Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas made its debut on Xbox this week and I was one of the first in line to get my hands on it. Some of you may have already seen this game on the PS2. It's finally in the hands of us Xbox owners with some improved graphics and added features.
I don’t want to get off on a tangent… Well all right…I do want to get off on a tangent but I promise it will orbit back eventually to a meaningful point.
Back at the dawn of time, before Halo 2 hit the streets and I had it surgically implanted in my Xbox, a parade of games made it through my machine. I really was a gamer, actual variety took place in my gaming life. Sometimes I would play more than one game in the same day. As crazy as this seems, it was true. Then came November 9th and my Xbox was converted to a Halo machine. Before that though, one of my favorite titles, and time killers, was Vice City.
Rockstar Games knew exactly what I was looking for in a game. It provided a huge amount of content, great freedom to choose my path through the game and the ability to pick up hookers, have sex with them, pay them for it, beat them with a golf club to get my money back, wait until the ambulance arrived to revive them, beat the drivers to a pulp and steal their ambulance to get on to an army base where I could get into an Apache Attack Helicopter and rain death from the skies on a city full of hapless onlookers- all without violating parole.
Needless to say I was looking forward to their next iteration of the franchise.
Thanks to Rockstar’s casual attitude towards the progression of time. GTA San Andreas remains a prequel to GTA III, but a sequel to Vice City. Delicately sandwiched into pre-Rodney King Los Angeles of the early nineties, the games protagonist CJ touches down from the Liberty City Airport into a wonderland of gangsta violence, the CIA/Calle Cartel crack epidemic and the Glory Days of Death Row Records. Ice Cube couldn’t even get on the radio at this point, let alone in bad movies about crotch rockets.
I want to make this clear before you read any further. I have been playing this game since Monday. I am not half way through the story. I am not a third of the way through the story.
I am not even an eighth of the way through the story. What you need to know before you venture into San Andreas is this- It is fucking ginormous. There remains two-thirds of the map that I have not even unlocked yet. The part that is open to me is a mostly alien landscape. I have visited most of the stores in the few blocks surrounding the Grove Street Crib that CJ is calling home for now, but please note that I said “most.” Clearly, what I can’t do is give you a rundown of the storyline and its fascinating twists and turns. So far it is well done, just like fans of Vice City might expect. Superb scripts and voice acting were mandated by the quality of these things in Vice City and Rockstar delivered. Surprise appearances by some very recognizable voices have already occurred.
One thing that needs to be said about though before I move on to gameplay is this- it is a dark story. I know you’re thinking that Ray Liotta getting released from prison and sent to Miami to take on a drug gang that may or may not be in competition with the people he went to prison to protect is pretty dark, but it has nothing on GTA: SA. Rockstar also took the profanity filters off for this game as well. If Mike James is looking for something that delivers family fun like the Incredibles, look elsewhere. F bombs are flying and the “N” word makes a stunning debut in video games within the first thirty seconds of gameplay and never goes away after that.
The air of authenticity this lends the game is the first thing I want to note about game play. CJ interacts with the community in this game in ways Tommy never did. The omnipresent and clever street patter is answerable via rudimentary controls. The D pad is used to offer up a wide range of responses to everyday conversations. Insults and compliments get traded with the people in your neighborhood in ways that would make Mr. Rogers race to the closet for his jacket and shoes. Other uses include gang recruitment and some other goodies I will leave you to discover for yourselves.
The next important thing to note about gameplay concerns the graphics. Anyone expecting a quantum leap from Vice City is going to be disappointed. Weather effects, terrain, textures and models are more varied. But details remain a little wonky up close and CJ, who starts out the game looking like a drowned rat only improves a little as the RPG elements of the game come into play. Despite the fact that no radical improvements to graphics came about, don’t worry. There are still plenty of really stunning visuals to enjoy in the game. Get high up in the bluffs surrounding Los Santos and enjoy a sunset. Head out to the Coast Highway in a rainstorm. Take a dirt bike into the redwood groves and logging towns of the back country. Go swimming in the placid surf of the Pacific.
That’s right, I said swim. Rockstar finally came to grips with the idea that anyone smart and tough enough to go to war with a criminal empire might figure out a way to struggle their way out of the deep end of a backyard swimming pool. Add it to bike riding as one of the new modes of transport available to CJ that Tommy never had. However, get used to bike riding before you go for a dunk. It figures in some early missions and is one of the activities that will quickly turn CJ from an anorexic Liberty City fancyboy, into a hulking ghetto predator. While Rockstar always claimed that Vice City included the ability to condition the lead character by running and sprinting, it was always difficult to gauge any change. They solved that issue with the RPG elements mentioned before.
Ride your bike, swim around, play basketball, hit the gym, eat some food and within a few days of game time CJ’s bulks up, gets ripped and stops getting teased by the local hookers for his scrawny physique. As annoying as you think this might be, it is really an unobtrusive element.
Rockstar added eating to the list of things CJ can do to regenerate health, and as long as you are doing it anyway, it pays dividends to his training regimen. There are a few other ways that you can personalize your thug, but I know this crew pretty well and given the choice between artfully combining hair styles, tattoos and clothes to gain a few sex appeal points and upping your pistol skills by climbing on a rooftop and picking off rival gang members on the next block… Well, if anyone manages to improve their sex appeal, let me know.
Weapons continue to be a weak link in the franchise in my opinion. Targeting is still god awful, weapon models remain rudimentary at best and the contrived hoops that the game tries to make you jump through to get them are laughable when you consider the ease of plowing a Buick through a crowd of gangsters or over the local patrolman and taking the guns from their lifeless bodies. That being said, I still don’t mind because this game will not ever be about acquiring things. Like GTA III and Vice City before it, GTA: SA is about doing things. Fun things. Crazy things. Psychotic, disturbed, destructive things.
Rockstar really laid it on the line for this game. The number and variety of crimes you can commit is wonderful. Whether you are tagging the local underpass or clocking unsuspecting pedestrians with a shovel, doing crimes is cool. If anything, the police seem a little more standoffish then they did in the tropical heat of Miami. My biggest knock on Vice City was that every time I accidentally ran over a little old lady thanks to the craptastic camera angles, a flotilla of federales in Black Explorers would be after me hosing my car down with MAC-10s. In San Andreas they have a much more casual view of vehicular homicide and random street crime in general.
Rockstar also loaded San Andreas with a plethora of mini-games. Everything, from DDR Rhythm-type, low rider competitions to the Sega Saturn console CJ has at the crib, exists in San Andreas to keep you entertained. Fans of Asteroids should head to the local bar for a round of Duality on one of the arcade style-games there. Previews and the literature promise more fun to come- BASE jumping, sky-diving, billiards, gambling and badminton. Okay, maybe not badminton, but you get my point.
I could probably come up with a lot more content to try to convince you about the game’s worth, but let me wrap-up by saying this. It’s no Halo killer. When I finish posting I will probably hit the XBox and head over to Turf to see who is running and gunning tonight. There are no multi-player or online options that will engage this community of sickos as well as Halo has. However, in the dark times of the night- when even the West Coast has put their controllers away and the friends list is empty of all potential party members, pry the disc drive of your Xbox open, lovingly unwrap a new copy of GTA: SA and escape into pure, solitary, gun-wielding, car-jacking fun. Just don’t be surprised if it takes you a little longer to get back to the master chief then you planned
Overall:
- Bubba
Back at the dawn of time, before Halo 2 hit the streets and I had it surgically implanted in my Xbox, a parade of games made it through my machine. I really was a gamer, actual variety took place in my gaming life. Sometimes I would play more than one game in the same day. As crazy as this seems, it was true. Then came November 9th and my Xbox was converted to a Halo machine. Before that though, one of my favorite titles, and time killers, was Vice City.
Rockstar Games knew exactly what I was looking for in a game. It provided a huge amount of content, great freedom to choose my path through the game and the ability to pick up hookers, have sex with them, pay them for it, beat them with a golf club to get my money back, wait until the ambulance arrived to revive them, beat the drivers to a pulp and steal their ambulance to get on to an army base where I could get into an Apache Attack Helicopter and rain death from the skies on a city full of hapless onlookers- all without violating parole.
Needless to say I was looking forward to their next iteration of the franchise.
Thanks to Rockstar’s casual attitude towards the progression of time. GTA San Andreas remains a prequel to GTA III, but a sequel to Vice City. Delicately sandwiched into pre-Rodney King Los Angeles of the early nineties, the games protagonist CJ touches down from the Liberty City Airport into a wonderland of gangsta violence, the CIA/Calle Cartel crack epidemic and the Glory Days of Death Row Records. Ice Cube couldn’t even get on the radio at this point, let alone in bad movies about crotch rockets.
I want to make this clear before you read any further. I have been playing this game since Monday. I am not half way through the story. I am not a third of the way through the story.
One thing that needs to be said about though before I move on to gameplay is this- it is a dark story. I know you’re thinking that Ray Liotta getting released from prison and sent to Miami to take on a drug gang that may or may not be in competition with the people he went to prison to protect is pretty dark, but it has nothing on GTA: SA. Rockstar also took the profanity filters off for this game as well. If Mike James is looking for something that delivers family fun like the Incredibles, look elsewhere. F bombs are flying and the “N” word makes a stunning debut in video games within the first thirty seconds of gameplay and never goes away after that.
The air of authenticity this lends the game is the first thing I want to note about game play. CJ interacts with the community in this game in ways Tommy never did. The omnipresent and clever street patter is answerable via rudimentary controls. The D pad is used to offer up a wide range of responses to everyday conversations. Insults and compliments get traded with the people in your neighborhood in ways that would make Mr. Rogers race to the closet for his jacket and shoes. Other uses include gang recruitment and some other goodies I will leave you to discover for yourselves.
The next important thing to note about gameplay concerns the graphics. Anyone expecting a quantum leap from Vice City is going to be disappointed. Weather effects, terrain, textures and models are more varied. But details remain a little wonky up close and CJ, who starts out the game looking like a drowned rat only improves a little as the RPG elements of the game come into play. Despite the fact that no radical improvements to graphics came about, don’t worry. There are still plenty of really stunning visuals to enjoy in the game. Get high up in the bluffs surrounding Los Santos and enjoy a sunset. Head out to the Coast Highway in a rainstorm. Take a dirt bike into the redwood groves and logging towns of the back country. Go swimming in the placid surf of the Pacific.
That’s right, I said swim. Rockstar finally came to grips with the idea that anyone smart and tough enough to go to war with a criminal empire might figure out a way to struggle their way out of the deep end of a backyard swimming pool. Add it to bike riding as one of the new modes of transport available to CJ that Tommy never had. However, get used to bike riding before you go for a dunk. It figures in some early missions and is one of the activities that will quickly turn CJ from an anorexic Liberty City fancyboy, into a hulking ghetto predator. While Rockstar always claimed that Vice City included the ability to condition the lead character by running and sprinting, it was always difficult to gauge any change. They solved that issue with the RPG elements mentioned before.
Ride your bike, swim around, play basketball, hit the gym, eat some food and within a few days of game time CJ’s bulks up, gets ripped and stops getting teased by the local hookers for his scrawny physique. As annoying as you think this might be, it is really an unobtrusive element.
Weapons continue to be a weak link in the franchise in my opinion. Targeting is still god awful, weapon models remain rudimentary at best and the contrived hoops that the game tries to make you jump through to get them are laughable when you consider the ease of plowing a Buick through a crowd of gangsters or over the local patrolman and taking the guns from their lifeless bodies. That being said, I still don’t mind because this game will not ever be about acquiring things. Like GTA III and Vice City before it, GTA: SA is about doing things. Fun things. Crazy things. Psychotic, disturbed, destructive things.
Rockstar really laid it on the line for this game. The number and variety of crimes you can commit is wonderful. Whether you are tagging the local underpass or clocking unsuspecting pedestrians with a shovel, doing crimes is cool. If anything, the police seem a little more standoffish then they did in the tropical heat of Miami. My biggest knock on Vice City was that every time I accidentally ran over a little old lady thanks to the craptastic camera angles, a flotilla of federales in Black Explorers would be after me hosing my car down with MAC-10s. In San Andreas they have a much more casual view of vehicular homicide and random street crime in general.
Rockstar also loaded San Andreas with a plethora of mini-games. Everything, from DDR Rhythm-type, low rider competitions to the Sega Saturn console CJ has at the crib, exists in San Andreas to keep you entertained. Fans of Asteroids should head to the local bar for a round of Duality on one of the arcade style-games there. Previews and the literature promise more fun to come- BASE jumping, sky-diving, billiards, gambling and badminton. Okay, maybe not badminton, but you get my point.
I could probably come up with a lot more content to try to convince you about the game’s worth, but let me wrap-up by saying this. It’s no Halo killer. When I finish posting I will probably hit the XBox and head over to Turf to see who is running and gunning tonight. There are no multi-player or online options that will engage this community of sickos as well as Halo has. However, in the dark times of the night- when even the West Coast has put their controllers away and the friends list is empty of all potential party members, pry the disc drive of your Xbox open, lovingly unwrap a new copy of GTA: SA and escape into pure, solitary, gun-wielding, car-jacking fun. Just don’t be surprised if it takes you a little longer to get back to the master chief then you planned
Overall:
90%
- Bubba
