I heard at the very least that the DE of San Andreas has been substantially improved.
I played through the Defective Editions a few months ago, out of laziness and wanting to get the cheevos. At best, I'd say that SA does seem to be the easiest to momentarily forget you were playing the DE - except for basically any cutscene, where for some fucked up retard reason the jeets at Grove Street Games/Rockstar changed all the NPC models into freakish mutants. Same for the other two.
For me VC felt the least like the original. In adition to the fucked up mutant weirdo people the AI upscaled textures are immediately obvious and you don't have to be too close to them to tell that something ain't right. The color of Vice City is all wrong, it's hard to put into words but it simply doesn't look right. Cars are entirely too shiny as well. They also really fucked up the flight controls, you can no longer spin helicopters on their axis (essentially no rudder, basically), and you can no longer roll the seaplane, you ONLY have rudder. You had those controls in the original, and they remained unmolested in SA DE, but here? lol suffer saar. Apparently the controls were OK when the DE first came out so someone had to fuck something up here in one of the updates.
3 is probably second to SA in being able to briefly forget you're playing the jeetified version (seriously, check the credits on the DE versions, as well as RDR2, a good third or so, maybe more, are jeet names), but the AI upscaled textures are also screamingly obvious. Among other faults, originally the NPC's in 3 had a distinctive stylized look to them, they changed them all to VC/SA style.
They did all work out of the box so to speak, that much I can say about them in a positive manner, although if you read reviews that seems to differ for some others.
These games made Rockstar what they are and they deserved, so, so much better. Rockstar should really be ashamed of themselves for such a poor showing.
