All this talk of GTA made me want to play the series again. I just played the entire main mission campaign of GTA 3 in re3 and had a blast. The game holds up much better than I thought, with missions that often allow quite a bit of freedom compared to some of the later titles. Liberty City is a fantastic place and just the right size for the amount and variety of gameplay that it offers.
As for re3 itself, it's pretty much perfect. It runs smoothly without major issues and I've only had a couple of crashes in a particularly chaotic mission with ped and traffic density set to max. You can set these values right in the menu, together with increased draw distance and a bunch of other stuff like antialiasing, filters, PS2 or XBOX style car textures, etc. It feels a lot more authentic compared to the standard PC version and AFAIK makes all the "essential" graphic mods like SkyGFX obsolete. Oh yeah, there's also freecam, which means you can use the mouse to look around at all times. Class.
I don't think there's any must have mods for GTA 3 which would require me to have the standard version, so I'm ready to consider re3 the real "definitive edition". I've just started reVC and will play the reLCS beta later.
Unfortunately, with all the shenanigans related to the DMCA takedown and the Pajeet Trilogy launching, it seems no mod scene has yet sprung up for the reverse engineered versions. If I understand things correctly, it could allow modders to, among other things, use VC opcodes in 3. I did a little modding for SA more than a decade ago, so I'm just becoming reacquainted with how things work. Still, I managed to make my recent playthrough of 3 more challenging by messing around with the text files (double ped defense and vehicle collision multipliers). Together with the increased traffic, it made a lot of missions quite challenging! I might try my hand at a more ambitious hard mode for the RAGE engine games at a later date.
Oh yeah, don't forget about GTA 1 and 2, nowadays very underrated games. I hadn't played the first game in over 20 years and I found it more enjoyable now than before. When I played it as a kid, I only cared about driving around causing destruction, but if you actually care to play it properly, it offers a fantastically open arcade experience. Unlike the 3D games there's no progression, instead you play the same missions over and over as optimally as possible while trying to increase your bonus multiplier until you master the map. Graphics, music and overall atmosphere are still awesome. I suggest using the Max Pack by Toshiba-3 (the same heroic modder of the Carmageddon series) for hassle-free playing in recent Windows:
https://gtaforums.com/topic/860039-grand-theft-auto-max-pack-a-complete-pack-ala-gog/