So I'm replaying through all of the 3D GTAs, and for the first one, this game holds up incredibly well. The characters, the sound track, the sense of world is all great...

except for the absolutely insane vehicle physics. Don't get me wrong the driving is still pretty fun as well. Cars all handle differently with an appropriate sense of speed or ruggedness, but one thing is common with all of them; you can flip any car all the time with almost zero effort.

Get up to a little speed, hold L or R, and over you go. Tiny sedan to fucking fire truck, it's all the same. I think it may have had something to do with jumps and getting money for stunts being a part of the game, so they had to make every car real damn squirley to make all that possible.

It's not at all game breaking, maybe a tad annoying, but mostly just a great time capsule of crazy open world driving, once some of the best, now mostly hilarious.

Now try it on iPhone!

I recently revisited the older games after finishing Bully for the first time (yeah, I'm always behind) and I think the GTA III series of games really do hold up well. GTA III still feels a lot more in touch with the arcade style roots of GTA 1 and 2. From the way the missions play out to the vehicle handling. It's so much faster paced than what I remembered and the cars can get a bit loosie-goosie, so you gotta rethink how you approach the driving. This was especially confusing to me at first since I also recently started GTA IV (I'm so hip to all the cool new games the kids are playing.)

Vice City's driving doesn't feel quite as squirrely as GTA III's, but the arcadeyness of the whole experience is still there. I don't think it was until San Andreas that cars started feeling a little more weighty and required a bit more finesse rather than flat out speed and controlling that speed.

That said, I really liked how GTA III felt sitting down with it for about an hour or so all these years later. It's much different from what Rockstar does today, at least in terms of feeling a lot more arcade-like and prone to more chaos.

"Chaos" is the perfect word! When GTA III came out there were tons of games with vastly more "solid" car physics, but that chaotic sense of constantly being on the verge of getting up on two wheels does really add a lot.

It's especially interesting considering how much driving specific games now focus on the simulation and reality side of things. Even in GTA V, Franklin's special ability functions to take some of the chaos out of driving. I'd love to see more modern attempts at varying driving controls and physics to really change up the general gameplay experience.