Similarly, the “GTAV-inspired modern controls” promised in this collection’s marketing have been applied somewhat unevenly over the three individual games. However, you can’t override waypoints that are automatically created during a mission, like if you wanted to take a detour across town to an Ammunation or a Pay ‘n’ Spray perhaps, and the pathfinding can often get confused as it continually recalculates over the course of a journey, at times resembling something closer to a hastily scribbled signature than the shortest possible route. It seems so antiquated that my original playthroughs with each of these three games were done with a paper map unfurled across my lap, so it’s very convenient that you’re now able to just hit pause to scan the full map of each game world and drop waypoint markers to your destination, like modern gamers would expect.

There are some positives, mind you, but almost every welcome addition is implemented at the cost of some sort of buzz-killing compromise.

If this half-baked Definitive Edition is anything to go by, I have to wonder if Rockstar reveres its own games as much as the rest of us do. At best this trilogy is ill-conceived and half-finished at worst it’s straight-up broken.

And yet, series creator Rockstar Games has decided to pay tribute to this modern gaming monolith and its two equally acclaimed PS2-era sequels, Vice City and San Andreas, by producing a collection of re-releases that cuts more corners than a Yakuza Stinger in a Liberty City street race. If any game deserved a definitive edition that allowed fans to relive that revolution without squinting to ignore ancient graphics, it’s this. Has there been a game released in the last 20 years that’s been more influential than Grand Theft Auto III? From its establishment of the open-world sandbox fundamentals to its critical role in reshaping videogames into a more attractive medium for mature audiences, GTA III’s shadow still looms large over almost every facet of the artform.

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