I’m always wary when Video Game Twitter gang-piles a game for having performance issues. The worship of 1080/60/4K/120 is quite clearly a post-HD games hardware cargo cult astroturfed by corporations with the sole intention of shifting more consoles and cards, and it figures that Gamers would be easy marks for digital brainwashing. In short, counting frames and pixels is antithetical to what I think a good video game is really all about - so when people first started doing drive-by hits on The Definitive Edition, I was wary. Pick any video game from the last 20 years, and you can probably find a warped model, a clipped piece of geometry, a crunchy bit of audio; put these isolated incidents through Twitter’s retweeting megaphone, and any minor defect can look like a serious LMAOing “how did lazy devs allow this 😂” problem.

Ten minutes into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - The Definitive Edition, I had already seen Samuel L. Jackson’s t-shirt turn pink for no reason in the very first cutscene; a Ballas car flew away during a bike chase; Ryder cycled into a cutscene’s frame with a weird fucked-up William Birkin arm; and, for the first time ever, got to see what the Xbox Series crash-to-desktop screen looks like! Oh well, I figured - at least I can fall back on my old high school pastime of spawning a Hydra to fly around and listen to some talk radio.

This was, of course, the worst thing I could have done. With no in-game fog or depth-of-field, hitting cruising altitude dips the game to a horrific stuttering panorama of San Andreas and its entire surrounding area, all at once - and it looks like crayola total shit! Oops! Oh well, I figured - at least I can still listen to the radio while checking this shit out. This was, of course, not possible at all - the Hydra jet’s jets droned over the radio at a volume that rendered it unlistenable. “Why not dip the SFX and boost the music volume??” is the question you’re about to ask, right? Well, seems the jet engines don’t respond to the ‘sound effect’ slider. Man, oh man! That is the LAST thing we wanted to happen!!! After only 40 minutes, I had been thoroughly humbled by The Gamer Cult…

I may have been unlucky here - but every single person I know who has played this so far has been assaulted by glitches, gremlins, bugs, defects, crashes and other technical problems, regardless of chosen platform. I got kinda lucky by only trying this out on GamePass, but I really feel for people who dropped a full £50 on the trilogy… Unacceptable, but I’m glad Rockstar stepped up and gave us this year’s Cyberpunk 2077 drama.