10 Best GTA Games - Ranked

1. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

You can break into a garage in Portland and make off with a Banshee, base-jump off Mt. Chiliad. You can take part in one of the most intense bank heists ever seen or fly a tiny plane into the back of an in-flight cargo plane.

You can do all these things, and it won't compare to the career-best heights that embody and reinvigorate every aspect of GTA: Vice City.

It's the pitch-perfect tone that knows just how much to poke and prod at 80s American ephemera. It's the cast of celebrity cameos having fun with some fantastically OTT characters. It's being given a chainsaw and then chasing down a handful of goons who betrayed your employer.

It's the finest soundtrack in gaming history.

It's the sun-kissed beach as your shirt billows in the wind and you tear down the strip, pursuing the next part of a story you actually want to see through.

What Rockstar tapped into when setting GTA in the 80s, was the perfect match of an already extravagant game, with a time period that in itself, was cooked and glazed in excess. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more masturbatory decade - where bright primary colours, perms and leather pants were deemed cool - and make it more loveable. Yet, they found a way through both indulgence, commentary and gameplay in equal measure.

Vice City is funny, biting, enjoyable mechanically and perfectly-sized when it comes to how its missions and content is spread across the map. Taken as a whole, it is the best Grand Theft Auto so far.