And when you do that with boxy turn of the millennium era 3D environments you end up with a look that I like to call “Little Timmy got loose on the custom level editor.” The retro textures were a match for the janky retro 3D physics and unrefined gameplay design. All they’ve really done is put the textures through an HD filter and updated the lighting engine. Except for the QA department, which in this case was putting in the level of effort required for a permanent vegetative state. Remastering is a cold and unpleasant No Man’s Land between the two, wanting the nostalgia cash-in of the latter while only putting in the level of effort required for the former.

Nor a “remake”, a complete ground-up reinterpretation through the lens of modern sensibilities, polishing up the mechanics and filtering out the gay jokes. Not a “rerelease”, same game with stability tweaks and maybe a nice resolution upgrade to pad out the shelflife. “Remaster” is becoming rather a foreboding word in my glossary. And now Rockstar have brought out quote “definitive” versions of what we might as well think of as the first three GTA games, GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas, and for this all previous versions have now vanished from availability, hope you weren’t invested in any of them or wanted to use that one San Andreas mod that Hillary Clinton burst all her capillaries over. And as for removing previous versions of the thing from sale, well, let me tell you a cautionary fable about a proud little man named George Lucas who decided that no one had any need for any version of the original Star Wars trilogy that didn’t have added Loony Toons sound effects and CG as dated as Sean Connery’s relationship advice, and now George Lucas has to sit there and plaster on a smile as the Disney corporation peels the skin off his life’s work and stretches it so thin it would disappoint a Marmite enthusiast. There will be people out there for whom their “definitive” experience of watching The Crying Game was at three in the morning blitzed out on mescalin with both feet immersed in buckets of wallpaper paste. Partly because I think that’s a subjective thing. Ooh, you want to be very careful about declaring any release of anything to be the “definitive” version. We have a merch store as well! Visit the store for brand new ZP merch. Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign-up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators! This week in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition.

Little man auto