Grand Theft Auto 3 is to the open world game what 1993’s Doom is to the first-person shooter. The difference is that Doom is still worth playing today and Grand Theft Auto 3 is not - and neither is its better loved sequel, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
]]>GTA 6 developer Rockstar Games were once working on a zombie survival game set on a Scottish island, which sounds like a mixture of GTA: Vice City and legendary Arma mod DayZ. That's according to former technical director Obbe Vermeij, who joined Rockstar North in 1995 back when it was called DMA Design, and left in 2009 following the release of GTA 4. In the run-up to the GTA 6 trailer reveal next month, he's started blogging about the development of several Rockstar games, from GTA through grotty snuff film simulator Manhunt to cancelled projects such as the zombie title and Cold War stealth fest Agent.
]]>Welcome back to another RPS Time Capsule. I will age a thousand years by writing this next sentence, but today we're casting our minds back to twenty years ago, excavating our personal favourite games from the actually quite good year of 2003. Yep, instant wrinkles like I've just been caught in a Death Stranding rain shower. I better finish this introduction quickly before I disintegrate to a pile of dust - much like all the other games from this year that didn't make it into this year's Time Capsule. Come and find out which ones we've decided to save below.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>There's always a man, a lighthouse, and a city. Sometimes, those cities are sucked from 2002 and splatted into modern videogames, like the Vice Cry: Remastered mod that takes the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City map and plops it into Grand Theft Auto V. Bet Ayn Rand didn't see that one coming.
]]>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.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I wouldn't call Grand Theft Auto: Vice City [official site] the best GTA game, but I might say it's my favourite. Between the eerie deadness of GTA 3 and the sprawl of San Andreas sat a tidy little game about '80s Miami bathed in neon and dusted with cocaine. It was a crude sketch of future plans for the series, done on the back of a copy of Scarface's script, but its roughness left gaps that the atmosphere nicely filled.
]]>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.
]]>Let's face it - the next GTA game, rumours of which currently have consoleland all a-flutter, ever arriving on PC is pretty unlikely. Red Dead Redemption never made it this way (something I rue enormously), there's no news of LA Noire doing it either, and Rockstar probably weren't super-happy about the scathing reaction to the belated, bloatware-afflicted PC version of GTA IV. Bah. Bah, I said.
Still, we can at least have things the console fun-toys cannot: such as the series' neon-lit finest hour, Vice City, recreated in the rather meatier GTA IV engine.
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