Funnily enough that’s actually why it is my favourite GTA game (I haven’t played 5 and I won’t play 6), although nostalgia probably plays a big role too.
I also liked that it had a cold, clinical feel compared to the later GTAs. You are in “Anywhere City” and it feels like society has entered a permanent state of decline.
I also think the relatively lite cyberpunk and retro-futuristic elements added a bit of flair to the concept.
That being said, I can understand why they will never make a game like GTA2 again; bad market fit and the futurism of GTA2 is in many ways a product of the 90s/early 2000s.
Yeah, I don’t get it either, why am I supposed to connect with the city? I’m playing a violent criminal in a goofy, arcade-y top-down action game. Setting was perfect.
What I absolutely couldn’t connect with is GTA 5: The mechanics are stale, the game doesn’t respect my time and Michael and especially Trevor are just nasty, unpleasant pieces of shit. Zero enthusiasm for GTA 6 from me, it’s just going to have all the same flaws as any GTA since 3 and will surely be more tailored towards online money extraction schemes.
Meanwhile Cyberpunk 2077, with a somewhat similar dystopian setting, has become my favorite game in large parts because of the characters.
gta2 is still my favourite of the series. the first game was so damn janky that i could barely play it but the second one is smooth as butter, and with the artstyle they chose it looks really unique.
You know a game is good when you log many hours playing the demo.
I found a crack online that removed the two minute time -limit and just explored the map. GTA2’s demo has zero mission, it’s just the entire first map with a number of things missing or changed. Still a lot of fun to just cruise around and blow stuff up.
GTA2 was good, it’s just games journalists obsessed with a “3D full immersion VR future”, that they felt threatened by every 2D games made once the first Voodoo cards left the factories. The reviews were not about the games, but endless whining about they losing their “fully realistic games” (past Medal of Honor, they usually envisioned a perfect recreation of Battle of Normandy) because a man made a theme park game with accurate roller coaster physics in assembly.
The 3D push was quite similar to the current AI push, but more successful. Imagine if Microsoft blocked games being released onto XBox if they don’t have a certain amount of AI generated assets and/or “live generated content”.
GTA 2 didn’t connect not because it looked slightly different than GTA 1. This was the “transition to 3D” era and people gravitated towards such games, like Driver.
A shame because it was nice when Chinatown Wars came around some years down the road. A nice trip back to 2D, with some modernization.
I recently picked up cw again and it feels like the best aged GTA in the series
GTA2 was the best GTA.
As a high school student I installed a pirated copy on the school network so my friend and I could play it in class. This was at a small town school where the IT specialist was usually too busy being a teacher and track coach to pay attention to what students were able to do on school computers. They removed the ability for student accounts to install software eventually, but I never got punished for what I did.
Oh I loved the days of circumventing early school IT systems. I remember we discovered that we could right click on something in the start menu and get into a shared network folder, we put Halo in it and basically the whole class played matches together but alt-tabbed when a teacher came by.
It’s a joke how easy some of those were to bypass. I still remember when the lab installed some nanny cam app so they could make sure kids weren’t playing games or looking at shit they shouldn’t. The app was so bad that I could just open task manager and kill the nanny cam software.
The librarians loved me, so I don’t think they cared enough to say anything, even when they went after kids near me doing similar shit.
Haha, that’s pretty shit level software. Usually it took a little bit more effort than that to just kill it in task manager.
Yeah… Even back then I was amazed at how little effort it took to bypass. But that was in the early 00s, and basic troubleshooting like opening task manager was considered black magic (just like opening a terminal is today to most people)
I remember figuring out how to make my account an admin account in like Windows 2k through some obscure setting that was still available. We stared with weird flash games in the library, and eventually played unreal tournament.
Was that the sticky keys trick? That was a fun one to use to elevate
No. What the heck? You can/could have used sticky keys to elevate account access??? What?
Yeah, so back in the day, you could replace the accessibility executable that launches when you hit shift 5 times to enable sticky keys, and is launched as a privileged process. Rename it and copy cmd to the old exe name, hit shift 5 times and you now have an admin console.
Still works today, you just have to do it offline if you’re not an admin.
One of my friends pointed out to the teacher that they shouldn’t store the grades on a shared location the students could access and got expelled. I’ll stick to Oregon Trail.
I started with GTA2, but Vice City is the best GTA.
Are you me? I 100% agree.
Three weeks into the future. One teeming city. Seven streets gangs. Unlimited criminal opportunity
-gta2 manual
Funami
FM
fasa dan sound
Weird article. GTA2 came out in 1999. That’s a long time ago. I doubt most of that team still works there. The idea that they had an issue making it somehow meaning that, over two decades later, the same issues will remain is an odd conclusion.
It’s just a weird comment, I get what he’s saying back then, but Saints Row had multiple games come out in pseudo-futuristic setting that were batshit crazy and fun to play, so obviously it can be done.
Lets be honest, we won’t see a futuristic GTA at this point because shark cards are a money-printing machine and Take Two will never approve anything like that because it would be too risky.
I liked GTA2. Probably because it was the only one I played. I would love to play it today, but the tank controls are too horrible. Does anybody know of an analogue controller mod or something like that?
You could try this mouse support mod: https://github.com/h0x91b/gta2-mouse
I haven’t tried it myself, so I have no idea how good it is
Or this twin stick mod: https://gtamp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1150
I played the hell out of GTA 2, had a 3 disk box containing 1 2 and London. And only now I’m bring told it was set in the future!
Yeah I thought it was just a mismatch of all different kinds. Like the 20s and 30s gangster cars and then random car styles from other eras
The London one was awesome!
Am I the only one who never realized it was supposed to be a futuristic city? To be honest my English wasn’t that good at the time I played it, but that information never clicked with me.
One of the districts in GTA2 is Funabashi, the name of a city to the west of Tokyo.
If you want to make a GTA set in the “future” that still resonates with people, set it somewhere in Japan.
Considering how often police chases and gang activity occur there, despite Japan’s extremely low crime rate, why not use Nagoya?
If your game relies heavily on cultural details, you probably shouldn’t make something outside of the culture you know.
Rockstar is a British company making games about US culture.
Rockstar is American, based in NYC. Their subsidiary Rockstar North does most of the GTA games and is based in Scotland.
Rockstar North are the studio that evolved out of DMA design, and the studio was responsible for the series since GTA 1. Every game has been developed in its majority in ediburgh.
It’s not the rest of the staff’s fault that the houser brothers moved to the states.
RDR was made by Rockstar San Diego.
Removed by mod
The guy they’re interviewing seems so detached from reality, the article links to another with more from the same guy, he’s quoted saying that “it doesn’t make sense to go to some left field location for novelty” specifically in regards to Tokyo, then goes on to say “it’s too easy to do what we know again” which sounds negative? But then follows that up with “nobody is[…]not going to play gta 6 because it’s in vice city”
It’s a really odd take tbh.
police chases and gang activity
Japan’s extremely low crime rate
How does this mix?
I’ll add to the chorus here saying I really liked GTA2. I dunno where he got the idea that gamers disliked it
We probably won’t see a GTA doing it anyway because Watch Dogs, Crackdown and Cyberpunk are already basically that.
People seem to like cyberpunk 2077 so maybe people still had hope for humanity when gta2 came out, it was just before its time.
And that’s the real reason why they won’t make GTA in the future soon. That part of the market is already taken by CD Projekt, and Cyberpunk 2077 was not a clear success, so other CEOs won’t force their teams to fight for that market. Too much trouble, too much risk.
Copy what already worked, add a minimum innovation and maximum microtransactions and repeat until money stops flowing.
I believe Cyberpunk 2077 was a success. 35 million units and $750+ M revenue.
I agree it was a success, but do you remember its launch? Big studios only copy formulas that guarantee win, and in this case even CD Projekt, studio beloved by gamers, initially struggled to turn it into success (And yes, I know I might be too cynical here, Rockstar still seems to be more focused on making good games than most big studios nowadays)
Just please put the random string of Elvis impersonators trolling the streets back in there
