I played the hell out of GTA 2, had a 3 disk box containing 1 2 and London. And only now I’m bring told it was set in the future!
Yeah I thought it was just a mismatch of all different kinds. Like the 20s and 30s gangster cars and then random car styles from other eras
The London one was awesome!
Am I the only one who never realized it was supposed to be a futuristic city? To be honest my English wasn’t that good at the time I played it, but that information never clicked with me.
Weird article. GTA2 came out in 1999. That’s a long time ago. I doubt most of that team still works there. The idea that they had an issue making it somehow meaning that, over two decades later, the same issues will remain is an odd conclusion.
It’s just a weird comment, I get what he’s saying back then, but Saints Row had multiple games come out in pseudo-futuristic setting that were batshit crazy and fun to play, so obviously it can be done.
Lets be honest, we won’t see a futuristic GTA at this point because shark cards are a money-printing machine and Take Two will never approve anything like that because it would be too risky.
It’s some 20 years ago I played it but I don’t remember it as being futuristic at all? Seemed like a normal city to me or what am I missing?
Apparently it had some weird weapons, which we’ve never seen in other Grand Theft Auto surely…
It was more like retro-futurism of the 1970s
Funnily enough that’s actually why it is my favourite GTA game (I haven’t played 5 and I won’t play 6), although nostalgia probably plays a big role too.
I also liked that it had a cold, clinical feel compared to the later GTAs. You are in “Anywhere City” and it feels like society has entered a permanent state of decline.
I also think the relatively lite cyberpunk and retro-futuristic elements added a bit of flair to the concept.
That being said, I can understand why they will never make a game like GTA2 again; bad market fit and the futurism of GTA2 is in many ways a product of the 90s/early 2000s.
Yeah, I don’t get it either, why am I supposed to connect with the city? I’m playing a violent criminal in a goofy, arcade-y top-down action game. Setting was perfect.
What I absolutely couldn’t connect with is GTA 5: The mechanics are stale, the game doesn’t respect my time and Michael and especially Trevor are just nasty, unpleasant pieces of shit. Zero enthusiasm for GTA 6 from me, it’s just going to have all the same flaws as any GTA since 3 and will surely be more tailored towards online money extraction schemes.
Meanwhile Cyberpunk 2077, with a somewhat similar dystopian setting, has become my favorite game in large parts because of the characters.
Three weeks into the future. One teeming city. Seven streets gangs. Unlimited criminal opportunity
-gta2 manual
Funami
FM
fasa dan sound
GTA2 was good, it’s just games journalists obsessed with a “3D full immersion VR future”, that they felt threatened by every 2D games made once the first Voodoo cards left the factories. The reviews were not about the games, but endless whining about they losing their “fully realistic games” (past Medal of Honor, they usually envisioned a perfect recreation of Battle of Normandy) because a man made a theme park game with accurate roller coaster physics in assembly.
The 3D push was quite similar to the current AI push, but more successful. Imagine if Microsoft blocked games being released onto XBox if they don’t have a certain amount of AI generated assets and/or “live generated content”.
Imagine if Microsoft blocked games being released onto XBox if they don’t have a certain amount of AI generated assets and/or “live generated content”.
Shhhh! Don’t tell them this idea, please!
Xbox is already dying, they’re in no position to scare developers off.
They likely already have that as plan Z already, knowing that console manufacturers demanded 3D objects in the games developers made for their consoles.
MS is definitely going this route.
GTA 2 didn’t connect not because it looked slightly different than GTA 1. This was the “transition to 3D” era and people gravitated towards such games, like Driver.
A shame because it was nice when Chinatown Wars came around some years down the road. A nice trip back to 2D, with some modernization.
I recently picked up cw again and it feels like the best aged GTA in the series
gta2 is still my favourite of the series. the first game was so damn janky that i could barely play it but the second one is smooth as butter, and with the artstyle they chose it looks really unique.
You know a game is good when you log many hours playing the demo.
I found a crack online that removed the two minute time -limit and just explored the map. GTA2’s demo has zero mission, it’s just the entire first map with a number of things missing or changed. Still a lot of fun to just cruise around and blow stuff up.
We probably won’t see a GTA doing it anyway because Watch Dogs, Crackdown and Cyberpunk are already basically that.
GTA2 was the best GTA.
I started with GTA2, but Vice City is the best GTA.
I started with GTA, but the best one is San Andreas
Damn right! San Andreas is just the best, hands down. I’ve never understood the love that Vice City gets. It just always felt so limited compared SA.
Or maybe my memories are just tainted by those damn RC helicopter missions.
I’ve never understood the love that Vice City gets.
It’s the
ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ
people love the 80s retro shit, especially back then, 20 years after the 80s.
I like how it looked. And to me it was and is game with perfect sized map and story lenght.
Nothing feels like its too far to travel at any time, but the map is large enough to feel like city. But small enough that you can learn it.
With SA i always feel like im over the game when i get to the last island, but in vice city the story pacing feels so good and it never outlasts its welcome.
I feel like newer rock star games are just too large to complete fully and keep your intrests, but Vice City hit the sweet spot where you could complete the game without getting tired of it and after short break you could start a new playtrough. I loved gta 5, but after playing seemingly all content it had it took years and few rereleases for me to pick it up again, but VC was a game i played trough twice or trice a year for a long time.
There’s really only 1 RC Helicopter mission in VC. And IMO the RC Plane mission is much harder. In general, there’s a lot of jank in VC, but the vibes are unbeatable. I agree, SA is the better game hands down, while VC is a better experience.
When it was released, SA was also my favorite by far. But with time I noticed I replay VC more than SA, likely because of the vibes. But yes, SA is a correct answer, too.
Nah, VC was much more fun long term than SA. SA had sooooo many more annoying features and set pieces imo
The gang wars mechanic put me off SA, same as the friends in GTA IV that keep demanding you go bowling with them while you are in a car chase with the police. It felt forced and screwed with the flow of the game by forcing you to stop whatever you were enjoying at that moment or deal with the consequences.
Vice City is also my favourite, great selection of music tracks, great 80’s vibes and it wouldn’t forcefully try to pull you out of your flow at random intervals.
Are you me? I 100% agree.
I don’t think so. But can’t be sure.
Chinatown Wars
I played the original Chinatown Wars on the NDS, still one of my favorite games.
Wish we’d get another top-down GTA like this. I love it being more fast-paced and arcady than the GTAs we current get.
Started with the first GTA on the PlayStation; I used to rank Vice City as my absolute favourite entry in the series - but as I’ve matured over time, I’ve come to find GTA IV (or more specifically, The Ballad of Gay Tony expansion) has taken over the top spot - though VC is still a close second.
If you haven’t played TBOGT in a while, I highly recommend revisiting it - there are a lot of parallels to VC in terms of overall feel and the general “fun” tone.
I kind of hated GTA IV when it came out because it was such a downgrade from SA, and I didn’t really care for the story. But I started replaying it recently and appreciate it more. I’ll eventually get to the DLCs. I liked Tony from GTAO, so that’s a good sign that I’ll enjoy them.
Vice City is a my second, if only for the aesthetics. I miss the top down fun, it simplified the game in a way that I really enjoyed, it’s just not the same running over hare krishnas in 3D/irl.
Top-down isn’t a good perspective for a driving game, IMO. I just don’t like not seeing where I’m driving.
This is why I like Vice City Stories. It implements some things from SA but keeps the vice city aesthetics intact.
My top 5 would probably be:
San Andreas
IV
Vice City Stories
Vice City
3
As a high school student I installed a pirated copy on the school network so my friend and I could play it in class. This was at a small town school where the IT specialist was usually too busy being a teacher and track coach to pay attention to what students were able to do on school computers. They removed the ability for student accounts to install software eventually, but I never got punished for what I did.
Oh I loved the days of circumventing early school IT systems. I remember we discovered that we could right click on something in the start menu and get into a shared network folder, we put Halo in it and basically the whole class played matches together but alt-tabbed when a teacher came by.
It’s a joke how easy some of those were to bypass. I still remember when the lab installed some nanny cam app so they could make sure kids weren’t playing games or looking at shit they shouldn’t. The app was so bad that I could just open task manager and kill the nanny cam software.
The librarians loved me, so I don’t think they cared enough to say anything, even when they went after kids near me doing similar shit.
Haha, that’s pretty shit level software. Usually it took a little bit more effort than that to just kill it in task manager.
Yeah… Even back then I was amazed at how little effort it took to bypass. But that was in the early 00s, and basic troubleshooting like opening task manager was considered black magic (just like opening a terminal is today to most people)
I remember figuring out how to make my account an admin account in like Windows 2k through some obscure setting that was still available. We stared with weird flash games in the library, and eventually played unreal tournament.
Was that the sticky keys trick? That was a fun one to use to elevate
No. What the heck? You can/could have used sticky keys to elevate account access??? What?
Yeah, so back in the day, you could replace the accessibility executable that launches when you hit shift 5 times to enable sticky keys, and is launched as a privileged process. Rename it and copy cmd to the old exe name, hit shift 5 times and you now have an admin console.
Still works today, you just have to do it offline if you’re not an admin.
One of my friends pointed out to the teacher that they shouldn’t store the grades on a shared location the students could access and got expelled. I’ll stick to Oregon Trail.
I remember I had a Voodoo card at the time of GTA2. Playing the Glide version of that game (if you could get it working) was like being transported into the future. The resolution was higher, the framerate was higher and more smooth, the lighting effects were insane. Especially on a large CRT with vibrant colors that game looked absolutely amazing.
I had a voodo banshee and it had a bug where the colours would slowly pulse across the spectrum as you moved around
At this rate we won’t be seeing another GTA game after 6 until 2040 anyways
At least they’ve already finished the engine it will run in.
I liked the weapon mods to the vehicles - oil spills etc
Also the car crusher that gave out items and cash iirc
The gang/faction system was lot of fun, I recall one of them was just straight rednecks so ton of fun to just rampage against them.
Also loved the nice touch of the 5 minute gameplay demo being enforced your character wearing a bomb vest set to blow in 5 minutes.
The spray shops were called “Max Paint”, a reference to a game that would come out two years later.
I liked GTA2. Probably because it was the only one I played. I would love to play it today, but the tank controls are too horrible. Does anybody know of an analogue controller mod or something like that?
You could try this mouse support mod: https://github.com/h0x91b/gta2-mouse
I haven’t tried it myself, so I have no idea how good it is
Or this twin stick mod: https://gtamp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1150
