You play the role of Carl “CJ” Johnson. It’s 1992 and you’re in the fictional state of San Andreas (based heavily on California) which consists of three main cities – the Los Angeles-based Los Santos, the San Francisco-based San Fierro, and the Las Vegas-based Last Venturas – in addition to a large amount of a lot of countryside, which enables San Andreas to eclipse the size of the already-massive Vice City. Each of the three cities pretty accurately reflect their source, so you’ll find many hills in San Fierro and the signature fog and gang violence in Los Santos, while Las Venturas has a never-ending glow of neon. The story is still as dark as any of the other stories in the GTA franchise but yet somehow San Andreas’ plot oozes much more atmosphere and feels far more realistic than anything we have seen before. The game begins with CJ returning back to Los Santos after 5 years in Liberty City. His mother has recently died and he is back in the neighborhood in an attempt to sort a couple of things out. However, in true GTA style the beginning is never good. Home for the first time you are pulled by two cops who frame you for the murder of one of their colleagues and only let you go as long as you do some of their dirty work. Your first priority is to reestablish your old gang, The Grove Street Families, which has fallen apart and no longer carries any influence anywhere, thus allowing rival gangs to take over and sell crack on the streets of your home. This is where the main focus of the game is at the beginning, setting up your gang, gaining influence and cleaning up the streets. From there on the plot twists and turns to take you to the other areas of San Andreas.
Arguably the biggest addition to San Andreas is in relation to your character. Unlike past GTA games, CJ is fully customizable. All kinds of items of clothing can be bought from shops in which to dress CJ in. It doesn't just stop with clothing either as there a huge amount of hair styles, beards and tattoos to decorate him with too. Additionally, CJ now has RPG-like statistics for all kinds of things such as his muscle strength, his weight and his stamina, all of which determine how well he performs. Eating the right food and training at the gym will reap rewards when your controlling a super strong CJ who can run lightning quick over long distances. Stuff your face with pizza and don't exercise and he'll be out of breath in seconds and be a sitting duck for enemies. There are also stats that increase while you are playing. For example, by using a bike for long periods your bike riding stats will increase leading to less skids, better control and a smaller chance of being knocked off your bike by a crash. Weapon proficiency can also be increased this way too. Use sub-machine guns frequently and players will eventually gain the ability to strafe and fire their weapons simultaneously while wielding two guns instead of one. Hand-to-hand combat has also been drastically upgraded with a wider variety of moves, the option to learn new techniques at gyms across the state, and the incorporation of a limited combo system. All the familiar weapons make a return such as shotguns, sniper rifles, rocket launchers and semi automatic weapons with a few new ones making an appearance.
Halo 2 isn't the only one with 'dual wielding' this year....
The game plays much like the previous titles - complete a mission and another one becomes available or a new character becomes involved allowing you to do missions for them as well. You’ll always have two or three mission paths at any one time, and it’s up to you to a point when you complete them. Missions are now much more varied than before and much more focused on doing over enemy criminals rather than tackling the Police. While past games tended to rely on getting from A to B alot, San Andreas mixes things up more. As well as your usual car races, escort and delievery missions there's plenty of times where you'll be sitting on the back of a bike shooting down enemies, stealthily killing your way through guarded Mansions or throwing Molotov Cocktails through hotel windows in order to burn it down. Alot of missions rarely attract the attention of the Police which I think is a very good move on Rockstar's part seeing as a sizeable chunk of the game is simply based on gang-warfare rather than risking the lives of the innocent public. Some of the missions however teach you brand new things that you can get up to in San Andreas when you are not participating in missions. For example one mission has you breaking into somebody’s house to steal weaponry. Because the person you are robbing is actually asleep you have to move slowly around the house and steal certain objects from the house without waking up the owner. A noise meter will track your every move as you creep about the house, make too much noise and you fail the mission. The upshot is though that you have just discovered something else you can do in San Andreas at night when you are not furthering the story. You can now burgle houses whenever you want, all that from just completing another fantastic mission.
San Andreas is full of these secondary missions and activities. As well as house robberies you can plan to hijack petrol tankers in order to sell them to the local petrol station, work as a valet at a Hotel, take part in a destruction derby or even participate in 'pimping' missions where you go around taxi-ing your 'bitches' around. Should you ever want to serve some good to the world the vigilante missions from the previous game return with a press of the R3 button in any Police Car, Ambulance, Fire Truck or Taxi (the latter being a great source of income for the early hours of the game).
Another new, and potentionally time consuming, element in San Andreas is the presence of gangs. As the un-appointed leader of the the Grove Street Family gang, you’ll have the option of going around other gang areas and provoking gang wars. Once you take out a few enemy gang members, a slew of other members will come out looking to take you down. If you can hold them off long enough you’ll acquire those few blocks of territory and make it your own. The more territory you own the more cash your gang earns you as well as the more people you can recruit to go on bigger gang wars. Also, if you're in your territory, they’ll also come to your aid if the police are on your tail.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has also introduced a relationship element to the gameplay. While it is nowhere near as deep and as involving as soemthing like The Sims, you are still expected to take your girl to restaurants and bars to keep her happy. Maintain a strong relationship and your lady may suprise you with a gift or two. Additionally, San Andreas is full of little mini games. In your very house there's a video games console with a few games to play on, or take a trip to the local bar and have a game of pool or a blast on one of the arcade machines. If you fancy a game of Basketball you can always take a short walk across the road where a ball and basket are ready and waiting. There's also things like a Dance Dance Revolution-like lowrider event where you have to press the buttons in accordance to the orders on screen. While these can a lack a degree of polish - the ball physics in pool isn't exactly perfect for example and the DDR isn't the most accurate control - they're all good fun and help further the feel of a real world.
And it's the convincingness of the world that makes San Andreas special. More-so than ever Rockstar has created a fully believable, living, breathing world for you to explore every nook and cranny available. Each of the three cities of San Andreas are absolutly huge with Los Santos alone being just as big as Vice City. Actually, huge doesn't even come close to the size of San Andreas, only once you've played it yourself could the sheer size of everything be appreciated. Not only is the size impressive, it's the diverse variety of environments and different atmospheres coming together to create one of the most visually absorbing games ever. The scenic calmness of the open lands to the far west, the inner city hood towards the east, and steep hills of the San Francisco like city located in the North West give every section of San Andreas’ map a different look and attitude. Watching the moon at night in the open grasslands or the sun rise over the coastline is picturesque. Weather also plays a big part with showers of rain thundering down on the tarmac streets, mist rolling up from the hills and dust blowing through the dry deserts all with day and night passing perfectly. All vehicles, from bikes to bi-planes, are very well moddeled and retain the superb damage model system that the previous 3D games boasted. The fact that loading times have been cut totally extend the immersion even further.
It's not just the visual side of the game that deserves all the praise, the sound work is equally remarkable. The seamless way in which the DJs react to the in-game environment, and from an intertextual standpoint, merge better with the player's situation far more effectively than in the previous games is just inspiring. An example of this would be at 8am on the game's clock Playback's DJ commented how it was time to rise for the early morning, or on the K-Jah West station where DJ commented on how it was going to be a rainy day and that people should take in their washing, whilst in the countryside I traversed at the time, buckets were pouring down from the skies. Later on you'll even hear public reaction to some of the events that you caused within the game. The voice acting is simply superb and sets a new benchmarks for speech within a game. The story is made all the more engrossing due to the extensive voice talent present. Samuel L Jackson is brilliant and instantly recognizable playing the corrupt cop Frank Tenpenny, hile Ice T plays rapper Madd Dogg with understandable ease - and they are just a few. It's not just the between-mission cut-scenes that impress, but also the regular colourful exchanges between characters as you're driving, and all manner of banter during each mission. It doesn't just stop with the characters either. Even the average joe on the street has something to say. Just yesterday I overheard a conversation between two men with one telling the other about a new nightclub he should check out. It's things like that which push San Andreas's world to new level of authenticity.
One of the best and most celebrated parts of the GTA series is its soundtrack. The radio stations in San Andreas reflect the various cultures in the state and also cater for everyone’s taste. Old favorites return such as the Chat station, while new ones arrive to reflect the overall theme such as Bounce FM and Radio Los Santos, which is the most appropriate for the era and as it focuses on West Coast gangsta rap and where you will hear the likes of Dr. Dre and Tupac Shakur. The other radio stations are a mix of various music including country, funk, soul, hip-hop and classic rock. Overall I don't think it's quite up to the standard set by the past 2 games. The Chatterbox of GTA3 has yet to be matched for hilarity while the complete lack of Punk music confuses me when the early 90's was a big time for the genre. A neat thing about the radio stations is that when you enter different vehicles the radio sounds different. For example enter a truck and the radio sounds tinny whereas you enter a nice sports car and you can hear the bass boost at work.
I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike.
So after paragraph after paragraph of praise, is there actually anything wrong with San Andreas? Well, yes. By far my biggest problem of the game is, when failing a mission you can waste a lot of time traveling back to it. While Rockstar have included a 'Trip Skip' feature in an attempt to avoid repeat travelling of sections, it's far less useful than you think, given that most of the time you've lost all your weapons through getting busted/wasted, or, worse, you've got to spend several minutes getting back to person you got the mission from in the first place, so having to resort to reloading your last save file is often the easiest and quickest way of getting back in the action again. Why Rockstar couldn't simply offer a mission-retry option I'll never understand. If they made it an option, people who wanted to retry could and people who wanted to do things the normal way could do things that way too. While it was a minor problem in the comparatively small GTA3 and Vice City, San Andreas's huge size magnifies the issue leading to incease frustration when a mission goes wrong as the thought of wasting another ten is infuriating.
There are a few more minor problems too. The lock on system of the GTA games has never quite been right. While San Andreas improves on past versions a great deal, it can still be more troublesome than it really needs to be. Overall control of CJ is great. Running is easier and quicker and he can now swim, jump over fences and pull himself up ledges. But shooting can still be a problem at times. It'll lock on people you don't want to lock on, it won't lock on until the camera has them in view (meaning if an enemy shoots you from behind you would need to turn yourself AND the camera around just to deal with them.) and the manual aim camera will often reset to it's original position when you release the button meaning you can sometimes run straight into the open when you didn't mean to.
Also, I seemed to have trouble with the in game map. The zoomed in look is sometimes hard to follow when you have to travel long distances. This leads to pausing to look at the full map multiple times following your path as you go along. This is always a problem when you're first getting to know your way around a GTA game but with San Andreas it’s even more apparent since the world is so much bigger. But, the addition of a 'marker' you can place on the map helps a great deal in identifying key areas and junctions and goes some way to making things easier.
My final gripe is more down to the PS2 hardware than the game and that is the problem of graphical pop up. For 99% of the time, it's not a problem. Yes, things would look better without trees appearing out of nowhere, but it doesn't effect the game. But then there's that 1% when you crash into something that wasn't there 2 seconds ago. One race in particular I remember where I had to race through a farmyard barn. I lined my car up perfectly to go through it, only for a ramp to appear out of nowhere sending me spinning into the sky and crashing down on my roof thus failing the mission (and leading to another ten minutes to retry the race again). Like I said, this has only happened a few times so it is only a tiny problem, but it was still annoying nonetheless.
I hate to finish on a negative point because, despite my gripes, San Andreas is an utterly fantastic game and a strong contender for Game of the Year. There's still a hell of alot I've not even mentioned, like being able to paint and customize your own car, ride pedal bikes, steal trains, waste hours in casino's playing Poker and jumping out of airplanes & skydiving with a parachute. It's a massive game with an uncountable number of side missions, mini games and objectives that’ll suck hours and hours away from your life. Though there is sort of a feeling of "been there done that" with San Andreas being the third installment of the series, it far surpassed my expectations and it still delivers the lasting boost to keep the game fresh and more importantly fun. Fans of GTA will probably be reading this with a copy already glued inside their PS2 while those who may have lost interest with Vice City or have never even played GTA, will curiously be wondering if San Andreas is worth the time. Simply put, everyone should own San Andreas. Everyone.
Please Note: We tried contacting the Office of Film and Literature Classification for a comment regarding Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It is completely uncut and we were a little concerned it may soon be pulled off store shelves. The OFLC only has the right to re-classify titles within 30 days of their original classification date and this date has since passed. Once again, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is completely uncut and Australians miss out on nothing.
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