Check out Exodos for this type of thing. It's built on launchbox (an emulator front end) and just gives a huge listing of every game you might ever want to play. Those games aren't all installed (assuming you didn't do the full 500GB+ install) but you click the game and it quickly downloads, installs into dosbox and jumps into the game (takes seconds since these are old games).
I always feel old when I read Reddit comments by people who say they feel old because they remember when GTA III came out. I played a lot of GTA I and II in the late 90s/early 00s. Admittedly GTA I felt a bit dated at the time but GTA II was great. The top-down view didn't age well I guess but made it feel quite distinctive. I feel like in a lot of people's minds the series only really began at III.
I'm old (ish?), was an avid gamer and grew up on DOS, playing games like GORILLA.BAS, Alley Cat, Dangerous Dave etc. Yet somehow I never played GTA I and II. I did hear about them but none of my friends played it, no one I knew had it in fact, so was never compelled to try it.
GTA III was my first GTA game so for me and my mates, that's when the series began. Not really sure why I and II were so low-key where I lived.
I remember the mission in GTAII where you had to first steal and then drive a bus to collect people. You bring the people to some sausage factory where you see how they are driven onto a conveyor belt. Then you have to drive a hot dog car to sell it before the mission is finished.
same here, but didn't like it already at that time, never played 3D versions, GTA 1 was extremely outdated already at time of release in 1997, by that time I was already playing Screamer 2 with pretty great 3D graphics or Need for Speed, heck in 1997 they already released NFS2 (though I least liked this release and take NFS1 or NFS3 any time over NFS2)
was always more UFO: Enemy Unknown, Sim City (2000) or Transport Tycoon guy
Well, I remember watching Asteroids as a kid on the coffee place my parents used to hang around, latter replaced by Kung-Fu Master, and to see DYI build your own computer before the Speccy became widspread, guess how old I feel.
It ended with the new GTA, with the new one obviously being III ;)
I spent so much time playing I and especially II, then was very disappointed with III.
GTA II also had one of my favorite bugs (that kinda required cheating): As long as you were throwing grenades, you wouldn’t move on the z-axis. So if you had unlimited grenades (or I guess just a lot of them without cheating), you could fly from one skyscraper to where ever else as long as you kept throwing those grenades. Just needed to remember to be on something as high when you stop throwing, or you’d still splat :D
IIRC you didn't even have to throw them? I think if you tapped the button quickly enough you would initiate the throwing motion but not actually throw the grenade, and that would be enough to keep you in the air.
GTAII was really weird for me, it ran at 0.5x speed. Later realised it wasn't any sort of GPU limitation but was due to some quirk with how it was tied to CPU. I had an off-brand CPU (a Transmeta if I recall) running on an old Mc Donalds workstation ripped out of an old office when they upgraded. It 'ran' just very, very weirdly. It wasn't until I saw a friend playing it on their computer that I realised that it wasn't in fact supposed to work like that!
I loved GTA II and spent hours playing it when I was about 14 or so. I don't recall keeping up with III's development at all and I remember seeing it popup on Kazaa one day, in an exe not much over 100mb. I was expecting another top down addition to the series and my mind was blown. Not only that it was this massive 3d game, but that someone had managed to compress it all down to such a small package.
I'm sure it was officially re-released for modern (of the day) PCs before this? I think I've still got it on discs somewhere, a set of the first trilogy, Vice City, and maybe San Andreas.
I played a lot of GTA1 and a bit of 2 when it came out. I think we used to play it at LAN parties my friends and I had as well. For me that’s where it stopped and I never clicked with GTA3 and onwards!
I remember when there was a kid who kept installing this and the Chex doom on the school pcs in 7th grade. GTA was pretty controversial as a game even though it is incredibly tame by today’s standards. I’m pretty sure they never caught him.
Opened the game, picked a car and immediately went over the Hare Krishnas. Fucking classic, I remember playing this game at school somehow, then played GTA2 until my eyes bled, amazing games.
That it's geo blocked in the UK, where the IP of the games originates makes me feel that's illegal even though no modern release is legitimately available.
An interesting fact about the early GTA games is that they owe their success to a bug. The cop cars were supposed to behave nicely like in every other game, but due to a bug in pathfinding they just drive straight into the players car. So at least to some extend the whole billion dollar franchise owes its success to a bug:
https://medium.com/@bdunn313/the-psycho-cop-bug-de9121335cf9
I used to play GTA on my 133 mhz Pentium, running windows 95. I distinctly remember the game running smooth and at a reasonably high resolution! My memory must have betrayed me because playing this now is hard to stomach. I just can't get over the jaggy motion of the hardlocked framerate (especially while driving at high speeds).
A core memory for me is playing GTA on my PC when my brother was home from one of his many stints in jail. He looked at me playing for a minute, asked what it was about, and then commented "whatever happened to super mario?".
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 64.3 ms ] threadGTA III was my first GTA game so for me and my mates, that's when the series began. Not really sure why I and II were so low-key where I lived.
And while Vice City will always be my favorite, looking back, I think the originals were better and I had more fun. But maybe I was just younger ...
was always more UFO: Enemy Unknown, Sim City (2000) or Transport Tycoon guy
but I vividly remember playing my first PC game in father's work on weekends - Crystal Caves https://www.playdosgames.com/play/crystal-caves
It ended with the new GTA, with the new one obviously being III ;) I spent so much time playing I and especially II, then was very disappointed with III.
GTA II also had one of my favorite bugs (that kinda required cheating): As long as you were throwing grenades, you wouldn’t move on the z-axis. So if you had unlimited grenades (or I guess just a lot of them without cheating), you could fly from one skyscraper to where ever else as long as you kept throwing those grenades. Just needed to remember to be on something as high when you stop throwing, or you’d still splat :D
Will give this a try.
Here is to hoping that Rockstar Games brings these two classics back.
https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto-1997/