izigame.me

When I first heard about Definite Edition, I was immediately sold, but full price and trilogy pack made me doubt whether I would buy it because I just wanted to re-visit Vice City again. Even more, I was hoping for Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories because I have never played them. I wasn't interested about GTA3 anymore and I never managed to finish San Andreas because I always got bored and annoyed of it, even on mobile.
Then the negative reviews rolled in and I decided to wait while they fix the bugs. By the time Valve announced Steam Deck, large amount of bugs were already fixed, but I decided that I wouldn't want to buy games outside of Steam Store anymore and once I received my Deck, I realized that the Definite Edition was still not released on Steam. So, I tried to convince myself that I don't really need to replay Vice City.
Luckily, now it's finally on Steam and with 50% discount, which is bargain for 3 great games. While many issues have been fixed, these games still get review-bombed by people who misuse the 2-hour refund policy to just leave a negative review. Well, people have weird hobbies and nothing better to do :P
I could say that graphically it looks great, has lot more detail in many ways (textures, lighting, particles and parallax window interiors) and is more enjoyable (controls, slo-mo weapon wheel, GPS and quick mission restart), but nobody would believe me because they have nostalgic memories of the original games. Gamers remember the originals as bug-free, which they never were.
It seems to me that gamers are still pissed because they expected the remaster to be more realistic than the original, but what they got was high-res remaster with emphasizing that GTA3 era games (Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas) were about cartoonish look and not about realism that we nowadays see in GTA4 and GTA5. I think the disconnect comes from modding, where modders always make the games to be more realistic. So, even when the remaster has higher quality textures, for many gamers, it feels like a downgrade in quality, which it actually isn't.
The blessing and the curse of PC gaming is that everybody can tweak graphic settings, but some now complain that the game doesn't perform well on Steam Deck. This is simply not true because it runs well on Deck with default settings. The biggest problem on Deck is Rockstar Games Launcher. Don't get me wrong, the problem is not with Rockstar Games Social Club, which I think is actually a good service as a backup. The problem is that the launcher is still not gamepad-compatible. Luckily, it only needs to be interacted with on first launch.
Another sad thing to see gone is some of the licensed music tracks, but I am glad that I got to play Vice City again, I especially enjoyed K-Chat radio channel, even more than I did 20 years ago. It's interesting time capsule of satire, which many times made me wait in car to finish listening the current sketch before continuing with the mission.
If you never played GTA games from the GTA3 era or played them long time ago, don't listen all the embittered gamers, this is way to enjoy those classic games and it now looks decent enough to play again.