I used to covet the game as a kid because my parents wouldn't let me play it. When I finally was able to play the series I barely got 30 minutes in thinking "wtf is this shit?"
Only one I've finish was GTA 4 mostly because i liked the vibe of it but I really didn't have much fun with the gameplay which is consistently shite for the entire series.
I have never tried to sincerely play the actual storyline, but I have had hours of fun running around in Vice City with weapons cheats enabled, flame thrower in hand, seeing how many stars I could rack up and cops I could kill before they finally took me out. That's probably exactly the behavior your parents were worried about, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
I did that for a long while but while shooting my 10,000th cop while holed up in the GTA 4 hospital i realised it was an empty joy that I did because I could only buy like 1 new game a year and I was actually really bored. And thats when I discovered battlefield and never touched a GTA game ever again
I highly enjoyed the mission in GTA V where you kill Marc Zuckerberg and I also found it amusing how most of the story boils down to petty infighting between the FBI and CIA.
I really like it when the letter agencies are shown as the pathetic weasels they are.
That really depends on if you mean aggregate rating or frequency of positive rating. If you mean the former, you are right. If you mean the latter, there are many "divisive" games where the supporters are incredibly wrong.
San Andreas is good. Vice City and IV have their strengths. V is very mid though, I didn't even finish it. (Because I had watched a let's play eons ago, my PC ran it badly and the story being meh)