Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PC) - When you play at 60 Frames Per Second...

As played on reVC_1.0 Rebuild.

This is nothing but a legendary entry into a series that needs no introduction. That said, one thing people seem to forget about Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is that, even at the time of release, the game had a boat load of technical problems when it hit PC - one such problem related to the frame-rate.

You see, as a console to PC port, Vice City was never designed to run any faster than 30 frames, anything quicker than intended makes the experience fall apart. The world physics in particular become extremely exaggerated at faster speeds and game scripts likewise break as a result of the change furthermore.

Alas, this is just one of many glaring issues with this action adventure sandbox. Both Vice City and Grand Theft Auto 3 never had the cleanest visual set-up, even on native PlayStation 2 hardware. There are some rough looking graphics here, with awful motion-blur (which can be switched off thankfully), awkward pop-in (which is still prevalent to some extent), ropey animations, and blocky character models, of which never looked good on any system really. Ofcourse, the crux of Vice City was its open-world but, now that we are reaching the 20th anniversary of it's release, the weaknesses of Rockstar's design are really starting to show.

In anycase, the reason I decided to play this at all is that Rockstar (or rather Take Two) released a "remaster collection" of the sixth generation Grand Theft Auto games. Sadly this "remaster collection" only spat on the legacy of Grand Theft Auto, as a franchise, by doing the absolute bare minimum in improving the original experience (i.e. not a whole lot at all). However, to make matters worse, these Remasters were put out at the expense of the older variants of Vice City, which were subsequently delisted. Fan projects, such as reVC, were terminated with little to no recognition of their efforts too.

What this means for fans of Grand Theft Auto is that, unless you plan on finding the original games and hardware to play them on, there is no official way to play the original verisons of Vice City on a computer or games console.

The only option for consumers, now, are the awful remasters. Anyone watching this will have already made up their mind but, if you have even so much as a little bit of sense, DON'T buy the Grand Theft Auto Remaster Collection. Vote with your wallet. Buy something better worth your time. A company like Rockstar, or Take Two, needs to know that customers won't stand for minimal effort projects and need to respect their classic games, and existing fans of said games in turn.