10 Grand Theft Auto Vice City Remastered Memes That Are Too Funny

Critics and fans alike have not been kind to the new release of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition. But a lot of jokes and insults hurled at Rockstar and Grove Street Games, who developed the game, are very much deserved.

The legacy of the PlayStation 2 trilogy, and specifically Vice City, has been tarnished with the release, as they were once boundary-pushing games, but are now broken with off-putting designs of classic characters. But though the game might have been bitterly disappointing to many, at least there’s enjoyment to be had from the memes making fun of it.

The Taste Of Heat

It seems like Grove Street Games had a problem transcribing a lot of the in-game text. This is just one of the examples, but it’s one of the funniest. One fan uses the King of the Hill meme to point out how the developer accidentally ruined a great Vice City joke. A hot dog stand, Shaft, has the slogan, “the taste of a real man’s meat,” but the developer mistakenly changed it to “heat.”

Even if the M does look like an H, the word “meat” is the whole punchline of the joke, but the humor must have been lost on the developer. For a gaming company named after a famous location in the GTA series, fans would think they’d be more in touch with that typical Rockstar comedy.

Never Pre-Order Games

One fan created a “why you shouldn’t have pre-ordered a game” starter pack. And all of the games in the pack had infamous releases. No Man’s Sky wasn’t the game that was promised, Marvel’s Avengers didn’t live up to the hype, and Cyberpunk 2077 still has so many glitches so long after its release.

Unfortunately, The Definitive Edition is part of that starter pack, and deservedly so, as most of those who pre-ordered the game for the full price of $60 are completely disappointed. And what’s worse is that the original versions of the game are no longer for sale.

Sims-Like Character Designs

One of the many things that have been criticized to no end about the game, the character models are easily the most insulting to longtime fans of the series. The models look like they have been taken straight out of The Sims, which doesn’t exactly match the other graphics of the game or even the gameplay.

This fan has used the new character models of Vice City to attempt to envision how a Grove Street Games remaster of Grand Theft Auto V would look. Though they did such a great job of making their Sims counterparts, it’s a nightmarish vision of one of the most envelope-pushing games of all time.

The Graphics Comparison

There is a no better analogy for the way Grove Street Games massacred Vice City than the classic The Ecce Homo meme. Being one of the most famous paintings in Catholic art, a botched restoration attempt made headlines across the world for how terrible it was.

A fan makes the brilliant comparison between the The Ecco Homo restoration and the Vice City restoration, and the remastered video game is nothing but a pale imitation of the original. When comparing the two, the user specifically refers to the graphics, which are somehow worse than the 18-year-old original. The graphics were why Vice City deserved a remaster, but not like this.

Ruining The PS2 Trilogy

There are so many theories about the upcoming GTA 6, but it hardly seems like Rockstar is in any rush, as they have spent the last god knows how long working with Grove Street Games for The Definitive Edition. On top of that, they’re also working with Facebook to create a virtual reality version of San Andreas.

But after The Definitive Edition, that VR version is cause for concern, and one fan expertly uses the Simpsons meme to put across their feelings. Though it wasn’t Rockstar who developed the remastered versions, they still let Grove Street Games ruin three of the best games in the series.

The Hit & Run Similarities

Using The Simpsons to make fun of the new trilogy seems popular among fans of the game, as another player has composited Homer Simpson and Tommy Vercetti into one person. But this isn’t for no reason whatsoever.

As the game has been critically scathed due to the new character models, many gamers have compared the textureless faces to that of a beloved Simpsons game, The Simpsons: Hit & Run. As the player has given Tommy the two strands of hair and a glazed donut, there’s ironically more attention to detail in this joke than there is in the game.

The Modders Did A Better Job

Vice City and the other two games didn’t just need more time in the oven, it needed another year of full-time development at least. But this meme puts it perfectly, as the modders have come to the rescue in a way that Grove Street Games never could. One of the biggest problems with The Definitive Edition is that it has removed the fog from the city.

The fog masked the fact that the city is pretty small and doesn’t look great when viewed from a height. But thankfully, modders came to the rescue and re-added the fog to the game. They’ve also been able to remove the rain, which has been ridiculed to no end. Modders are more reliable than developers lately, as modding is one of the ways GTA V has improved for the better since its release.

Even Rockstar’s Logo Is Wrong

It’s bewildering that Grove Street Games pays so little attention to detail that they can’t even get Rockstar’s logo right. One of the few great additions to Vice City that wasn’t in the original is a giant pool in the shape of Rockstar’s logo.

It’s a creative use of the iconic R design, but oddly enough, on the minimap in the game, the logo is completely wrong. The actual logo has four points on the star, but on the map, there are five points. It looks as much like an upturned maple leaf as it does the Rockstar logo.

Rockstar’s Neglection Of Vice City Stories

Back in the days of the PlayStation 2, and even the PlayStation 3, Rockstar was creating so much that the bonus content was full games. Liberty City had Liberty City Stories, and Grand Theft Auto IV had both Chinatown Wars and The Ballad of Gay Tony.

But one of the best of them all was Vice City Stories, which took place in Vice City but was 20 hours worth of new material. The meme points out just how much Rockstar has neglected the game, even though the 2006 game has some of the series’ best material.

Take Two’s Stock Drop

With the release of The Definitive Edition, Rockstar found out what it was like to lose for the first time ever. The game was critically panned, and as it stands, it has an abysmal user score of 0.9 on Metacritic. It was so broken that even the PC version of the game was even briefly pulled from shelves and online markets.

This much of a messy release is hardly going to increase the stock price of Take Two. But that much of a drastic dip wasn’t to be expected either. The stock price plummeted over six percent after the game’s release, and one fan uses a Joker meme to laugh in the company’s face.