I’m not talking about Grand Theft Auto Online, either, which is, so far as I can make out, still a predictably shambolic mess after throwing its doors open to the public earlier this week. No, I’m talking about that peculiar joy you get from playing a game made for… well, play… with someone else.

To put this in some sort of context, allow me to explain. I played through Grand Theft Auto V and enjoyed it. I liked the characters, I found the story enjoyable and the gameplay entertaining enough to keep going after the credits rolled. Can’t ask for more, really.

Except this evening my good friend Sam came over and we played together. Sam and I used to play Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City together when we were at university, usually drunk. (We’d play Grand Theft Auto drunk, not we were usually drunk at university. Though we were drunk quite a lot at university.) Since going our separate ways and entering what careers advisors insist on calling “the world of work”, though, the only games we’ve really played together have been things specifically designed for group play with structured rules — things like board games and the like. I thought it would be interesting to see if GTAV would recapture the magic of the previous games, so I invited Sam over this evening primarily to play it, and if it didn’t, well, there’s a shelf full of board games to play instead.

Fortunately, GTAV very much has the old magic. In several hours of play, we didn’t do a single structured piece of content in the game — no missions, no races, no Flight School, nothing. Instead, we’d set largely improvised challenges and then attempt to complete them. First up, we wanted to get to the Los Santos airport and successfully steal a plane — something we’d regularly try to do in GTAIII — without getting shot to pieces by the police who were summoned the moment you step on the runway. Eventually we managed that, so we turned our attention to the enormous Mount Chiliad, the peak that dominates the north end of the map. First we tried to fly a plane over the top of it and parachute onto the summit. Having successfully accomplished that (once — never again after that) we discovered a pair of dirt bikes near the top, and a conveniently-placed jump ramp nearby.

After an unsuccessful attempt to make the jump that ended in the unfortunate demise of poor Trevor, we tried to get back on top of the mountain — firstly by parachuting again, then by driving and finally by walking. All of these attempts ended in failure — my parachuting concluded prematurely when I failed to realise that leaping out of a plane at a couple of hundred knots would cause you to go flying at a couple of hundred knots, too, and ended up plastering myself all over the site of the mountain; driving up the mountain was stymied by the fact that most vehicles can’t drive up near-vertical rock walls (though driving the front of a big rig past some very surprised hikers was enormously entertaining while it lasted); walking up the mountain concluded after several “trip-and-fall” incidents that saw Trevor rolling part of the way down the mountain, with the last fall being a big one that brought his life once again to a premature end.

I haven’t laughed so much at a game for ages. GTAV still has the magic.