"GTA:SA Almost there, but not quite..."

Every once in a while, a game comes along that is so well done, so perfect, so amazingly put together that it can absorb your life. Unfortuantely, this hasn't happened for me since Final Fantasy 4 on the Super Nintendo, and I've had to settle for those pop games that can still manage to take up a portion of your life for a while.

Graphics:

The first thing you look at in any game is the atmosphere you are placed in. Rockstar and Rockstar North have done a really great job in the past making us believe we are in Liberty and Vice Cities, and San Andreas is no exception. Here, we have three cities and the countryside inbetween them to explore. First, we are dumped in the city of Los Santos, a city which is supposed to parallell real life Los Angeles. Well, I've never been to LA, but it seems like all the landmarks are there, including a nice little hazy effect for pollution. The next stop is the countryside, which is pretty much farmland, some trailer parks, and some tiny communities with the usual fixins of the big cities. The great thing about the countryside is that you can see forever and ever and ever into the distance. Once you make it to the second city, San Fierro (a ripoff of San Francisco), there are numerous fog effects. Lordy knows why they insisted on this, but they did. The haze in LS was bearable. The fog kind of puts a dampener on everything. I dealt with it. Living in San Francisco myself, I appreciated the inclusion of almost all the landmarks I love here, and even the addition of the gay district (aptly named "Queen's" in the game). After your time is done in SF, you are left in the desert, which employs heat effects to make it look sweltering. Oooo, ahhh...get me to Las Venturas, the Las Vegas copy. This, by far, was the most exciting city in the game, and I wish we could spend a lot more time here. The Old Ventuas Strip features that old Vegas-style look with tons of neon lights, the cowboy, etc. It's graphically very exciting!! The new strip resembles the new Vegas strip with the huge resort casinos (which features names such as "The Camel's Toe" and "Comes-A-Lot"). My gripe with all these huge casino resorts being around is that we couldn't go in to more than the two involved in the story lines. Why not just take that extra step? Ah well.

The look of the characters is very similar to GTAIII and Vice City. Perfectly animated with blocky hands. All the major characters have their own unique looks, and even the generic characters are well animated and have unique looks depending on the city and area you are tooling around. The vehicles have changed again, since the year this game takes place is 1995ish, and they are updated from their 1980's counterparts in Vice City, but not as jazzy as the 2000esque cars in GTAIII. This is fine, because all the cars look and feel like they could honestly be in the game. For the most part, they appear in the relevant places, such as the run-down, rusty cars in the ghetto, to the fancy sports cars in the high-class areas, to tractors on the farm, yee-haw! The only REAL graphics change has happened when you drive super-fast in that it looks like the screen is pulling away...yeah, I'm not sure why they spent time adding this and not adding insides to the big casinos. The car names and designs are all quite clever themselves, and add a lot of realism to the game.

Graphics gripes: The sun. Why did they make it so that it would blind you when you are driving towards it? Is that supposed to be fun or funny? Neither is true. The radar. It helps you tell you where you want to go, and when you want to turn and such. It sits in the corner of your screen, and is teeeeeny tiny. My gripe with all the GTA games is that, I spend a LOT of the game staring at this little tiny radar thingy. You can't enlarge it, you can't move it to look at the game more, nada. It's very annoying, as I'd like to not spend soooo much time staring at the radar and more time looking at the beautiful game. It would be good if there could be an arrow that appears at the top of your car pointing you in the direction of your next target, multiple arrows depending on the number of targets. I know this was implimented in other games, so it's not impossible. This way, we'll all be able to see where to go without having to stare at the mini-radar too much. Also, since the game is at least 3 times as large as the previous games, the general map can be hard to read. It can be extremely frustrating to zoom in and out on the map trying to find that dang marker where you're supposed to go!! Grrrrr. Many people have complained about the graphics not appearing on time when you get somewhere. It happens from the very first scene to the credits in the end. Sheesh, it's horrible, honestly. It only REALLY bugged me when something was in my way, but it didn't show up until 3 seconds too late. My final gripe with the graphics is that the game itself is very very dark in some areas. They have a brightness meter in the options, but this didn't help. This especially was bad when the markers on the radar were blue, and you couldn't find where you were supposed to go or who you were supposed to pick up. Don't choose dark colors for markers again!!

Sound:

The graphics are half of what immerese you in a game, with sound being the other half. The Grand Theft Auto series has been known to include a variety of radio stations in its game to help set the tone, and this installment is no exception. There are a number of radio stations including hip hop, classic rap, soul, funk, rare grooves, country, reggae, house music, and the talk station. While I'm not really a fan of the hippity hop, I did explore the soul, funk, and rare grooves stations and found them very enjoyable to listen to. I remember in Vice City, I tended to listen to the talk radio station a lot, and I can't remember a time in San Andreas where I was so disappointed in the music stations that I would listen to the Talk. So, I tend to view the music stations in San Andreas as a step up. Here are my top 3 songs that they chose to include this time:

1. En Vouge -- Never Gonna Get It (Soul Radio)
2. Dazz Band -- Let It Whip (Rare Grooves)
3. Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty -- Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man (Country!)

The inclusion of the tongue-in-cheek commercials is, thankfully, back. These commercials always include some sort of thinly veiled innuendoes, this time covering topics of glory holes and masturbation. My favorite commercial involves a diet whereby mothers can make their children so fat, they'll never want to leave the home! I LOVE YOU MOM!

The voice acting is always top notch, and this time, we get a wiiiiide array of voice acting (in fact, when you see the credits, you'll notice this is where a majority of the effort had to have gone to). The major characters aren't played by anybody noteworthy, except for Samuel L. Jackson as corrupt cop Officer Tenpenny. The DJs on the radio mostly all real life DJs to my knowledge, but my favorite would have to be DJ Funktapus played by real-life funk genius George Clinton (No, he's not the bastard love child of George Bush and Bill Clinton...). He really adds that little something extra to the Funk station that the other DJs can't seem to convey. He's got his tentacles around me, baby! The voice talent and script for this year's talk radio station is hilarious, as usual. Andy Dick has a segment on gardening that really made me crack up, and the return of the latin lover DJ from Vice City talking about looooove again was unexpected and a welcome surprise. What is surprising, and something that I haven't noticed in the series before, are the comments made by the cops on their radio frequency when you steal one of their cars. Hilarious! Another tidbit that usually turns out to be amusing are the comments made by the pedestrians and other car drivers. These comments are usually one-liners that always make you laugh, and there are hundreds of them! This time, even the main character gets some funny one-liners, and I especially like when he sings the songs on the radio when you don't move him around for a couple seconds.

Sound effects are fairly standard. When you shoot a gun, it makes a gunshot sound appropriate to the weapon.

Sound gripes: I really like how there are so many stations. I like picking my one station and staying with it for a while. It used to be much easier in the other games when you could use the R2 L2 buttons to switch the stations, so I didn't mind going into a new car and having to switch back to my station. Uhm, now, we have to use the directional pad to switch stations, thus making it almost impossible to swtich stations in the heat of a mission. Not fun! The music itself is a good variety, but some of the DJs are....rather annoying, like DJ Phillip "PM" Michaels on Contemporary Soul Radio. More than a few people have been put off by the excessive use of the f and n words in the game. For me, it wasn't terribly distracting, and you kinda get used to it after a while. It adds to the atmosphere of the game. However, the one thing that irked me a little was the fact that some of the songs on the radio station included cursing, which isn't permitted in real life.

Gameplay:
Part 1 -- On foot!

My friend, when she saw the game, wanted to know if you could get out and stroll around town if you wanted to. Sure, why not? The crux of the on-foot gameplay deals with gunplay. You pick up a variety of weapons throughout the game, and use them to keeeel people. Mwahaha. The good thing is is that there are lots of different weapons! The bad thing about this is, I tend to use one, maybe two weapons. This can't be considered a gripe, but I'm sure lots of people do the same thing. Naturally, what comes along with the guns is the targeting system. It is greatly improved from the past installments by showing us how much "life" the targets have left. Unfortunately, the same old problems with the system are still there: targeting random bystanders instead of the people you WANT to target and randomly rotating around when you press the target button which disorients you. Lord knows why these problems are STILL there???

GTA:SA also implimented a "stealth mode" which consists of being ninjaish and sneaking up behind people and killing them. I could RARELY get this to work, and the so-called stealth missions I honestly just raced through with my gun with far more success. They claimed that hiding in the shadows would help you evade the cops, and this I could never get to work past the first stealth mission. My suggestion: take out the useless stealth missions. The main character also gains experience when using guns, which leads to better aim, quicker reload time, and in some cases, he can dual wield the weapons. Is it just me, or does it seem that the accuracy when you finally get to dual wield plummets? My major gripe with the guns is that, to my knowledge, you have to wait until all the bullets are gone for the main character to automatically reload. This leads to awkwardness and inefficiency when it comes to gun fights because you can't reload when there's a spare moment, it tends to want to reload when you're getting your arse shot at by a ton of bad guys.

In addition to the guns, the main character can also resort to fisticuffs, which can become stronger through working out at the gym. What's a gym? Ohhh, a gym. While some people were put off by the fact that you could work out and also had to eat, it's really an addition that isn't too annoying, and can be totally neglected without much detriment. Since you almost never resort to actually hitting, you don't need to work out those guns so much as the real guns. You can also choose between three different fighting styles based on the three gyms in each major city. Lord know why they spent so much time implementing hand fighting stuff when you almost never hand fight!! Ah well...

Part 2 -- By land

I have already addressed the look of the cars, but how do they riiiide? Well, some ride as smooth as silk and others ride as smooth as yo mama's pimply, hairy, wrinkly butt. I don't really have much to say on how cars handle, other than for some missions, when you can't choose your car, they give you a real crapmobile that's hard to steer. Sigh, I really wish they wouldn't do this for, oh, every mission...

What I really enjoyed about Vice City was the addition of the motorcycles, and this has been greatly expanded upon in San Andreas. Many have chosen the motorcycle as the primary means of transpotation due to the fact you can bob and weave in the traffic instead of having to crash into everything with the car. Rockstar also added bicycles which are pretty much dumbed down versions of the motorcycles. The worst complaint about the cycle in Vice City was how easily you would get thrown from your cycle. Seriously, if you sneezed at the screen, it would throw you from the bike. This is addressed in San Andreas with by the addition of vehicle experience. The more you drive, or attend driving school, the more vehicle experience you gain, and the easier the vehicles are to handle. With cycles, you get thrown from them a lot less often, and usually only when you are going top speed (well...that's like all the time :-\ ). With cars, I never REALLY noticed a difference in how they drove when I had more experience. Some complained that completing the driving school, boating school, etc, did not do much in the way of gaining experience, however I found that you gained experience a lot faster on the vehicles after you complete the school, so it's not a total waste.

Part 3 -- By Sea, by air.

The boats in the game are hardly used, and they handle the same as in Vice City, so I do not feel the need to address them too much. However, I do feel the need to address the addition of a multitude of airplanes. I just simply don't understand the reasoning behing the planes. Most of them are hard to control, and I feel it takes longer to fly from one city to another, than to drive. As well, with completing flight school as a necessity to open up certain areas of the game, it seems like I bought an unofficial sequal to PilotWings instead of a Grand Theft Auto game (the inclusion of the jetpack certainly nailed that feeling for me). This is Grand Theft AUTO, not Plane Hijack Heaven. in Vice City, maybe one or two missions had us flying the friendly skies. Many of the later missions (too many) leave you to the awkward control scheme of the airplane, and again we don't get to choose which plane to pilot. Especially frustrating is the mission early on in San Fiero where you have to use a radio controlled plane to destroy vehicles. The single most frustrating mission of the game, it was horrible. My suggestion is, less plane, more car.

The Story: (contains some spoilers)

GTA games are known for their in-depth story lines that criss cross throughout the entire game. The first two games called its shots from Mafia movies, while San Andreas is more of a Boyz in the Hood type urban gang feel. The story focuses on CJ who recently returned to "the hood" in Los Santos after his mama gets killed. Poor guy, he spent 5 years in GTAIII's Liberty City trying to escape gang life and is thurst back into it full force. The story arc starts off simply as trying to rebuild your gang in Los Santos, to building up a successful garage business in San Fiero, to fending off the crazy Catalina in the badlands, to helping a start up gang casino in Las Ventuas, and finally ends in a full-scale riot back in Los Santos a la the LA riots.

While the Mafia-esque story lines had you doing things that were fairly believable in the scope of its story line, many of the situations CJ is thrust into simply do not seem to be within reason of this gang-focursed story line. For instance...at one point in the story, you are forced to do things on behalf of a secret government organization. Uhm, yeah right, that was pretty unbelievable to me. As well, the mission where you steal a jetpack from a military facility...not believavle either. Finally, becoming fiends with the RC Car nerd? I had a very hard time buying that rough and tough thug CJ would be terribly compassionate. It's nice to know that the protagonist isn't suffering from the so-called "Angry Black Man Syndrome."

Speaking of, it's hard not to notice the stereotypes in the story. This is usually portrayed as the black man doing things for whitey, or whomever else is in power. CJ is normally portrayed as the "dumb muscle" who gets the job done, but in reality, the audience knows that he's a smart and calculating individual. This isn't so for the other African-Americans portrayed in the game. As well, except for Catalina who is portrayed as the CRAZY WOMAN SHE IS, you don't get missions from any other women, as women are portrayed as only objects to date or use. Your sister, Kendal, is the only strong female out of the whole cast! You also get missions from an Asian and a Latino, rounding out the stereotyping of the cast of characters. While there still is a sort of stigma against introducing a homosexual character into a mainstream game such as San Andreas, there are many stereotypical references in the commercials moreso than any other minority group. Most of them are in good spirits, although I still could have done without them. As well, one of the characters early on is alluded to be gay.

One of the things added to the story are character that cross over from both Vice City and GTAIII, since this game fits smack dab in the middle of the Grand Theft Auto timeline between the two games. It's a cute addition, but somewhat seemed to be stretching it a bit. The characters themselves are all flawed and quirky, running the gamut from drug problems, to blindness, to chronic masturbation. My favorite characters are the offbeat pimp Jizzy B, the offbeat wannabe rapper OG Loc, and the offbeat lawyer Rosie.

While Vice City introduced us to the asset system, the story arc kind of fell apart due to it. San Andreas corrects this problem by...not really have that many assets at all, which is disappointing. Instead, many assets are treated as non-essential side missions to the story line including the RC store, valet parking, the airstrip, gang territory wars, the car dealership, and 3 courier missions. The addition of these is kind of a nice tradeoff, but not nearly as fun as the Vice City porn studio and such. The normal R3 sidequests are there including Police vigilante missions, firetruck, ambulance, and taxi. Rockstar included pimping, burglary, train robbery, quarrying, and trucking side-missions to this mix. Lord knows why they got rid of the ice cream side mission, as it was one of my favorite. Also included is now a sort of dating simulator by which you gain girlfriends and take them out, and then "have coffee". Kind of campy, but you do get rewards for gaining points with the ladies. The import/export side missions have always been my favorite, until the game was made 3 times larger...now it's a pain to have to drag cars back to one location. As well, I don't see the point in having to use a crane to get the car on the ship...it's a waste of time, and doesn't really add to the side mission. Just let us park it in a garage...and give us a garage in all 3 cities. Also, why lower the amount of money you get if the car is damaged? It just seemed counter-intuative to me. And the fact that the other reward for the import/export dock is that you get to import the cars for a high price? Yeaaah, that's really sucky compared to the fast cars you would get back in Vice City. Rockstar also brought back the races and some sort of derby, whicih I have no interest in trying since they were near impossible in the older games. There's also gambling, playing pool for money, and playing basketball by yourself. Lastly, San Andreas features a sort of Dance Dance Revolution simulator on some of the dates and missions and when you go into clubs randomly. It's quite a bit harder than the real DDR, oddly, and it seems to be difficult to get the hang of. Thankfully, there's only 2 missions that force you to do it and you can sort of bluff your way through it on the dates. All in all, the side missions can be a fun or infuriating distraction, and luckily many of them just help to supplement the already enormous stroy line.

Other section:

I didn't know where to add this stuff...

The trains. Ok, I hate the trains in this game. They are by far the easiet way to get from city to city. Unfortunately, they never come. Ever. What is the point of adding something if it comes so infrequently? This leads me to the highway system. In the past, you never really wanted to use the highway system as it was confusing and just a mess to try and get on and off (was there even a highway in vice city?) This time, it's just as confusing, but sometimes can be the best way to get from city to city. Again, reading the map is so confusing when it comes to figuring out the highway system, and it would have been preferable if the highways were somehow highlighted a different color, with some sort of arrow indicating on and off ramps. But, since it's sometimes too out-of-the-way to take the highway...you can tend to just get on your car and drive along the train tracks. This is dumb, as I'd prefer to drive the highway like a normal person, instead of taking the tracks because it is a more direct and trafficless route.

Really frustrating missions. Ok, well, we're used to this in the GTA games. Still, though, why do the designers think it's fun to add in missions that take 10-20 times to pass?? And why is there no "Retry Missions" option already?????? And why do you have to lose your weapons when you die or get arrested???!!! It's frustrating, and leads me to excessively reset the game every time I die, get busted, or know I'm already failing a mission. Seriously, the "retry mission" option would be a great help. I will give them that SOME of the missions allow you to skip certain parts when you go to replay it (such as if you had to drive from a city to the boonies for 5 minutes...they would allow you to skip straight to the boonies when you start the mission over again). This is an ok start. However, if you fail a mission in the middle of the boonies, and have to go all the way back to the city to restart it? Unacceptable, and a total waste of time, and unfun. This is especially disconcerting for when they are missions you HAVE to pass to progress the storyline. The flying missions, especially, were frustrating.

The police system. It sucks. I hate it. It tilts the game to the side of unfunness a lot of the time. It's always so arbitrary when you get a police star and the po start chasing you down. Why in blazes do they feel the need to attack ME when there are like 15 other people already attacking me!!?! Grr. It always seems to come up at the most inappropriate times, such as during the ambulance mini-mission. It's especially unfair to try and avoid the police when you are waiting for someone to get in your car. You never can, and it's an automatic force for you to start over the mission. I really would hope Rockstars changes the police system to make them a lesser part of the game. It's fine if they catch you hijacking a car. It's fine if they see you run someone over. Stop making them only target you. Stop making them more annoying during missions. Stop making it impossible to ever lower your wanted level. It also seems too arbitrary the conditions for your wanted level to decrease. Fix it.

Swimming! Yes, CJ can now swim! Wooooohooo. I rarely used it. Maybe 2 missions used it. I fell off the edge into the water maybe...twice the whole game. But thankfully now, this isn't the kiss o' death.

Your gang. So, remember Mario from Vice City, who was part of your "crime organization" and chilled out outside your big mansion talking about his girlfriend? Did it piss you off that he wouldn't follow you around and help you during the missions? NOW you can recruit people from your gang to follow you around and help you out. Unfortuantely......this system didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped. The gang members suffer from poor AI. They will follow you, but are prone to running off and fighting whomever. They die at the slightest gunshot, and a passing car can take out half the people you've recruited in one swoop. If this is going to be part of the next game, some serious retooling has to be done. This goes into the gang territory side mission. You have to "engage a rival gang" within their territory to start a gang war there. As easy as this sounds, I can typically circle a block for about 10 minutes and still not find the rival gang there! By that time, I have lost a majority of my gang members, and interest in pursuing this mandatory part of the game. This system was very unenjoyable.

All in all, the game has a lot of work to be done on it, to make me 100% happy. I love the elements and extra gameplay they added, however, some further thought and playing reveals the few flaws that make the game unenjoyable at some points. So here is the score distribution:

Graphics: 7.5
Story: 7
Sound: 8
Funness: 7
Overall: 7.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/19/04