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GTA Trilogy Coming To PS2
Gamasutra reports that Rockstar will be releasing all three modern Grand Theft Auto titles as a bundle, simply called 'Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy'. The GTA three-pack will retail for $39.99, and should release on December 4th. From the article: "The collection is believed to be one of the last to carry the Grand Theft Auto name for the PlayStation 2, with the next iteration in the franchise, Grand Theft Auto IV, already announced for simultaneous release for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in North America on October 16, 2007 and in Europe on October 19, 2007. Take Two has previously announced, however, that an unnamed 'current generation' port of its handheld Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories will be released by Spring 2007, continuing its recent habit of debuting GTA side stories on the PSP and subsequently porting them to current-gen (generally PlayStation 2) hardware." I don't own any GTA titles at the moment, so this might be a good buy for me.
... as long as it comes in something more sturdy than the cardboard box that the "Collector's Edition" of GTA: San Andreas came in, that tore apart before it even got off the shelves at GameStop. What would be really nice is if they included graphical upgrades like they did with the collection for the X-Box, bring GTA III and Vice City up to San Andreas graphics quality. That'd be worth the money.
> I don't own any GTA titles at the moment, so this might be a good buy for me.
At that price, for three games, I'd go for it.
>> I don't own any GTA titles at the moment, so this might be a good buy for me.
man that smells like a sponsored post right there.
truth is, if you dont have any GTA title yet its probably because you're not a big GTA fan to begin with, and if you are but have pirated them instead (bad boy!) then you won't want to buy them either.
but heh...nice sale pitch.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
and wish they'd port GTA to the Wii as well.
Good thing I have a PS2, though!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
While GTA is in my opinion that GTA helped define the canon of modern free-roaming games and is in fact worth playing, I think one of the more irritating aspects of the game is just how long these games are. The length of each game, and the number of missions, do not create a good ratio with the amount of variance available to the developers. In other words, you eventually start to feel like you're just doing the same missions over and over again with little variation; and that's playing through ONE game. Buying all three at the same time will overwhelm most players.
The current-gen port of LCS has been out for about five months now.
Rob
This is great indeed for PS2 fans who never got into the franchise. I own Vice City for both PS2 and for PC, and in fact I have GTA III and San Andreas for PC as well.
If you have a competent gaming PC (certainly not state of the art... but not a barebones w/ business graphics), it would be worth the extra couple bucks to buy the three of them for PC instead. I don't think it would cost an awful lot more.
Differences:
1. The graphics are better (and more adjustable).
2. You can modify the game in various ways if you ever wish to do so (yes there's the X-rated mod for San Andreas, but there are others).
3. The load times are almost nonexistant (i.e. when hopping from island to island). Really, when you're going 140 and everything just stops dead for 10 seconds or so while it loads the other island, it can get frustrating.
4. It's easier to back up saved games on PC, since they're just files in your My Documents folder; none of that memory pack crap. This also makes it easy to save games with cheat codes enabled (seriously hysterical things are possible with the cheat codes, but they prevent you from achieving 100% game completion if you save with them).
There are other little perks here & there.
In case you're wondering, there are plenty of gamepads available for PC with essentially the same buttons that the PS2 controller has... my Logitech has nice software that lets you map gamepad buttons to particular keys and/or other input actions, and can be set up to play EXACTLY like the PS2 version. I never liked the default control setup for PC, so this was important to me.
Finally, if you get on eBay and grab a copy of the first San Andreas release, you can use the "hot coffee" mod, if you are so inclined (the previously mentioned X-rated mod which sparked so much controversy when it became known). The latter releases aren't capable of this, as far as I know.
Of course it's still cool that, for PS2-only gamers, you can get them all so cheap! You save at least $100 off their combined initial release prices.
Conclusion: If you're going for all three of them at once, the PC versions are (IMHO) worth the extra money if your PC can deal with it. I have an Athlon XP 3000+ (32-bit) w/ 1GB RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro, and 5.1 sound... it's far superior to the PS2 versions... even works great on my laptop (a ThinkPad T42 w/ fairly similar specs).
The only GTA I've played on my computer is GTA III, but IMHO the controls suck. On the PS2 the controller controls everything. On the computer, I can't map too much to the gamepad and it still doesn't work quite right (ie, moving around). You're stuck with awkward key combinations and the mouse. Then again, most computer games I've used in the last few years seem to suffer from the same problems which is why I prefer consoles.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
I was going to post something similar. However, I'm not with you on controls.
First off, you can get an adaptor to let you use a real PS2 (other other console) controller on your PC for well under $10 - you don't have to get a controller only for your PC, you can share with a console.
Secondly, GTA is heavy on shooting - a mouse is a much better control option. Driving is nicer with a controller, but driving with a keyboard is much easier than shooting with an analog stick.
One more thing - there's a GTA multiplayer mod called Multi Theft Auto. Haven't tried it myself, but if the idea appeals to you then you want the PC version.
i thought they put this out a year ago, though!
oh, thats right, they did. it came out for the Xbox, too!
it hit October of 2005 (november for ps2). now, i'm not necessarily a zonk-hater (in fact, I think the guy gets a mostly unfair bad rap), but..... this product isn't anything new: it has existed for a long while. the real news is, simply, that they're dropping the price.
Considering that the PS2 is STILL outselling every console out there - including the 360 - it's a pretty good move. I'll probably even get the PS2 port of Vice City Stories when it comes out next year sometime just because it'd be nice to play the missions on the big-screen. The music is probably the best in the franchise as well.
Plus - although they improved some of the Liberty City Stories control shortcomings on the PSP, some missions are nice with the Dual-Shock controllers (vehicle racing missions particularly).
This franchise is pretty much what has kept me from the Wii. Plus the idea that something as groundbreaking might appear on the PS3 much like GTA did on the PS2. Call me a Wii hater (I like Nintendo keeping the industry fresh) but a million Mario derivations seems tired to me.
IM IN UR PS2 CORRUPTIN UR KIDZ!! Someone call Jack Thomson!
Not trolling one system vs the other, I just have a thought on a possible problem with GTA4 on the 360.
From what I understand they have been already filling up a DVD with San Andreas (and possibly the previous games?) What will this mean for the 360? Obviously Rockstar will want to make GTA4 a big improvement over previous titles if they can. The textures are going to be larger, more models with more detail, the world bigger, more voice acting, more music, whatever else they can do. If they are already filling DVDs something has got to give. They can't rely on installing to the hard drive (I think that was a bad move for Microsoft to not put one in every system.) Maybe they can just compress the data on the disc more, but I'm guessing they already had to do some of that with San Andreas. There could be disc swapping, splitting the world onto two discs. If so, they wouldn't want to have you go back and forth between them for missions very often or it would drive you crazy. They could split the music between the two discs too I suppose, kind of like having different radio stations in different towns. If the space limitation does become a problem for Rockstar, what would this mean for the PS3 version? Would they just make the game the same on the PS3 version as if it had the same constraints, or would the PS3 version be an expanded or smoother experience?
I'm sure Rockstar has a plan, but I'm just curious what other people's thoughts are on this.
Fuck Jack Thompson. He uses everything a part of his anti-video game rhetoric.
I've tried a few different game pads for the computer and haven't liked any of them. Recently I picked up the Red Octane Universal Adapter for my PS2 controller. It is great.
If, like me, you think that the PS2 controller is the best on the market right now, it's very much worth the $20.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
GTA : SA didn't "fill up a DVD". In fact it used LESS than half the capacity of a DVD.
I bought the 2 pack a long while back that had gta3 and gta vice city in it. After playing Vice City almost all the way through (got everything except all 100 hidden packages), I went back to try out gta3 and was horribly unimpressed. Once you get used to the newer graphics, going backwards is a big, gigantic let down.... I've not played San Andreas yet, but I suspect you'd get the same feeling playing that and then going back to vice city.
Wow. Sixty-two inches. I can only imagine how poor a game would look even at 1080p on such an unnecessarily huge screen. 1280x1024 on a 17" CRT or 1600x1200 on a 19" is several orders of magnitude more crisp. These resolutions have been feasible for gaming on the PC for many years now. Overpriced and overrated HDTV is still lagging behind and is only truly impressive to the PC ignorant, though I'm sure it's nice for movies. But you weren't talking about movies.
And on that note, joysticks are for flight games. But I can't recall seeing any for sale to play the stellar Ace Combat series with on PS1/2. I always had to use a gamepad because that's all you get. We tend to use gamepads over here in "PC gamer Bizarro World" for games that are appropriate for such devices (a foreign concept, I know). These devices have been available since at least 1997, by the way, and dual analog PS2 clones from Logitech and others have been around for years as well and are indistinguishable from the originals.
However, the number of games, even on consoles, that are optimally played with a gamepad are far less than the PC ignorant would imagine. Any game that involves aiming feels more like you're trying to control a 9 year old girl scout who's overdosed on cough medicine while she's attempting to perform brain surgery, using a gamepad. At least in games without cheesy autoaim nonsense which ruins the whole deal anyway. I played through MOH Frontline on PS2 (and Rising Sun), neither of which had that 'feature', and several other FPS/TPS on it and previous consoles, and it always felt wrong, even before I had the experience of doing it the right way. The mouse is simply the most realistic and logical method available of portraying a non-inebriated adult (who's not a gun-o-phobe) holding a weapon and acquiring targets. Rockstar really nailed it in the area of control for the PC versions of GTA III & up, allowing the use of mouse/keyboard for on-foot/aiming and gamepad for driving. Other clueless console porting devs should pay attention.
So in essence, it is the consoles that limit your input options, and many other options as well by design. Only the PC has consistently offered the right tool for the right job (I'd put TM here in parentheses, but that seems pretty lame to me).