward is normally a series of videos all about the bits of games which don’t quite work and why. But in this special episode, Marsh Davies talks about how the mainstream media tends to discuss games only in terms of their threat or their use - with a particular look at the BBC's recent Make It Digital season, including programmes like the docudrama The Gamechangers and the science show Horizon.
]]>On Tuesday night, the BBC aired The Gamechangers, their one-off drama about the making of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and the court cases brought against Rockstar Games by US lawyer Jack Thompson. This seems like rich subject matter, but the results proved a disappointment in nearly every way.
Other people have already written accurate reviews and rounded up what Rockstar and former GTA developers thought of it, so I'm not going to do either of those things. Instead I want to talk about the film's failure to offer insight - or even to attempt to depict - the game development process. Mostly I'm going to talk about James L. Brooks' 1987 movie Broadcast News.
]]>You might have noticed Steam downloading a sizeable update for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas over the weekend and wondered what that was about. A fancy secret tying into GTA V's return to the west coast, perhaps? Not quite. The patch added support for XInput controllers like the Xbox 360 pad, which is nice, but also removed seventeen songs from various radio stations. No more angsting out and gunning it across Gant Bridge in the wrong lane listening to Killing in the Name, I'm afraid. It breaks old saves for some too, though a mod fixes that up.
]]>More sites should interview mod-makers, I feel. If one of this week's picks is anything to go by, they can have some interesting things to say. Modding might not usually be quite as huge a process as making a full-on indie game, but as a modder you face your own unique problems, ones we don't always get to hear about. Maybe we should take note of that at RPS. Either way, read on for this week's roundup.
]]>I was never really disturbed by the actual Child's Play movies, because they were rubbish, but for some reason this being the first link in my inbox this morning - informing me that someone has created a Chucky mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - left me feeling a bit queasy.
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