Oh man the nostalgia. I only played The Getaway once or twice at a friends place and I loved it. In some ways it was the technically superior game, more dark and griddy, and a big selling point was the highly "photorealistic" graphics with real life modern cars and lack of HUD.

That's one of the reasons I liked it so much, VC (and GTA3 too mostly) had pretty "weird" cars I couldn't relate to, all sorts of muscle cars, pimpmobiles, banshees etc , while The Getaway had modern day to day traffic and hit closer to home for me, but despite that the GTA series stayed my favorite overall.

It's a little tragic that now I can emulate it but time has caught up to it and I can't enjoy it as much as I would have back then.