Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

GTA San Andreas is THE game to own and no PS2 owner should be without it!

One feature San Andreas does surprisingly well, on the other hand, is gang warfare. The early parts of the game focus on trying to liberate C.J.’s local “hood” and push out the other gangs, and the way to do this is by taking over their territories. Once the gang warfare part of the game is reached, the various parts of the game’s first city are highlighted in different colors, depending on the currently controlling gang. To take over a rival gang’s territory, you first need to initiate a gang war by finding a group of enemy gangsters (wearing some blatant colors depending on who they belong to) and gunning them down. Then, all you have to do is survive a couple of waves of reinforcements (augmented by health and armor pickups appearing around the zone), and the hood is yours and will start contributing cash to your hideout. Of course, you don’t have to do everything alone – once you build up a high enough “respect” rating, you’ll be able to ask members of your own gang to join you on your excursions. There’s an upper limit on how many can be had at any one time, of course (and until your respect gets really high, you can only hire on one or two), but it’s pretty cool to ask a few homies to watch your back. Recruiting is simple; just hold down R1 to target a friendly green-shirted gangster, and then hit up on the D-Pad to make him an offer. Gang members under your command will automatically chase down anybody hostile to you, but they can be immediately recalled by hitting the up arrow again, or told to hold position by hitting down arrow. Sadly, the AI is a little sub-par, and I found myself commonly having to backtrack to find one or two of my lost goons who had gotten stuck on something, but given the sheer size and complexity of the game world, I was pretty impressed at how well they handled things.

Overall game difficulty is something that fluctuates depending on what job you intend to do, but overall, as a GTA veteran, I found the missions to be quite approachable. Thanks to the way that ranged combat now focuses on trying to stay behind cover while taking your opponents down, missions requiring a bit of shooting action thankfully aren’t overwhelmingly challenging, but some of the vehicular chases through thick city zones can get a little irritating for those of us without god-like reflexes and driving talent. The scripting isn’t bad, although one mission involving chasing a train on a motorcycle while a friend riding on the back tries to shoot off the bad guys on top of a train got a little irritating, simply because it was so difficult to get into a position where my friend would shoot the enemies rather than the side of the train – but my annoyance over this quickly subsided later in the game once I got to play some of the truly fun and hilarious missions, like making strafing runs with a machinegun-armed remote controlled airplane, or stealing a truck, connecting it to a fuel tanker, and driving it cross-country to a safehouse with the police chasing me, Mad Max style. That said, there are a few missions some will find insanely frustrating that perhaps could have been balanced a little better – there are even a few missions critical to the campaign that play out basically like a version of Dance Dance Revolution, in which the player is challenged with hitting specific buttons in tune with a soundtrack to score points. A novel concept that seems cool at first, but some people may find these parts so difficult that they’d wish they were optional. One thing we can all breathe a sigh of relief over, however: C.J. (and other NPCs) can actually swim now, so accidentally chucking your ride into the drink in the middle of a frantic police escape will no longer result in a smashed controller – vehicles will float for a bit, then slowly sink, giving you plenty of time to get out and swim to safety. There’s allegedly quite a bit to find underwater too, so training up that swimming skill and poking around might just be worth it.

The controls in GTA:SA are solidly done, and the game takes full advantage of every button on the DualShock controller. It’s still the same old standard that any GTA fan will feel right at home with, but there have also been a few additions to accommodate the new features, such as the aforementioned hydraulic bouncing with the right analogue stick, or using the D-Pad buttons to recruit / dismiss gang members or interact with people who want to talk with you. Other noteworthy control changes include being able to jump over low or medium-sized walls (including fences and some gates) by hitting square, and being able to manually aim using any weapon by holding down R1 and moving the right analogue stick (yes, this is also used to lock on, but you can break the lock now by moving the stick), which is quite handy, although still no match for a keyboard and mouse, a fact which is painfully represented in several missions – the PC version can’t get here soon enough. The force feedback effects are also very well done, and it was insanely cool to have the controller react appropriately whenever I took a vehicle off-road or rammed into someone. There’s even a certain amount of weather reaction in there, as thunder during a heavy rainstorm will also cause a distinct vibration.

Audio-wise, San Andreas is actually a much more vulgar game than its predecessors – swear words are used very commonly in the dialogue, and the characters in general have some pretty filthy mouths, especially when you run into them at high-speed while barreling down the wrong side of the road. Actually, if you don’t mind the offensive language, communication as a whole is very well done in GTA:SA, and while some of the voice acting gets slightly corny, it’s really cool seeing the new audio elements at work. NPCs will actually stop and have conversations with each other that you can listen in on (and they actually resemble something more than randomly spliced-together speech fragments), C.J. will hurl loud obscenities at any foo’ that gets in his damn way, and oncoming police forces will taunt and mock you all the way through town. I’m really impressed at the huge dialogue improvements Rockstar has worked into the game, especially compared to old the GTA3 days. The sound effects are no less impressive, with totally new weapon noises that actually sound somewhat realistic for a change, and some really beefy engine sounds (that I can actually hear for once – finally, the days of muted audio from GTA3 are gone!) that make for a truly pleasurable driving experience. And what of the radio stations? The best I can sum them up is that it’s the same general stuff we’ve come to expect from the series as seen in previous games, with the typical wacky D.J.’s and music selection appropriate to the 90’s era the game takes place in, as well as a single talk show to listen into when the treks between towns start to get a little boring. It’s pretty good stuff, although I felt the talkshow segments didn’t feel as inspired as they used to be (needs more Lazlow!), and the music definitely won’t be for everyone, especially the country music station.

Probably the thing that amazes me the most about GTA:SA is the graphics engine, or rather, the fact that Rockstar is effectively beating the crap out of the PS2 trying to coax the best possible performance out of it. Astonishingly, their efforts are yielding success – mostly – but at quite a cost. Probably the neatest thing about the San Andreas engine is that, aside from that of cutscenes and a few indoor areas, there’s basically no loading screens. Taking into account how frikkin’ huge the game world is, that’s quite a feat, but the cost is that the fancy streaming technology used by the game to compensate for the PS2’s miniscule memory capacity has my console hammering the game disc almost non-stop. Whether this will have any long-term effect on the playability of my game remains uncertain, but at the back of my mind I’m feeling somewhat better about picking up the extra warranty for the game at my local EB. Here’s a few more faults to throw at you before I get into the good stuff; thanks to the way the streaming tech works, it’s very common (especially at high speeds) that you’ll end up moving through the world faster than the game can properly render, causing you to run into buildings or objects that appear seemingly out of nowhere suddenly, or end up stuck with very low-detail world geometry until the engine catches up. Trying to get into your personal car garage can sometimes take upwards of 20 seconds or more as the game frantically tries to finish caching the local landscape so it can load your stored vehicles into view. The vehicle pop-in range is still terrible, with NPCs appearing and disappearing at a pre-set distance in a “bubble” around your character, and it’s still entirely possible to look behind you for a second, see a line of vehicles, and then look again to notice that they’ve all vanished (though instances of this have been noticeably cut down). Framerates are also erratic, and while the action is smooth for the most part, there is still some annoying slowdown or brief hitches as the game loads new data. I seriously weep for whoever was responsible for trying to get the game engine running well on the PS2 platform, as while it is by no means an inferior console, it definitely isn’t meant to handle something of this magnitude.

Okay, with that out of the way, I’m going to get on to what doesn’t suck about San Andreas in the graphics department. Firstly, and most noticeably, is the slightly changed graphical style. This is by far the most detailed Grand Theft Auto to date, and it shows in everything from the characters to the vehicle models. While it’s sure as hell nothing that would ever come close to rivaling Doom 3, it’s pretty amazing how far the art team has come since the GTA3 days (no more weird square artifacts in front of lightsources!) The first thing I noticed is that the game is surprisingly dark, even at maximum brightness (which is something a lot of people might have trouble working around, especially with low-quality televisions), but once I adjusted to the change, I started to see a lot of the cool details the game has to offer. Take the view distance, for example; while the NPC spawn range is still irritatingly limited, the actual world geometry distance is astonishing, and I was very happy at being able to peer across a lake and see the raging city behind it, or climb up a huge mountain vista and view the landscape from above. The special effects have really improved, with flame, dust, and even weather conditions (fog, rain, etc) looking really good. Even the animations have noticeably been offered a once-over, though they’re still a little jumpy sometimes. The lighting effects look really nice, and considering the available landmass, there’s a surprisingly good amount of detail in all the explorable areas. Really, I know from the earlier paragraph it might seem as if GTA:SA’s engine is trying to bite off way more than it can chew (and it probably is), but these issues aren’t enough to offset what I found to ultimately be a fulfilling graphical experience, and it’d be wrong to see somebody put off from the game just because it runs at slightly less-than-optimal performance.

The feeling I’m left with after nearly a week of playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is still one of amazement. I’ve barely explored all of the available areas and I’m positive that I won’t be finished the game any time soon if I keep wandering off to go explore every random dirt road I come across, but thanks to all of this, the experience is consistently a fresh and invigorating one. I have to hand it to those Rockstar guys for stuffing this game so full of amazing content and then shipping it out in such a playable and, most importantly, fun state with a minimum of fuss and, surprisingly, no significant bugs. For god’s sake, they even snuck in a multiplayer mode where you can hook up a second controller and run around freely, hijacking vehicles and causing mayhem all over the place, and while this mode is a bit more limited than I would’ve liked, I’m shocked that it was even included at all. With a good storyline, a surprisingly capable (if abused) graphics engine, so many features that my head spins just trying to process them all (and I probably missed mentioning quite a few in this article), and all the great gameplay that made the GTA series a blockbuster seller, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is one game no PS2 owner will want to miss out on. Congratulations once again, Rockstar, for continuing to abuse a franchise that, somehow, never manages to get old.