The remastered Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was added to Game Pass today, so I downloaded it to see how things have held up.

I originally played this game on PC (I still have the discs, somewhere) and had a pretty good time with it - until I hit a few missions where the terrible controls were too much to overcome, and I quit. I also gave the Xbox 360 version a try, but that was a port of the mobile version, so it was even worse.

I thought the new remastered versions were built from the ground up, or at least ported to a new game engine - Unreal? - but so much of the original jankiness remains, I have doubts. Mercifully, the controls do feel better though.

I'm not a huge fan of the remastering that Rockstar has done here, however. I feel like this could've been done better with less high-resolution texturing and more work on the underlying 3D assets.

The interior of CJ's house looks like something a modder would've created in the earlier days of game mods, where a high resolution texture pack was about the most anyone could do.

The models of the characters are also weird looking. The original models had to be styled a certain way to make up for their lack of fidelity, and so had a reason for looking more like caricatures. This remastered version adds a level or two of smooth subdivisions on top of stupidly high-resolution textures, and the result is extremely off-putting. It felt almost offensive to me on first viewing.

The lighting is also kind of bad. It feels like nobody tested these games.

I know there's more to it than that, and I don't mean to shit on the work of the people who created these games, but I'm glad I didn't impulse buy the trilogy right when they announced it. I'm hoping some work might be done to iron out the worse parts so that by the time I get around to playing these games again, they might actually be worth it.