[PS2] Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy ROM Download

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy ROM Screenshots

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy ROM Description

Grand Theft Auto the trilogy, a collection of three of the most popular and gloriously violent games of the PS2 era – GTA 3, GTA Vice City, and the one with the memes everybody knows, San Andreas. Everybody’s played these games, unless you haven’t, in which case what the fuck are you doing?

Recently I decided I was gonna replay these bad boys, compare them to each other, and make a video talking about which one I think holds up the best. And fucking hell my Twitter, that wasn’t way harder than I thought it would be. I mean so many people love these games for many different reasons, and after replaying them I can see why. They’re all exceptional games in their own way, but I personally felt like there was no one game that just objectively did everything better than the others. Like they all had certain qualities that they did the best.

After playing through them again I realized that I loved all of these games in their own ways and appreciate them equally, but I still want to make this video and ending it with “they all rule in their own way” would just be dumb. So fuck it, I’m just gonna break out my scalpel cuz it’s time to dissect.

How I’m Comparing Them

We all have our favorites and personal biases so I figured the fairest way to do this is to use categories and award a point to the game that does the best in that category. For example, box art – this one has the best box art, 1 point to GTA 3. Easy peasy, nipple tweeze. So then at the end we can count up the points and see which one has the most and therefore is the best, because that’s how criticism works apparently. The game with the highest number is the best, just ask IGN, they definitely know what they’re doing.

Although I do want to put a quick disclaimer here – I might be criticizing these games in this video, but please remember I love all of these games more than I love breathing. This is all just my opinion and you shouldn’t take anything I say too seriously. But whatever, I’m bored now, let’s talk about video games.

Story

Oh good, starting off with a nice easy very subjective one so everyone can disagree with me and tell me how stupid and gay I am in the comments, wonderful! Now, stories in GTA games have always been interesting to me because they usually try to combine quite serious topics and themes with wacky over-the-top fuck-a-doodle-doo characters and stereotypes. The tone is simultaneously dark and silly, and I think they pull that off very well. But which game pulls it off the best?

Well, personally I think it’s San Andreas, because I would say a GTA story is only as good as its characters. And in Vice City, most of the characters you came across were barmy battey bonkers clinically insane. And whilst that’s definitely entertaining, there’s not really much to relate to unless we’re talking about Tommy Vercetti, who’s the fucking best and I want to kiss him right on his polygonal mouth.

GTA 3 also had some great characters, but I personally feel that a silent protagonist doesn’t really work as well as a voiced one, at least not for a series like this. I mean don’t get me wrong, I think Claude is a badass, but only because that’s what I’m projecting onto him. I mean for all I know he could be constantly thinking about sand.

San Andreas has fucking great characters. Most of them managed to be funny and interesting but not so over-the-top that you can never really take them seriously. And the main crew you start out with are all awesome – CJ, Sweet, Ryder, and of course funny fat man Big Smoke. They all have such amazing chemistry together and I think they’re a big reason why people are so nostalgic about specifically the first part of this game.

And then of course the betrayal happens, but that’s just another reason I love this story, because the first time I experienced that moment it felt like I was getting sucker punched in my balls. Because I really cared about these characters, so seeing them stab CJ in the back after everything they’d done together was a pretty powerful moment that carried real emotional weight for me. And if a game can give me a moment like that and also have characters like fucking OG Loc, then that, that is good fucking shit. Good writing, good game, good boy.

Controls

Okay so this one’s a bit more simple, we’re talking about the gameplay – the cars going vroom vroom, the guns going bang bang, the American muse going yeehaw. And honestly this one’s pretty simple for me because as much as 3 and Vice City are both still very fun to play, they improved so much in San Andreas control-wise. Like the shooting was way better, the lock-on and aiming was better, and they added a ton of new features that actually changed a lot, like the ability to climb over walls and a shit ton of new minigames and optional content.

But that, that ain’t controls, we’ll get to that later, don’t get ahead of yourself Carol. Not to mention on the PS2 you could actually control your third-person camera both on foot and in vehicles, which was so much better than going into a first-person camera every time you flicked the goddamn right stick. I mean I know things were different in PC world, but that’s not even a real world, it’s a computer store for nerds.

To be fair, San Andreas was an absolutely massive game that did a lot to make itself seem more next gen, which I guess now would be last gen, and if that’s not a depressing thought then I don’t know what is. So I think it’s fair to say that it deserves this point. However, there is one part of the gameplay that I actually think Vice City does better, which is the driving. And let’s be real, a lot of what you do in these games is drive.

I mean credit where it’s due, San Andreas has a way bigger selection of vehicles and more wide open spaces to drive them in, but in Vice City the vehicles generally felt nicer to drive. The turning was sharper, the cars felt faster, and it was all generally very smooth. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but all I know is driving in Vice City was always a treat and I think it deserves some credit for that.

So what I’m gonna do is give one point to San Andreas for the general controls, and one to Vice City for the driving. Oh and as for GTA 3 – no motorbikes, two out of ten.

Style

I was originally gonna call this category graphics, but then again comparing they’re frankly pretty dated graphics of these three games that are older than most Logan Paul fans seems pretty pointless. But what I do want to do is look at the game styles – you know, compare the artistic designs, color palettes, use of lighting. Basically just see which one is visually the nicest. And for my money it’s definitely Vice City.

Yeah the character models and animation may be better in San Andreas, and there are some places in that game that are absolutely gorgeous, but I would say that it’s not as consistently appealing as Vice City. Some of the areas can look pretty bland. And also fog – why this game was so obsessed with fog I will never know. I mean I get that they were trying to show off all their weather effects and super cool futuristic realistic features, but these days that stuff is just kind of quaint and ironically I think it sort of dates it more.

GTA 3’s city, whilst being very impressive in its own right because it was a fully explorable city in full 3D in 2001, which at the time was rarer than a fucking unicorn, is pretty bland by modern standards. There wasn’t much color to be found, there was a lot of gray, and at certain times everything would just turn really dark.

Vice City on the other hand – boom baby, colorful as can be! In the day you could enjoy the beautiful sun effects with the palm trees and the beaches and whatnot, and at night the city gets lit up and fucking ah, just God bless neon man, seriously. The art direction in that game was fucking brilliant and it did a great job of highlighting the multicolored synth-heavy insanity that made the 1980s so fun, unless you were Russian, in which case it probably wasn’t that fun.

Map

So this one’s pretty simple – it’s just the games’ map, you know, it’s world, it’s city, that thing that’s in the background when you’re stealing cars and burning prostitutes. I’m gonna exclude GTA 3 from this one cause I literally just shat all over its city and to be honest I’m starting to feel pretty bad for criticizing it so much. Like I really do love it, I just love the others more. So just choosing from Vice City and San Andreas, it’s it’s really tough.

Because like I said, I love Vice City, and not just because of its art direction. I also think it’s a very well designed place. Every single area in that city feels simultaneously unique and connected to the rest of the city. Nowhere seems out of place or uninteresting, and it’s all so fucking iconic. There, every time I revisit it I feel like I’m transported to a time period I wasn’t even alive in, and all I want to do is crank up the Bowie and snort cocaine until my nose falls off.

But at the same time, San Andreas is just incredible. I mean they managed to make a game world of that size with that many unique districts and that few loading screens on the bloody PS2, the same console that had fucking Crazy Frog Racer, great game by the way, absolutely ten out of ten experience, definitely can see why that got a sequel. And even though I would say San Andreas’ game world isn’t as consistently well designed as Vice City, I just cannot ignore how much work it must have been to make a world of that size with so much attention to detail.

I don’t even want to think about it. I guess at the end of the day it’s kind of like quality versus quantity, but nah, as much as I adore the city of Vice, I think San Andreas should get this one, if only to give some credit to the absolute madmen who attempted to make a game world that massive in the same year as fucking Catwoman, another great game by the way, simply a masterpiece in every way, actually kill me.

Soundtrack

Now this is where the whole point system gets a bit tricky, because there’s the question of exactly what these points are worth. For example, if I was to give a point to a game because it had the best protagonist, and another point to another game because it had the best loading screens or whatever, should those two points be treated as equal? The answer is obviously not, but that’s how I’m doing it regardless.

So let’s talk about soundtracks, a category that probably shouldn’t be worth the full point, but it is anyway cause fuck logic. Soundtracks have always been a big part of GTA. I mean what would all those car chases and races be without a badass track to accompany them? This one is probably the most subjective category yet because everyone has different musical tastes and at the end of the day we’re all going to have different jams. And I do actually think all three of these games have great soundtracks.

But when it comes to the best, for me there’s no competition – humming Vice City theme to avoid copyright. Vice City you made me fall in love with 80s music and exposed me to some really good classic tunes when I was at a young and impressionable age, thereby shaping my taste in music for the future. I hope you’re happy because I am. Like I actually am, that’s not a joke.

I fully acknowledge my bias here and if you prefer the tracks from either of the other games that’s perfectly fine. I just had to show love to Vice City. It’s got some of the best songs ever made and I personally think it has the best soundtrack out of the three, although San Andreas does have Free Bird, so it’s got that going for it.