What's Your Favorite Grand Theft Auto Game?

[Magmavision2000]

For me, it's a toss-up between GTA 2, Vice City, and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Those three, in my opinion, mix story progression and accessibility the best.

[Tanooki]

I'm between GTA3 with its godfather vibe and the for the love of miami vice Vice City.  They're hard to choose between, but also in all fairness I've had little love for the franchise outside of that.  The top view older ones were a bit rough but not bad, but the post VC stuff I've hated a bit more by release.  More bloated, thugging, more asinine stuff like getting fat to having assholes texting/calling all the time nagging and cops who kill if you bump into them on accident stuff.  THe PSP spinoffs of 3 and VC were great too, and also the GTA3 lite-ish game on GBA was fantastic as well.

[+GoldenWheels]

I actually busted out Vice City and my backwards compatible PS3 recently, just so I could play vigilante missions (something I spent many hours doing bitd).  Well I am doing missions to open up the islands...had forgotten how great this damn game is.

 

Love San Andreas too, and the latest one. But man, Vice City...that's the one. REMAKE IT!!!!

[+wongojack]

Red Dead Redemption

[Lord Mushroom]

I have only played the first one, so it has to be that one. I am not a big fan of 3rd person games, so it might have been the favourite even if I had played the other ones as well.

[derFunkenstein]

Vice City and GTA V are a toss-up. After that come GTA IV (including episodes) and San Andreas. That's not an insult to any of them, because they're all amazing. 

 

The top-down games never did it for me. I played GTA on the PS1 and GTA2 on the Dreamcast, never really got it. And then III came out and each iteration was a masterpiece. 

Edited May 14, 2020 by derFunkenstein

[jhd]

 

I have all of the PlayStation and PS 2 games (including the London expansion pack for GTA 2), but I only really spent much time with GTA 3. Even then, I spent less time actually pursuing the plot then just wrecking havoc across the city. The sniper rifle is fun! ?

 

I really want to spend some quality time with Vice City and San Andreas, but my PS 2 is having disk-read errors that I need to attend to first. 

[Shawn]

Gay Tony & 5.

[Mikebloke]

Its strange, pre-3 I'd have said GTA2, I had a love for it for quite awhile. The next one was Vice City, which was also the first (and only!) game I bought a console (brand new!) for.

 

I do like San Andreas but I found out the hard way when I tried to escape PC version jittering that the PS2 version is in mono sound and is awful! A more powerful PC seemed to help a little but it still suffers from some issues.

 

I was completely put off by IV, The immigrant-can-only-swear-in-english stereotype was too strong, the background story of the brothers is hinted at but never really explored meant they never got any serious character development, which is a shame because it seemed like it was ripe to create that scenario. The biker dlc was ok, but way too short, think it was like an hour or two? Then you had ballad of Gay Tony, wow! This is a DLC, this saved IV for me and it could well have been a full blown game in its own right.

 

I've tried to play V, admittedly only on a 360, and it played well enough it wasn't like it was slow or anything, but I just got... bored. Maybe I've played too many games of the series now but something about it just doesn't catch my attention at all. I've had no urge to buy it on sale on other platforms.

[Cebus Capucinis]

GTA: London 1969 for sure. Vice City has the best gameplay but driving around in a Mini blasting old school reggae is just awesome!

[BassGuitari]

Toss-up between GTA2 and GTA3.

 

When I was in junior high one of my friends got the first GTA around the time it came out (to remarkably little fanfare that I can remember, which is funny considering how big the franchise has gotten--it was definitely a sleeper title); he showed it to me after school one day and my impression was that it was fun enough, but pretty rough around the edges. GTA2 essentially refined and expanded the concept into (IMO) a much more satisfying gameplay experience overall. I also find the future/cyberpunk setting the most interesting of all the GTA games as well.

 

GTA3 was one of those watershed moments in gaming for me. Outside of RPG-type stuff, I don't think I'd ever played something so immersive before...and GTA3 went even beyond that. Just the sheer amount to stuff there was to see and do in that game was mind-blowing.

 

It was also kind of crazy seeing the leap from GTA2 to GTA3, seeing this sort of a sleeper franchise suddenly and inexplicably turn into a world-beater. It was like when I heard there was going to be a 3D Duke Nukem game after I had played the shareware episodes of the original Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 2 (which as far as I could tell were modestly successful in the PC ecosphere but hardly blockbusters), and seeing the game and thinking, "Little ole' Duke is all grown up, and he's gone Hollywood!" ?