[Singer] I could do without monday morning. Stumblin' outta bed and yawnin'. Didn't get home 'til a quarter to three, I
could do with a D. [James Stephanie Sterling] Ya see?
Do you feel a little bit better now? Just, just a little bit better? Oh, hello there everyone, it's me James Stephanie Sterling, bitch, and I'm here with my long term boyfriend Rude Ralph, whose been feeling a little bit down lately, a little bit, a little bit self conscious. He's worried that he doesn't look all that attractive. A little bit down on his looks. So I thought I'd show him Grand Theft Auto: Definitive Edition, to let him know that things could be worse. He could be an even uglier piece of fucking shit.
Ah yes, oh shit. Ah yes, Grand Theft Auto: Definitive Edition, let's talk about that, shall we? I had another script already planned, I wrote it days ago, that was efficient, thought I'd save time right now, but no, here we are, with a completely different episode because how could I not talk about the Grand Theft Auto The Definitive Edition, so let's do that right now, shall we? Yes we shall. At least I didn't drop it.
[Editor's note: there is a far too long portion of just dumb clips of the game being buggy here. Lazy cunt trying to pad out his video.]
[Singer] I could do with a D.
[Editor's note: This is where the meat of the video starts]
[JSS] Holy heck, those so-called Grand Theft Auto “Definitive Editions” are *fucking* shit, huh? Like, incredible levels of pathetic fucking shit. Like, “Rockstar Games Wearing Its Overwhelming Arrogance On Its Sleeve” levels of awful, wretched, laughable fucking shit. This past week, Rockstar Games released the GTA Trilogy out into the world, marketed as enhanced and improved versions of the original PlayStation 2 titles, GTA III, GTA Vice City, and GTA San Andreas. The problem is, these rereleases are pissing awful. The so-called “enhanced” visuals are miserable - the reworked character models look warped and creepy, and while some people claim it overall looks great, I frankly don’t see it. I’m playing it on Switch, and while it looks fine enough handheld, on TV all the visuals look smooshed. Though there are indeed some improvements to, say, the lighting, textures are in many places broken and misaligned, and the game is littered with glaring bugs that are currently being shared all over the shop on Twitter. On top of that, the trilogy’s performance is complete dogshit, with framerate drops that seem like a joke when you consider how old these games are, and how they really, really shouldn’t be running like they’re taxing on any modern piece of hardware.
For many folks, though, these aren’t problems. Indeed, some won’t even agree with me that it looks particularly ugly, even though it really is fucking hideous. What can’t be forgiven, however, is the complete shitshow surrounding this release, which highlights Rockstar’s perpetual sense of self-importance and smug autosatisfication.
Firstly, Rockstar pulled the scumbag move of removing digital versions of these games’ original releases, a cheap and contemptuous method of falsely upping the value of the new versions. This is one of the game industry’s favorite tricks - don’t sell something based on what you’re offering, but what you’ve taken away. With the original versions of these games no longer available on Steam, PSN, or the Xbox Marketplace, anybody looking to play via these services are now railroaded into the hilariously titled “Definitive” Edition. An edition which, by the way, isn’t even definitive. Due to licensing issues, because fuck the parasitic music industry, the original soundtracks for the trilogy have seen a number of cuts. Now, while this can’t entirely be laid at the feet of Rockstar, you can hardly claim that these rereleases are “definitive” when they don’t define the original experience, when content has literally been cut. Luckily the Electric Light Orchestra's Four Little Diamonds is still in Vice City. I know literally everybody watching this has, like myself, been terrified that ELO won't be featured, because ELO is an amazing band, even though Four Little Diamonds is admittedly one of its weaker songs. Indeed Secret Messages, the tenth studio album by ELO, released in 1983, is seen as one of the weaker of the company's releases. Certainly no Out of the Blue. Though, ironically, it itself features a number of cut songs which if the original plan for a double album had been realised could have made it one of the best. After all, Hello My Old Friend is a heck of a song. Rather than Four Little Diamonds, I'd have put one of the songs from the previously released album Time in there, a fantastic concept album with some absolute banger tracks. Christ. None of that was in the original script. Furthermore, and we can’t blame the parasitic music industry for this one, a number of cheats have been removed, with Rockstar citing “technical reasons.” Again, for many this won’t be a dealbreaker, but the fact remains that these versions simply aren’t definitive.
So, the games are broken, buggy, ugly, and not as complete as the originals. On top of that, clear corners were cut when creating these glorified polished ports. It’s been pointed out that text in the games’ environments is riddled with spelling mistakes, seemingly caused as a result of the devs automating the process of upscaling the visuals. Basically, it’s been suggested an AI simply guessed at what the environmental text was saying, leading to a number of background jokes, such as they are, becoming thoroughly mangled. For example, there’s a sign for a hotdog place in Vice City, Shaft Hot Dogs. In the original game, the tagline for the store reads, “The Taste of a Real Man’s Meat.” Yeah, cute enough. In the Definitive Edition, it reads “The Taste of a Real Man’s Heat,” which makes absolutely no fucking sense. Another sign has gone from saying “Guitar Wank Booths Available” to “Guitar Henk Booths Available” which… fucking what? The number 9 on the back of a jersey in San Andreas appears to have been pasted over what was once a 7.
Developer notes have been found left in the game’s code, along with the unlicensed songs that were cut from the final release, and speaking of things left in, the notorious “Hot Coffee” sex minigame continues to haunt the series, since code for that has been found lingering in San Andreas as well. Quite why or how this long-removed and controversial minigame, or the comments, has any trace of itself in these releases is unknown, but one thing has been agreed upon - it really shouldn’t be in there, but the product is so fucking slapdash that it only seems fitting.
[Announcer] I could do with a D.
[Editor's note: This gag was added here to just fulfill the rule of three. Fuck Jim.]
[JSS] All of this is a mere appetizer for the shitty main event, however, and that’s the fact that GTA Trilogy on PC has been unplayable for days since its release. See, because Rockstar’s head is terminally jammed up its own arsehole, GTA Trilogy relies upon the propriety Rockstar Games Launcher in order to work. Except, the Rockstar Games Launcher wasn’t working when the game came out, so nobody could play the fucking trilogy. This extended to all other Rockstar titles on PC too, with even offline and single-player games, like the definitive edition, tied to the company’s shitty online launcher that nobody asked for. And game publishers, do please note that nobody has EVER asked for your shitty little launchers. Bethesda, nobody asked. Ubisoft, nobody asked, whether it comes to your launcher or your sexual harassment of your staff. And Rockstar? Nobody *fucking* asked. Steam is perfectly good enough to launch these games. Bespoke launchers do nothing to enhance the experience, they only stand as yet another barrier between the player and the game they paid good fucking money for, and when you can’t even keep it up during an important game launch, what’s the fucking point of you or the unwanted, woefully inefficient middleperson you’re making your customers go through? Dickheads. But it still manages to get even more laughable than that. Despite the launcher returning, GTA Trilogy remains unavailable on PC as its been pulled from sale entirely. Rockstar is citing the need to “remove files unintentionally included” with the game, which it wouldn’t have had to do if the games weren’t cheaply and hurriedly cobbled together with duct tape and jizz. It’s clear that this disastrous puddle of cold piss was made with cut corners and as a result, it’s a mess to the point of becoming a laughing stock.
A well deserved embarrassment for a company that treats itself like gaming royalty, that usually basks in the vomit of hype-driven praise that invariably accompanies its massively expensive, increasingly tedious games. As a result of this frankly insulting release, the GTA Trilogy has been thoroughly bombed by user reviews on Metacritic. At the time of talking, the PC version sits with over 2,000 user reviews, only the tiniest handful having anything positive to say. The vast, *vast* majority of reviews are overwhelmingly negative to the point of the game having a 0.5 average user score. God, I really fucked up reading that. The reviews note the ugly visuals and warped character models, the litany of bugs and glitches, the shitty textures, the poor performance, and the inability to use mods. Many have written the game off as more of an undercooked port than an actual remaster, and there’s plenty of people simply telling Rockstar and Grove Street Games to go fuck themselves. Ah, that's another 100 odd reviews since I wrote the script. I do like this 10 out of 10 review though. The game is incredible! This remaster is great! The Best Game! Wow amazing! If that's not sarcasm, I can only assume a rooster wrote it by pecking at the keyboard, and somehow came out with legible sentences in a monkey typewriter situation.
The other platforms aren’t doing so hot on the meta to the critic though either. The Series X sits at 0.5, and the Switch version boasts a slightly improved 0.6. But let’s hear it for the PS5 version, folks, WOOOO, which has the distinction of earning a 1.0 average score! Fuck yes. Oh, wait a minute, what? It dropped down to 0.9? Pfft. I had a whole sarcastic bit about the PS5 recorded. Oh well. That goes straight in the fucking bin.
Frankly I’d have taken a full remake of any single one of these games than a trilogy of embarrassments. Not least for the fact that, looking back, these games have aged so utterly poorly. Even with improvements to driving, combat, and general controls, all three games are rough and frustrating to play, with a number of poorly balanced missions and controls and movement that still remain frustrating even with an overhaul. I mean, let’s face facts people - GTA III is fucking shit. It’s a mess, and it always has been. An awkward first stumble in the bid to turn Grand Theft Auto from top-down PS1 game to fully 3D open world. Playing through it again, I fucking *hate* it. I completely fucking despise it. Vice City and San Adreas do better, but even they’re difficult to go back after so many years of improvements and strides made in open world game design. Regardless, if you still thing these games aren’t dated to fuck, the Definitive Edition will go down in history as one of the most pathetic releases ever squirted out by Rockstar, and one of the most awful rereleases in history, if not the *most* awful. And frankly Rockstar deserves it. Arrogant bunch of fucking cu-SKELLETON WARRIORS
[Editor's note: The important part is done. About fucking time.]
[Rude Ralph Noises]
Totally obnoxious. Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed today's episode on Grand Theft Auto The Definitive Edition The Trilogy. It's BAD! Y'know?
[Rude ralph noises]
So anyway, yeah, I'm just, like, sick of Rockstar's shit. It's been perpetuating its shit for years, where it tries to live up to its name, and thinks it's an actual rock star, and it's perpetuated a shitty abusive work culture. As some of you may have learned if you ever watched my video Fear and Fury: How the Rockstar Sausage is Made, I think it's called that, but anyway, we talk about some of the awful work culture that Rockstar has. To say nothing of how it treats press, and how it expects uncritical unwaivering praise. And, in general, Rockstar thinks it can just get away with things like issuing a really really shitty set of remasters, or have a really really shitty bespoke game launcher. And, I think it's, it's nice, it's just nice to see Rockstar get a well deserved and long overdue kick up the arse. I don't bare grudges. That's such a lie. Anyway, that'll do, I guess. Thank God for Me. Didn't drop it even once.
[Rude ralph sounds]
Obnoxious.
