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.

my fav game of all time. gta iv comes close but this is peak gaming. nostalgia plays a big factor but i cant help but include it into my rating. going full speed while "hood took me under" is playing at san andreas has no price. playing woozie or return to san andreas missions has no price. characters are some of the best ever invented. my only critic is that ryder wasn't developed that well but the game was mindblowing in 2004 and almost under every aspect it still holds today.

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.

I'm an old school gamer and have no interest whatsoever in today's game world with its predictable, safe genres. (Yeah, I'm sure there's mindblowing indie games, but I also feel that at my age, gaming really is a waste of time.) My interest in games stopped around 1995, when multimedia became a hype, costs exploded to polish the surface, and publishers became fearful of the financial risks, which -- to me -- effectively killed the marvelous creativity of the early years.

GTA San Andreas is about the only post-1995 game that I played excessively, and that I still occasionally play today. I remember a colleague of mine showing me the game around 2007. He started it up, ran up to a car, opened the door (in that wonderfully exaggerated animation), dragged the driver out, threw him on the floor, got in and drove away. I was immediately absolutely enthusiastic, got myself a copy and in the following winter, I did pretty much nothing but play it in my spare time.

Doing missions and watching cutscenes was fun (the voice acting is great), but I mostly loved the sandbox nature of the game. The best thing is the massive, detailed world open to exploration, and it loved driving my Sanchez through the countryside to discover some shack with a plane, or doing the Las Venturas ring with a Bullet.

And yeah, of course, I loved to just get out and create mayhem and see how long I could survive the constant onslaught of the police. I loved stopping my car in that long motorway tunnel south of Los Santos airport, and then starting to throw Molotov cocktails, creating massive chains of explosions. No helicopter could shoot me down, and the police is so dumb it always comes from behind and can't get over the rails separating the driveway, I could survive for hours there amidst burning and burned-out car wrecks and hear the agonized screams of burning security enforcement agents. Even the tanks were no threat.

Also, sometimes I just went to the beach and beat the shit out of anyone who was unlucky enough to cross my path.

Yeah, of course, GTA SA allowed me to fulfill my darkest dreams of aggression, and boy was it satisfying.

The graphics, of course, are pretty simple, but to me, who thinks 16-color 320x200 EGA is quite luxurious, I often also enjoyed just watching the scenery in the evening or night light. The guys did a great job with the lighting, and the game still looks better than many later games whose clash of colours just make me want to puke.

The main downside, as I mentioned, is the AI. It is incredibly dumb. Once you realize how it works, it often gets incredibly easy (the gang wars especially). But even then, your main enemy is yourself -- I don't know how often I died because I just did some stupid thing which lead to a whole chain of events which left me wasted or busted.

One thing I missed is a "cruising mode". I played it with the keyboard and would have liked the option to go along nicely and peacefully, together with the other traffic, to just watch the scenery go by. At least you can have a nice little train ride on the San Fierro tramway. (Throw Molotovs if it gets boring.)

Anyway, it IS an awesome game which I occasionally like to drag out and still play today if I feel like beating shit up and blowing up the world.

Oh yeah, and the radio stations are great. Even the talk radio which I actually discovered only recently. My fave back in 2007 was K-Jah, but about 80% of them had a great deal of wonderful songs, and the DJs always were hilarious. The black, cynical humour of the game is one of its best things.

San Andreas is easily the best GTA game for me. I remember buying the GTA games on some sale, and eventually I had time to get to it after I graduated college, I think it was a few weeks before Thanksgiving after I graduated college. I decided it would be my first old GTA game, I already beat V a few months earlier and San Andreas is often considered the peak of the franchise by many. San Andreas starts off kind of slow where you are with a gang in a Los Angeles based inner city and doing basic criminal acts. But the game picks up once you hit the big twist and it keeps you hooked until the very end. This game just has so much variety, you have your typical shootout missions, you have plane flying missions, boat riding missions, car races, stealth missions, assassination missions, car chase missions, and that variety is hard to find in these kinds of games. On top of that you have grade A voice work by actual actors like James Woods, Samuel L. Jackson or Charlie Murphy. The characters and wacky World really are what hold this together. The characters in this are just so hilarious and memorable that they stand out. The World has 4 main areas, one that is modeled after an inner city of Los Angeles, one modeled after downtown San Francisco, one modeled after the strip in Las Vegas, and one modeled after rural areas in the midwest. The games map is much bigger than Vice City and offers a lot of variety so you never get too bored of one area.

Now the game isn't perfect, it does suffer from typical GTA issues. The aiming and controls are pretty awkward and stiff, there are often cheap moments where you'll have trouble locking onto enemies, there are the occasional glitches that can make you fail a mission, the flight school missions are also a bit annoying since the plane controls a bit awkward. But these issues really aren't as bad as previous games, and the variety and story keep these issues minimal. Sure San Andreas might have a number of issues but the memorable missions and variety, the locations, the characters, and the ability to play missions and beat them using a variety of different methods are what really brings this game together. On top of having great voice work and a good soundtrack, it easily is my favorite GTA and I'm not sure the series will be able to hit this high mark with future sequels.