Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy

As we inch closer to the 10-year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III this Saturday, we’ve done a lot of reflecting about the era of gaming that it ushered in, and how it changed the way developers look at games. But aside from standardizing open worlds and giving us and a decade of morally ambiguous gaming, GTA as a series has told a lot of fascinating stories. And a big reason those stories were so fascinating was their cast of larger-than-life scumbags, psychos and sociopaths, most of which were not only memorable, but surprisingly complicated underneath their cartoonish exteriors.

With that in mind, we roped together a few of our editors and wouldn’t let them leave until they’d told us, in their own words, which ones were their favorites...

Sony seems to be on something of an HD remake kick lately. This week finally brought us long-awaited confirmation that the Ico and Shadow of the Colossus Collection will head our way sometime next year; with last year’s God of War Collection and the upcoming Sly Collection, that brings to three the number of classic PS2 series Sony’s retrofitting with 1080p visuals and Trophies, before re-releasing as budget-priced PS3 games.

This is a trend we can really get behind; as much as we love our old PS2 games, we can barely stand to look at them anymore. Give them a makeover so they don’t look crap on our new TVs, though, and we’re all over them. With that in mind, here are a few other series from the last generation we’d love to see resurrected for the modern age of HD consoles...

We know that all you GTA heads are neck-deep in the beautifully rendered corpses of mid-level irritating crime-boss douchebags, but let’s take a moment and consider our roots. Liberty wasn’t always this chock-full of cell phone blabbing pedestrians, road raging grandma SUV pilots, and rights-violating officers of the law. In a simpler time, there was only one camera view looking down on all the chaos and the citizens were jaggy

Crime doesn’t pay. But virtual crime? That does pay. And by the bucket-load. Even by the time the series reached Florida, it was breaking records in a major way, with Vice City becoming the fastest-selling PS2 title ever - until San Andreas beat it. And that’s despite four million Americans pre-ordering Vice City, and a million more buying it upon its release (here in the UK, the Miami Vice-vibed title shifted over a quarter of

They say you should never go back. In GTA's case, though, it's surprising how well the old adventures have aged. But how in the hell did we put up with all the ways it sucked? We're talking GTA's many glaring or recurring flaws that, because the rest of the game was so ruddy awesome, we chose not to notice. Did we really put up with Grand Theft Auto when it sucked like this?

 

With Grand Theft Auto IV taking a new, more realistic direction in a radically different vision of Liberty City, it seems more and more as though the series - like its new protagonist, Niko Bellic - is angling for a fresh start. The cartoonish mayhem of previous GTAs seems out of place in this bleak new vision of Liberty, and according to our UK counterparts, virtually no familiar faces will appear in GTA IV. But that doesn't necessarily mean we've seen the last of them. Rockstar's left a lot