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Ahead of next month’s Grand Theft Auto VI trailer, three classic GTA games from the PlayStation 2 era are coming to Netflix’s mobile library in December. These might not be the versions fans actually want ported to more platforms, though, even if some visual improvements seem to have been made.
We first reported on Rockstar’s plans to remaster GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas for new consoles and mobile devices back in 2021. These remastered ports were finally released as Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition in November of that year on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. While select parts of them looked okay, the games were a mess, with new bugs, broken graphics, and other glitches. The issues were so bad that Rockstar Games did a very un-Rockstar thing and apologized to fans while offering them free copies of the original versions of the games on PC. And while the remastered GTA Trilogy did get some updates to fix its more egregious shortcomings, the games are still not fan favorites. That all being so, I’m not sure many people will be excited about these remasters making the leap to phones.
On November 29, Netflix announced that Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas—all released originally on the PS2 between 2001 and 2004—would be available on mobile phones starting on December 14. As with other Netflix-hosted games, you’ll need to be a Netflix subscriber to play these GTA ports on your iPhone or Android device.
Things look a bit different this time around…
Interestingly, comparing the screenshots of the new Netflix ports to the current console and PC versions of the GTA Trilogy reveals some changes have been made. I noticed this a lot in an early moment in GTA: Vice City. It seems as if the colors have been toned down a smidge and the overall image looks darker and more like the original PS2 version’s.
If you look carefully, you can still see the remastered Vice City Definitive Edition models and textures, so this is still (presumably) that version of the game.
But it seems someone has gone in and tweaked some visual settings—including the fog, based on other screenshots—to perhaps improve these new Netflix ports.
I’m intrigued by the changes, even if they are minor, as they seem to help the remastered versions of these beloved games look a bit more like Rockstar’s original open-world classics. So I might check these out once they arrive on mobile devices next month. I just have to remember how the hell you play Netflix games on a phone.
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