The rain effects, particularly, are so ugly that they obscure your view you’d better hope it’s not raining if your mission involves seeing where you’re going. There has, objectively, been a graphical upgrade to these games, in that they don’t look as foggy and fuzzy as they did – but honestly, I’m not sure I would say that they look better than previous re-releases. I could hardly make out characters’ faces, or pick out coloured blips on the map, or see purple graffiti tags on red brick. In San Andreas, the colour balancing is so bad that in order to see what’s going on under fictional California’s sunset skies, I had to turn the contrast down as far as it would go. I ran through collectibles that I could not pick up. Within a couple of hours of starting GTA III – the oldest and least interesting of these three games, an astonishing step forward for gaming in 2001 that feels a little sterile now – I had reached a mission that I couldn’t complete, because the character I was chasing kept falling through the world. But why are we putting up with it now, and paying for it? These remasters feel less stable than the PlayStation 2 originals. Graphical glitches, irritating controls and random crashes were, to be fair, all part of gaming in the 00s, before the days of online patches that allowed developers to fix things bit by bit. Sign up for Pushing Buttons, our weekly guide to what’s going on in video games.

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