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A few weeks ago, I complained about the Switch Online Nintendo 64 collection. If you didn’t read it, I understand; you’re busy. You’ve got a life. But the basic thesis was this: Stop uploading broken ROMs and calling them re-releases. There’s no reason for fans to spend money on an experience inferior to one they had over 25 fucking years ago.
But I think I owe Nintendo an apology.
Because lord almighty, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition makes those Nintendo 64 versions look like pristine new copies of a game WATA sells to itself to inflate prices. Remember when we were all talking about that? Anyway….
The Grand Theft Auto trilogy isn’t the first remaster to work hard to fuck up its legacy, but might be the biggest. It’s basically the Star Wars: Special Edition of games. We gasped at the idea of beloved classics even better than before and what we got was shitty, distracting new visuals and weird changes for the sake of saying, “We changed it!”
Rockstar promised overhauled visuals and quality of life improvements. What we ended up getting was basically slightly better car models and prettier lighting on some buildings.
Which is great! Except everything else is trash. The new character models range from fine to what the fuck, and that’s the least of the game’s problems. Missing fog makes San Andreas seem tiny. Signs now have weird misspellings (likely caused by using an algorithm to upscale without spot checking). Frame rates are slideshows of the fun you would be having if Rockstar and Grove Street Games put in the care to make these classic games, you know, playable.
There’s no reason for this. Well, actually there is: Greed. As much as I’ve seen folks call the GTA ports “lazy,” what we’re really seeing is cut corners and a rushed release. When you have to cut songs for rights issues, and leave them in the game anyway (albeit disabled), you know you’re not really putting your best in.
Also, Rockstar games can afford rights to these songs. I know, I know, some estates are harder to work with than others. And I know first hand that getting the rights to use songs in something is a labyrinth of phone calls, confusion, and disappointment. But I’m not a multi-billion-dollar company with a constant influx of money from GTA 5.
I’m not the first to compare it to Cyberpunk 2077’s launch, and that’s because we’ve all willingly walked into a world in which games are released broken and we sit like good dogs until the devs get around to fixing them.
But Cyberpunk 2077 was a new game. There’s an excuse. Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition (great name, by the way) consists of games that launched on the PlayStation 2, a console that was three PlayStations ago. Of course, these new remasters are ports of the mobile versions of the game - which, to my understanding, is because it’s an easier version to port. You know, so great job on that.
And, look, say what you will about Cyberpunk 2077, but at least it allowed players to actually play it on PC.
At the same time, if these are mobile ports of the Grand Theft Auto games, make them fucking work. I expect some frame drops on a Switch. I don’t expect them on an Xbox Series X. The ‘enhanced’ graphics add a heavier load, I’m sure, but come the fuck on. We’re talking slightly better models and lighting. If the PlayStation 3 could handle GTA 5, I feel like the PlayStation 5 should be able to cleanly handle GTA 3.
Folks, it doesn’t need to be like this. Diablo 2: Resurrected may not be perfect, and it may be made by a company with severe labor issues, but at least it plays like the original. Hell, it even lets you switch back to the original’s graphics if you want. You can experience the game both as it’s been updated and as it was originally meant to be played. Kind of.
You can complain that Diablo 2: Resurrected doesn’t do enough to fix features that seem outdated or clunky to newer audiences, but at least you can play it as it was meant to be played. Rockstar literally took down older, closer-to-the-original versions of the game. If you want to play any of the games in the GTA Trilogy as they originally were, you need to already own a copy. And good luck if they’re not disc-based versions on legacy consoles, because otherwise you’re gonna still be getting new bugs and missing old songs.
There’s no way to ‘go back home’ to an older game. But games, like any art form, should have the ability to be viewed in context. I know I’ll never get my dream of every re-release containing a museum of manuals and scanned artifacts. That takes work, energy, and most importantly, money. I understand.
But there’s no reason to make it impossible to play older versions of games. There’s no reason to ditch the past outside of getting paid. Now fans’ best option is cracking older releases for mods or emulating old consoles. Neither should be the result of a company selling what should be, I dunno, the “Definitive Edition” of the game.
If anything, the Grand Theft Auto trilogy shows more respect for the bottom line than for fans. Businesses need to make money, of course. But Rockstar has reached a point in which fans will buy whatever it releases, so why bother fixing it first? Grand Theft Auto is iconic. And, as with the earlier Star Wars: Special Edition comparison, you can break something iconic and still make a lot of money.
This is all to say, let people play the original versions of games. Stop cashing in on ‘the classics’ by making them no longer classic. If you care about the game, fucking act like it. Feel free to update. Feel free to add and improve. But improve doesn’t just mean ‘change’. It means ‘make it better’. And that includes playing it.
Or, one better, actually include the original versions in remasters and remakes. You don’t even need to make the saves cross-compatible. I accept this will never actually happen, but god, it would be nice to know that we can celebrate video game history without simultaneously throwing it away. It would be nice to compare versions, to reference how games used to function.
Ah well. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is better than these games anyway.