Jolt Country

I reinstalled Grand Theft Auto III today in a fit of nostalgia. Turns out the game is still fun as shit after all these years. I'm not sure where the difference lies, but it's vastly more fun and satisfying to go on a hilarious violent rampage in this game than in any of the others (barring IV which I have yet to play. I bought it on release day despite not owning a console on which to play it because I am a moron). Stealing a taxi and mowing down a dozen or so pedestrians until the police object to my behavior, at which point I begin the Homicide Shuffle of switching from cop car to cop car in an effort to delay my inevitable death at the hands of a SWAT van or police helicopter.

I was thirteen when GTA3 was originally released, and my mother forbade me from purchasing it. As a result, by the time I finally played a GTA game I knew all about the structure of the game. Sometimes, though, I like to start a new game and play GTA3 as if I had no idea how open-world games worked, having had prior experience with more traditionally linear games. It must have been mind-boggling in 2001 for the average gamer to be dumped on the sidewalk and given what is essentially a huge violent Hot Wheels set to play with forever.

Whoa, buying GTA4 before you had a console to run it is pretty damn hardcore. I have been contemplating getting San Andreas again but yeah, maybe I'll just load the original GTA3 and dream/lament-not-having-4.

I just read your TK review of GTA3 and I was all ready to argue, but then I realized that I agree with pretty much every single one of your points except for the part where you said it sucked.

Having exactly one save point on each island is fucking stupid. Having water kill you instantly (yet making it incredibly easy to fall in) is fucking stupid. Lack of an in-game map beyond a monochromatic minimap that shows the two surrounding square blocks is fucking stupid. Having timed missions in which there is literally zero room for error is fucking stupid (it took me at least twenty tries to complete the mission where you have to follow a trail of porn in a van). The design of the final island, with its insanely twisting residential streets that are completely impossible to navigate with the radar, is fucking stupid.

Yet it's still one of my favorite games ever. Why? I don't know. It's certainly not a great game, though it has the potential to be so. I'd like to think I don't just have low standards, but if that's the case then I don't know why I enjoy GTA3 so much. It's infuriatingly difficult in parts (not the challenging kind of difficult, the "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" difficult), and the PC port is totally half-assed (this was pretty much par for the course at the time, though. Have you played the PC port of Metal Gear Solid?).

But goddammit, this game is fun. The design of some of the missions is terrible, relying tremendously on trial and error, and the physics of the cars don't make any sense at all. Everything about the game, though, basically adds up to a big beautiful clusterfuck of violence and mayhem. The idea of a sandbox game appeals to me immensely, but for some reason nobody has done it as well as the GTA games consistently do.