I also fail to understand the appeal of these fucking games. Played 3/VC and SA, couldn't get myself to beat any of them because they were so fucking BORING
Vice City and San Andreas were fun games. The freedom at the time was quite notable, and it was fun-based freedom, not freedom for freedom's sake and realism faggotry like in GTAV or RDR2. Just go off running around and there would be fun cool side missions like rampages, wherein you murder a certain amount of people or blow up x number of cars with infinite ammo in a set amount of time for a cash reward. Steal a random vehicle and it starts a mission wherein there is a bomb in the car, the doors lock and you have to take it to a defusal expert in time, without any major collisions otherwise it goes boom. Steal a random bicycle at the local skatepark and it starts a mini-game where you have to collect a bunch of rings by performing jumps (not doable if your cycling and stamina stats are low). There's a bunch of hidden packages scattered around the place that provide unique rewards available for pickup at your properties. You can purchase properties. Fly planes. Sail boats. Play pool. Gamble. And it all largely has purpose. There's racing gameplay of various kinds, shooting, stealth, flying, All kinds of interactions and endless gimmicks. Main missions are varied, they start off pretty lame but get increasingly interesting and challenging. The music is fucking fantastic, classic stuff. It defined my broad tastes in music today. There's numerous ways you can make your life easier during missions, like stealing an armored police car before a tough mission, simply approaching the objective from a different angle or climbing onto the rooftops for a vantage point, finding some hidden body armor pickup hidden in a bush (make a mental or physical note of where pickups are as they respawn when you die), taking your own custom-fitted vehicle with nitrous boosts, or even just flying in an apache helicopter if you unlocked one and blowing everyone up with missiles. There's stats! Fighting moves you can unlock. Run faster. Hit harder. Unlock dual-wielding of weaponry. Improved car handling. managing and growing your character makes the gameplay evolve slightly over time and makes doing the miscellaneous gameplay more fun. The storytelling and power trip was relatively appealing. The graphics were shit even for the time (based old R*) and the art direction more than compensated. The game was packed full of humor and social commentary, but also some glorification of degeneracy though that was kind of the point and it did so in style. The interesting kind of degeneracy; old world degeneracy, not zoomer and internet culture lame shit. The world was much smaller than modern open world games, a quality over quantity approach that was standard back then (god bless technical limitations), the world is simply packed full of things to do and find. All the quality and nuance is simply gone in the modern era open world games, not just RDR2 and GTAV. Every time you die, you lose all weapons, armor and a percentage of your cash, are moved to the nearest hospital (location reset), and if in a mission that progress is lost. Suck on that Dark Souls! Heavy consequences are fun and it makes the economy have a lot of weight, as well as keeps exploration relevant (have to find and/or buy weapons again). You may be tempted to kill a cop or gang member, grab his weapon then flee and hope you can evade the cops. You'll learn tactical nuances to help you get ahead such as when you steal a cop car, you get a free shotgun from it. Steal an ambulance, you get a bit of health. And so on and on.
The combat kind of sucks and drags it down a bit, and if you've no tolerance for racing/driving in games it would get old fast. Ultimately the games are not
, slightly falling short of that, but they ARE simply good old games and worthy of the hype back then. If the combat were better, not lock-on shit (or cover-shooting for that matter), they would be the undisputed best open world mayhem games unlikely to ever be surpassed. I believe there are mods for that. Maybe one day I will try them.
Note that very little of this relates to GTA3, I thought that game was overrated even as a kid. Vice City they started to nail these concepts well and injected a ton of style, and San Andreas was the peak of it, though what they did to hidden packages was decline, and the style shift turns some people of the codex off though they are likely unaware it evolves and changes a whole bunch once you leave the first city.
