My experience of the 3D era of GTA mostly comes from Vice City Stories on the PSP. I loved exploring Vice City even I hardly ever played any of the missions. The side missions of taxi, vigilante, and ambulance I’d always be doing, but mostly it was cheat-coding all the weapons and blowing stuff up. It seemed the way, after all. Aside from that, though, I’d had no contact with the 3D era games within the timeframe it ran.

Then comes GTA V – bringing the second game of the HD era, which is where I started taking more interest in Rockstar’s most popular series. While admittedly I was originally only interested in the Online when the PC version of the game arrived, I soon felt the time was right to see what the story was about. By buying it on the Xbox One, so as not to get distracted by Online.

I enjoyed the story a lot. It got me thinking back to the older GTAs. 4 was easy enough, since it was available as part of the Xbox’s backwards compatibility, but the 3D era games were harder. I’ve already explained when talking about The Definitive Edition how the original PC version of San Andreas worked fine until it then refused to let me play, which put me off from investing it the others. How mods could have fixed the problems, but I’d rather not deal with them.

But now there is The Definitive Edition. And it’s on the Switch. Portable GTA once again. Upgraded visuals and controls were the major selling point for me, as a unified control scheme similar to that of GTA V (I never expected but did kind of hope the visuals would match) would make playing the games a lot easier. I wanted to get playing as soon as I could, and would have gone with Vice City had I not been planning to stream it from the start with no prior information, so I instead opted for GTA III.

From the off, I could tell this was classic GTA with a face lift. The very loose vehicle handling, the simplistic mission design, and blocky world design brought me back to memories of playing Vice City Stories – which would be accelerated when getting to Vice City. All three worlds offered a lot to see even with them being small (well, two of them), and the draw distance being fully open allowed for much more of that world to be seen.

But then the bad stuff starts coming out. Despite that improved draw distance, all the pedestrians and vehicles still act as though it’s there. Sometimes traffic will load in so close to you that you’ll need quick reflexes to avoid crashing into that vehicle – and sometimes it’s just inevitable that you will. As such, it’s best not to go full speed all the time.

And despite the improved controls, the mechanics behind them are untouched. With free aim active, focusing aim with the left trigger doesn’t really allow for a focused aim. The character still moves at their base movement speed in any direction, only pointing their gun at where the aim should be. Or will turn to face where the aim is, but cannot be moved from that spot.

It makes for a few frustrating missions when precise actions in a hectic environment are vital. It’s nice to have the choice of free aim (same as with the hold to sprint option), but it encourages a different type of gameplay than the run and gun style any GTA player knows well.

These are still definitely the games players of the 3D era know well. They still have the same great stories and characters. The same worlds full of secrets to find. The simple missions that are fun to play through. And having them on Switch for the first time should have felt great. I guess it is, as it all depends on how easily you can look past the problems the definitive versions of these games have.

Bugs and glitches could be found in the originals, but new ones have found their way into these games – including a few weird warping character models in certain cutscenes. There’s a lot of frame stuttering going on, which can make driving a bit more of a pain when the game has a micro-second or two of slowdown which impacts it registering control inputs. Then there’s the San Andreas exclusive issue of excessive loading between transitions, with nothing but a black screen to look at for five or more seconds at a time.

I still love the fact this definitive edition exists, but at the same time I can recognise that these issues have hampered what should have been a great moment of celebration. This was meant to be the greatest celebration for the 3D era – the era of GTA that accelerated the success of the series. Instead, we have a celebration that seems to have recreated a previous success by putting the flaws of it front and centre. And that is no reason for celebration.

Images Taken From:
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition (Original Screenshots)