Does anyone prefer the older GTA games(3,Vice City,San Andreas) to the newer ones

The new games are probably better gameplay wise but I've never had as much fun with them as I did vice city. Maybe it's more that they all kinda give a similar experience

Haven't played 5 yet, waiting on PC version, but between GTA4 and those you listed, yes, San Andreas if my favorite hands down.

Hell, I even had more fun playing GTA2 than I did with 4.

I really enjoyed the old GTA games when they were out but the new ones have VASTLY better gameplay. Not even close. Even for the time. I love how GTA V handles shooting and driving (compared to real driving games and shooters) where if you did that type of comparison in the past, GTA games were pretty shit.

4 suffered from taking itself too seriously. Not as big of an issue in gta 5

Certainly. IV and V Rockstar takes ahold of the reins too much for cinematic purposes. They've gone away a bit from the heart of what I liked so much about 3 through San Andreas. Used to be you had many many different ways you could approach a mission because there were very few walls and controls placed around it to ensure it played out in a specific way. I want the kind of GTA where I can roll in with a tank or fly in with a helicopter and blow the crap out of an entire mission and all of its scripting just because I can.

Too many missions now where it is; proceed to checkpoint (cinematic), proceed to next checkpoint (cinematic), play mini game (cinematic), DIE, restart at last checkpoint instead of spawning at nearest hospital. I want shorter more open missions and no mid mission checkpoints.

Vice City holds a special place in my heart just because it's so nostalgic for me. The newer games are better without a doubt, but I'll never forget the times when my brother and I would take turns going on a damn rampage through the city, or when we tried to get through the story together.

I completely agree. Big fan of 3 and Vice City (I played them back in the day) but I could never finish San Andreas and it's probably because I ended up playing it many years after the fact and I feel that those games have not aged very well.

The only GTA games I enjoyed unreservedly are the first one, San Andreas, and GTA5. I was so into the cinematic, third person open world of GTA3. It was the ideal next step from something like Driver 2. But that game handles like shit and it's real stupid unfair at times. I feel almost similar about Vice City, but man, Vice City's aesthetic. San Andreas found a nice next step that I could stomach occasional obnoxiousness for the absolutely sprawling possibilities (for the time), fun characters and long, winding story.

4 had almost everything going for it except for obnoxious friends who won't let you just cruise and listen to beats. And then 5 does mostly everything I want. Everything has such a cinematic qualtiy to it, and you can change the nature of it depending on which neighborhood you're driving in at what time of day. I went for a drunken walk downtown until I got hit by a bus and got in a fist fight. Speeding down Great Ocean Highway in a sports car listening to Kauf's remix of Heart In the Pipes while the sun is just going down and painting everything orange and magenta and feeling 80s as fuck. Driving my hood ass four-door through Mirror Park during broad daylight, throwing up middle fingers. DUNE BUGGIES, HICK SMALL TOWNS, AMOEBAAAAAAA AMOEBAAAAAA.

Iliked the change in gta4 but find it really hard to replay it. I really enjoyed 5 had some cool things going for it, but man those first three games rocked. for me vice city is the best ofr the bunch played it about 6 times just love driving around causing mayhem while listening to the best music in a video game.

Saints Row is what should have happened after GTA San Andreas. I'm glad I get both worlds with the 2 companies making such great games.

For as much as I don't think the action of the newer games really holds up compared to proper action games, they certainly come much closer than the old ones. The mechanics of the PS2 era games are incredibly dated.

Vice City has the best physics (spec. bike physics) of any open world game that has ever been made and will be made

I really didnt like 4 for that reason.

Vastly. 4 was ass. Haven't played V yet. Here's hoping.

Man, am I officially one of the old guys if I remember the first two GTA games? Seems that usually people skip them and calls GTA3 the "first game". So sad, the old games are awesome.

Been a long time since I played any of the middle ones, but I still like the newest ones better. More polished, bigger worlds, better stories. Would probably play some HD remake of Vice City and San Andreas though. GTA3... not so much.

Vice City is still the best game in the series. San Andreas was awesome, but I think the tone of Vice City was just better. They nailed it. GTA 3 was the proof of concept, Vice City was the apex, and San Andreas was the bad-ass sequel. Also, Vice City had the best soundtrack of any game ever.

I was really bummed out by pretty much everything post-San Andreas. They just lost...something. It never did feel right. The whole time I was playing GTA IV or GTA V I was constantly going "well, if they just did this it would be so much better" - whenever they had a chance to do something really awesome they did the exact opposite. Comparing that to Saints Row IV which did everything - everything - right, it just felt like a bummer. I know that GTA and Saints Row have nothing in common anymore, but it's hard not to compare the dumb open-world crime game to the serious open-world crime game. I think my big problem with the newer games in the GTA series is that they took themselves way too seriously but I think a lot of that seriousness just fell flat on it's face. The stories had interesting starts, but by halfway through I just totally lost all interest and got bored.

Don't get me wrong, GTA IV and GTA V are good games in their own right, but compared to everything else out there the parts where it falls flat are glaringly obvious, I think in part due to other games doing those things better. Back when GTA 3 and Vice City came out you could overlook those things because there wasn't anything else like it, but these days... Rockstar had some stiff competition. They need to do that stuff better is they still want GTA to be relevant. Hence why we had all of the GTA V backlash. It's kinda weird because we all like it when we were playing it, but the more time we had to think about it the more we went "Mehh...Maybe that wasn't so great..."

In my opinion V isn't quite as bad as IV, but it still suffers from a lot of the problems that IV had. There are certain parts in V where you can kind of see the old-style GTA vs the new-style GTA start to happen, but for the most part they take a hard turn into the super-self serious. I think that game has a weird identity crisis going on. You can clearly tell that some of the writers wanted it to be dumb and fun, and the other writers wanted it to be super serious... There is kind of a weird disconnect there. Y'know it's not bad if you don't think about it that much, but the second you sit down and reflect on everything that happened it kind of unravels a bit, at least it did for me.

I like them all!

I liked the old ones better. For me that reaction is a product of the tone of the games and how I felt while playing them. The series has always succeeded in making me uncomfortable at certain points because all of the games in the series have had some form of satire going on. Sometimes that satire would hit a little close to home, hence my discomfort. For the most part, though, that discomfort never hampered my enjoyment of the games, largely because it never insisted on being in-your-face about stuff and there was enough over the top stupid humor to make up for it.

However, in GTA IV, it just felt like the series was starting to get aggressively mean spirited about things. I've never been able to play more than about four or five hours into that game because it is so insistent about telling you that "the American Dream is an empty lie and the entire nation is full of a bunch of fat, vapid individuals who would be better off dead. Now go fuck yourself." You can only take so much of that before you feel bad about yourself and want to turn the game off. Kind of turned me off to the series and I didn't play V as a result.

In the context of what was available at the time sure, i like 3 and Vice City better. San Andreas doesn't hold up as well. The story and characters and general vibe of the game became too ridiculous. That's why i never liked Saints Row much.

GTA V is an outstanding game that i still boot up every now and then to mess around with the world but it's not mindblowing like 3 was in 2001. No matter how good it could never have the same impact.

@lawgamer: Yeah they do get kind of mean spirited about that stuff. There's a big difference between biting satire and just being assholes. They definitely get well into the asshole category more than a few times in IV and V.

Might've just been timing, but playing Vice City non-stop for a whole summer is still one of the best gaming memories I have.

All the early 3D GTAs have aged terribly, Vice City a little less so because the '80s aesthetic is so well done in that game.

I agree IV is a bit of a narrative downer, but it's just a better game in my view. V is fantastic but it's a little too soon to tell in the grand scheme of things how it holds up.

In Vice City you could go from one end of downtown to the other and back by jumping a bike from roof to roof. We'll never see that kind of playful fun in a Rockstar game again. Instead we've got John Marston having trouble walking through a door because his walk needs to animate in a meaningful way.

The newer games don't have anything that controls as badly as this bloody mission in them, so that automatically makes them better in my book.

yep, vice city is hands down the best gta that ever was, and ever will be it seems...

No. They feel archaic and the presentation is too cheesy nowadays.

Vice City and 3 were amazing. I also really enjoyed San Andreas. More recent ones take themselves too serious.

GTA 3 and Vice City were a lot more impressive in their time than 4 or 5 were in theirs. GTA 3 was genre defining and Vice City refined on some of the control clunkiness of 3 while perfectly evoking the feeling of a coke fueled 1980s Miami. Conversely when 4 finally came out I found the missions to be pretty boring and also felt that a lot of the new additions such as the cellphone and internet cafes didn't amount to much more than distractions. The online was never fully fleshed out and the story is probably better than average but I feel like it gets a lot more credit than it deserves. All of these complaints apply to GTA V as well. Not to mention other sandbox games were just flat out doing everything better than GTA in my opinion. Sleeping Dogs may not have the same scope as either GTA game but I feel like it beats in almost every other regard.

I prefer the older ones for the simple reason it they retain the true sandbox feel. The newer games sacrifice the ability to wander off, grab a tank early doors and smash a few missions with it.

San Andreas was always king for me. That's part of the reason I can't wait to play V (the other part being it looked to strike a good balance between being serious and goofy open world fun).

GTA2 is probably my favourite after San Andreas.

It sure seemed like GTA V was a pretty large technical shift from GTA IV, and even more so for the games before that. Part of the awesome appeal of GTA, for me at least, was the totally stupid shit you could do. The ragdoll physics, the dumb shootouts you would get into, sending yourself flying across the map.

GTA V doesn't necessarily allow for all of that, at least not to the level of previous games. The newer games, while not necessarily being self-serious, don't allow you to do the super dumb shit that you used to be able to do in previous versions.

For that reason, I prefer the old ones for their timeless replay-ability and sandbox-y-ness, but the newer games (specifically GTA V) for their technical ability.

I liked GTA IV and V, but given the chance, I would take GTA III and Vice City over both of them any day of the week.

I think most people who prefer Saints Row to GTA 4/5 probably do.

That kind of exists in GTA:Online, in fact it mostly does. Those missions feel like a true throwback to III. Also, anyone claiming that Vice City was the best is clearly only looking at it from a place in time standpoint. The map was garbage in terms of verticality and variation. Oh boy, one big long drag to drive down, with almost no bumps! Ugh. San Andreas completely fixed that for me with the mountain ranges and countryside, and the new San Andreas state in V is gloriously landscaped. Mt. Chiliad is awesome, and the forests feel true to the nature of real woodsy areas.

I prefer IV to all of them.

Crazy, right?

Not really. I like them all more or less equally which is to say I like them all a lot.

I have no fun playing 4 and 5. GTA V feels like real chore and I remember loving spending time with the older ones.

San Andreas was far and away the most fun I had with a GTA game at the time. Well, until I got to the flying school and then fuck that shit was the opposite of fun. I didn't have a control pad for the PC at the time. Flying with keyboard & mouse was terrible. I ended up uploading my save to some GTA forum and some mad bastard played it for me. Which was wonderful. Ditto the fucking mission near the end with the jump jet on the aircraft carrier. Fuck anything involving flying in GTA 3 engine games, that was dire.

But as actual games, well, GTA 4 was a vast improvement gameplay wise and GTA 5 improved on that. I fucking adored GTA 5. I've already played through it twice. All the way through. I can't really comprehend people who don't get something from GTA 5 but digged previous games. It plays better, it still has fun characters, the only complaint is maybe that Rockstar's critique of consumer culture is played out. OK, no maybe about it, it really is worn thin. But if you like that kind of game I don't get what's not to love.

I'd love to be able to go back to Vice City or San Andreas but they are just super hard to play now. They have lots of things that I miss, like the goofy customisation overload on CJ, but on the flip side, GTA 5 handles wonderfully.

I like them all!

It's impossible to say because... nostalgia? I dunno. I have fond memories of the ps2 games, but they don't hold up well in any regard, especially 3 which barely even has a story to speak of. And neither 4 or 5 will hold up in the gameplay department (4 already shows its age). GTA is very much a product of the time its released and the series hasn't been innovative since 3 brought open world games to a 3d space.

With this knowledge I rank my favorite GTA games by their stories, and 4 easily has the best story out of them all.

For me gta vice city was unforgettable just cruisin round town with the 80s music great stuff.

Everything about gta 4 annoyed me the driving the shooting and the fuckin mobile phone going off every 2 seconds "hey nico its me your brother you want to hang out" ---no fuck off I'm busy killing hookers

but gta 1 at the time was fan-fuckin-tastic

As much as I love the GTA 3 trilogy, those games played like dog shit in their day. They've only gotten worse with age.

San Andreas will always be the best one.

I enjoyed the old gta games when they came out but I recently tried the 3rd game and found it annoying not having check points. So today I definitely prefer the new games.

I liked the first GTA, didn't like 2, thought 3 was sort of junky, and haven't played any of the rest.

Although it wasn't necessarily the best one Vice City was still my favorite one followed by GTA3

I feel like there are too many people who forget how just god awful the targeting was in III.