I know what you mean and I felt the same way about the PS2-era games – they felt pretty awkward to me. I enjoyed GTA4 and 5, but in different ways from the original top-down games – I suppose in a world where open sandboxes are commonplace, they stand out less than they used to. In the late 90s, being dumped in a city and left to cause havoc was a real novelty 🙂
This will sound a bit “my uncle works at Nintendo”-ish, but an old school friend works with Rockstar now and has a credit in Grand Theft Auto 5, he’s one of the people who wrote the tools for graphics/texture artists and modellers to import their stuff into the game world. We’re very proud of him 🙂
