You’ve seen the YouTube thumbnails. “GTA V from 18GB to 1.5GB!” “The Last of Us down to 800MB!” It sounds like magic. But is it real, or is it a digital trap?

The PlayStation 3 era was a golden age. We saw the birth of The Last of Us , the cinematic brilliance of Uncharted 2 , and the open-world chaos of Red Dead Redemption .

But there is a dark side to this nostalgia:

Play the game as the developers intended: with all the audio, all the cutscenes, and none of the malware. Have you ever downloaded a "highly compressed" game that actually worked? Or did you get burned by a corrupt file? Let us know in the comments below.

A standard PS3 game usually clocks in between 15GB and 50GB. For collectors and emulator users (shoutout to ), storing 50 high-quality games means buying a dedicated 2TB hard drive.

Enter the internet’s favorite solution: