Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Not yet at the stage where in-game GPS can be used as a crutch for overly dense or visually monotonous levelling, the world design of San Andreas is all interconnected backstreets and shortcuts, and the artful use of colour and texture to suggest interest or to assist the player in building a mental map of all the landmarks across San Andreas' diverse city. To move through it is to learn it intimately, to belong in it, and to read the space and know which escape route to follow under which circumstances. Every backyard and park and underbridge. The missions carefully ripple out from Grove St, introducing new territories bit by bit, such that the player is still able to connect familiar signs and buildings with new vistas, like stars to a navigator.

Then when it suddenly all becomes too much, the story goes that it's too much too. We're miles away in the country and it's night time and the spaces are far too open and now we're lost because we're in exile. CJ cannot go home. The intricate network of passageways that constitutes Los Santos (where it's always better to move by foot or bicycle) is replaced with bare hills and long, straight highways leading to new nowheres. That which once took hours on foot because it was bustling with life takes minutes by car, and the human textures of the world are lost to a shiny sameness that actively works to deflect player interest. The passage from Grove St is to the Desert of the Real, its veins running cold and efficient with the anonymity of hyperspace.

The emptiness of much of San Andreas outside of Los Santos is testament to its overambition, but this works well for its narrative where CJ must return from the desert back home. It also gives the landscape an air of mystery that has to be actively filled by player imagination, hence the accumulation of community myths concerning ghosts, cryptids, angels, and parallel dimensions. GTA V would attempt to tap into some of these narratives in order to control them, but in San Andreas it's the organic byproduct of players, glitches, and weird landscapes. It's the perfect synthesis of broken and polished gameplay and features, and because of its homely details and manic scope, still one of the biggest feeling games there is.

The HD port of San Andreas is just terrible. It's a port of the iOS port of the game. This means that several changes that had to be made for it to work as a portable game are still here. The touchscreen-friendly interface is still there, but it doesn't bother me any.

Let's start with the positives of this port over the original:
- Mid-mission checkpoints that you can restart from right away
- Autosave after missions
- Achievements if you're into those
- The game actually allows you to see what clothes you're changing into, rather than placing you in complete darkness
- The controls for the forklift are better in this version

Now for the negatives:
- Several songs have been removed from the soundtrack (Funky President, Runnin' Down a Dream, Express Yourself, Killing in the Name, to name a few)
- The vehicle schools somehow swapped "clockwise" and "counter-clockwise"
- Damaged car parts sometimes turn a completely different colour (always the same colour, depending on the type of vehicle)
- Sound balancing is fucked; sirens and engine noises are far too loud over everything else
- During cutscenes, sometimes sound cuts out completely
- Music skipping in the radio stations (song starts, cuts out into a different song)
- The little intro with the theme song isn't present in this version
- In the mission Life's a Beach, the HUD can just disappear, making it impossible to complete the required dancing minigame
- The mission Homecoming makes the game freeze if you don't approach an objective from the east (you start the mission to the west of the objective)
- The mission Los Desperados has a lot of AI pathfinding issues not present in the original
- Pedalling a bike might as well be impossible
- They added the ability to target people who are in vehicles, so you naturally target those people over the ones shooting at you
- Manual aiming isn't possible when there's something nearby that can be auto-targeted (so basically it's not ever possible)
- The jetpack controls like complete ass
- The tractor can no longer tow vehicles, which means some bulletproof/fireproof/damageproof vehicles can't be obtained any more
- Game automatically makes CJ climb up walls and fences if possible
- The "go back" button in menus is the Y button for some weird reason
- Fire can sometimes be completely invisible for no reason


I highly recommend the PS2, PC (not Steam), and original Xbox versions of this game over the HD ports. However, if they are somehow your only option, San Andreas is still an amazing game even with this huge list of new and exciting flaws.

In all honesty, I don’t feel all that confident or comfortable assessing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Why am I plagued with a looming sense of apprehension? Well, to be frank, it’s because I’m white. I’m not only referring to the fact that my skin pigment lacks so much melanin that I cannot physically tan, as the sun’s rays have always transferred searing burns to my skin instead of a golden sheen. I’m alluding to all of the cultural factors of my ethnic background that have molded my general upbringing whether or not I actively engaged with them or was aware of their status quo alignment in American society at the time. I grew up middle class on a street with three churches of differing Christian denominations, my music of choice was a variation of rock/metal music, and my dad votes Republican. And yes, I was an avid watcher of The Simpsons (a strong white signifier according to Aqua Teen Hunger Force). My background and the one that comprises the cultural iconography of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are as different as cats and dogs, which is why attempting to delve into the substance of the game’s narrative, characters, and real-world parallels may result in a vortex of ignorant poppycock. Still, I have to discuss San Andreas, for it would be detrimental to my reputation as a comprehensive video game critic if I never even uttered a single word on this monumental achievement for the interactive medium. San Andreas is the most significant entry in the infamous Grand Theft Auto franchise, arguably the most exceptional title on the basis of quality, and the true benchmark point for the burgeoning open-world genre.

The gang fights are legendary, the map is terrific and the characters are awesome.

Juuuuuuuust misses perfection for me, but basically one of the all-time time video games in sum. Good stuff.

I distinctly remember my first experience playing GTA Vice City. I could not stop grinning as I stared wide eyed at the headless police officer who lay dead at my feet before I jumped back in a stolen sports car and crashed into more pedestrians and then into the ocean. Some games I'd played throughout the 90s as a kid let me pester NPCs and interact with my environment, but never had I been given the reins to wreak absolute chaos like this. It was fun and freeing. But it also felt like an arcade game, with weapons scattered around the map like powerups which you'd then lose upon death or arrest. And its short campaign felt like organizing activities at a jungle gym, rather than a proper main attraction capital s STORY.

Then one day at my friend's house, he popped in this new GTA game, San Andreas and I realized I was playing something different and special. This wasn't a 3D open world arcade game any more. This was somehow both a character-driven narrative adventure like Ocarina of Time and Morrowind which I loved AND an unbridled sandbox of chaotic fun, all set in a city that felt like a real, living place. I fell in love with each aspect of the game as it unfolded, my mind being blown at each narrative or mechanical reveal, and it quickly became one of my favorite games. I didn't play it again for almost 15 years, but after two replays recently, I'm thrilled to say that each thing I loved held up, even in the face of more recent Rockstar games.

First, the game grabs me immediately with the strength of its story and characters. CJ feels real and relatable and his familial struggles are personal, grounded. I feel deeply how much the characters love Grove Street, how desperately they cling to their outdated code of ethics and how much they loathe seeing it fall to the various predators of the crack epidemic. Grove Street slowly becomes a symbol for optimism in the face of decay, resistance in the face of oppression, and rolling into it always feels like coming home.

Each mission feels like a real accomplishment toward something meaningful, just from the strength of the narrative. But then you're also unlocking new side activities with each mission: character customization, tagging, car modding, gang wars, home burglary, eventually car exporting, flying, business acquisition, and on and on. AND you're also constantly growing stats in driving, cycling, muscle, stamina, and weapons which grant useful benefits, on top of feeling suspiciously like character development. Every moment I spent playing, either progressing the story OR dicking around blowing up civilians, felt meaningful and rewarding. Gang wars in particular transform the experience of openly roaming Los Santos outside of missions into a dynamic, ongoing conflict.

This sense of optimism and progression that permeates the first chapter makes the gut-punch of the betrayal plot twist that much more effective. Being exiled to bum-f*ck nowhere Flint County with your growing empire evaporated and your healing family torn apart again feels like a realistically cruel reality check for me the player as much as CJ. The remaining game chapters detail the climb from that rock bottom to being the king of Los Santos, and it works in broad strokes, even if the details of that journey can sometimes be oddly paced or unevenly toned. I love how CJ really starts to grow up through the San Fierro chapter, abandoning his immature, guns-blazing approach to providing for his people in favor of a smarter, business-oriented approach, while also growing from his naive "grove 4 life" definition of family to one that can include people like Cesar and Woozie. Throughout this and the Las Venturas chapters, we also see him adapt the hardness and ruthlessness needed to maintain a position on top in this brutal world of capitalists and criminals, leaving behind some of the warm innocence that made him so initially endearing, though he always maintains a level of lovable stupidity as he rubs shoulders with real estate tycoons and foreign organized crime leaders. When he finally finds a way to bust his brother out of prison and make it home, he seems like a completely different person than the man that touched down in Los Santos for a funeral months ago, and I love how Sweet calls him out on this, snapping his focus back where it needs to be to tie up loose ends and end the narrative in a satisfying way.

Now, as I mentioned, I'm not without some gripes toward this game, particularly in the middle chapters. Sometimes you go stretches of several missions without CJ seeming to think about his hood or family, which perhaps is narratively realistic but which also can make the narrative feel unfocused. Sometimes things get downright wacky, breaking the grounded grittiness of the early game, like when you single-handedly take on the military and steal a jetpack from Area 69, which you can later bring back to Los Santos and terrorize Ballas from the skies. And there is definitely a large serving of my least favorite part of the GTA franchise--immature sex humor which is often misogynistic, homophobic, or just goofy. Maccer and Kent in particular feel like completely unnecessary "comedic" relief at a point in the narrative where tensions are already lax and CJ is getting a little silly himself.

Ultimately, though, the drive to bring justice to your family and Grove Street overpowers these narrative weak points, and the final chapter of the game is a tour de force, complete with a riot that breaks out in the city, totally transforming the game you thought you knew yet again, and an epic final mission that feels like a rewarding and challenging consummation of the skills you've gained. This game came out merely one year after Vice City. It makes no sense for something so fully realized and yet so colossal to exist at all, let alone to have been created in the context that it was. It's an achievement of gaming broadly and remains one of my favorite games ever made, almost 20 years later.

Por trás de toda a megalomania e o humor politicamente incorreto, tem uma narrativa surpreendentemente madura, que toca temas que até então eram evitados pela indústria de jogos.

CJ e todo o elenco de apoio tem um carisma enorme, e talvez seja o GTA com as missões mais legais da série.

Mecanicamente não tem tantas melhorias como Vice City teve em relação ao III, mas representa o aperfeiçoamento da fórmula até então.