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[jough]

Got the PC version this week - and it is good.

The level of complexity compared with Vice City (my former favourite game) is just astounding.  I'm not as impressed with the gameplay, some of which is tedious and frustrating, but just exploring the cit(y)(ies), messing around, driving and listening to music, is really good.  Vice City was pretty two dimensional - flat and simple in layout (more so than GTA III, for that matter) but San Andreas is huge, with bridges and highways and city streets and cloverleaves and overpasses and drainage sluices (like in Terminator 2) and harbours and boats and... oh man.  And that's just the landscape.

It's not as visually stunning as Half-Life 2, and the combat isn't as exciting, but for just cruising around in a digital world, accept no substitute.

There goes my weekend.

[Ben-San]

As I think I've said before, I think the weakest part of the modern GTAs is the story missions. San Andreas has a good storyline but being forced to trudge through the frequently-tedious missions to play with the huge area they give you to run around and do whatever in is just incredibly frustrating.

I don't normally recommend something like this, but if you have access to a form of cheating that makes the story missions optional rather than obligatory I highly recommend using it. I swapped memory cards with a friend to get a save with the entire map unlocked and have enjoyed the game much more than I did before. I still have a save in the early game but I haven't felt any driving need to pick it back up. I play games to have fun. I only want a game to make me earn my fun if the earning is itself fun.

In conclusion: San Andreas is an awesome toy with a fairly mediocre game attached.

[AugustWest]

Wow, that's really fascinating that the two of you should say that.

I rented GTA:SA this week.  It's the first of the GTA's I've ever played.  My take is very much like yours.  The world is great and it's fun just to steal a car and drive around.  The missions were a little too tough for me.  I had a hard time getting past the Drive-by.  Then once I did I have to go rescue Sweet and am getting shot up doing that.

I think it would be nice if it were more flexible in how you do you criminal activity.  For instance, if I could just steal a car, take it to a chop shop and make money for it.  Or mug people.

But it's cool just driving around LA, uh LS.

[St_Zartan]

I think it would be nice if it were more flexible in how you do you criminal activity.  For instance, if I could just steal a car, take it to a chop shop and make money for it.  Or mug people.

In the first GTA for the PC, you had to score a certain number of points to clear each city. And, if you fucked up a mission, you could not do it all over again - not to mention that failing a mission usually happened along the lines of INCREDIBLE DEATH and losing your guns, score multipliers, etc. So most folks would end up, sooner or later, spending thankless hours (no in-game saves!) stealing Nice Cars and taking them down to the docks to sell them, trying to earn the cash to CAN I JUST BE FINISHED AND SAVE AND GO EAT DINNER NOW. Ahem. That was a tedious fuck*ng dynamic.

There are lots of ways to be a bastard, though, AW. You can mug people - the best way, if you're just starting out and not weighed down with seven different assault rifles, is to grab yourself a knife, sneak up on hookers / drug dealers and slit their throat all stealth stylezzz. Completing the pimping missions is a good way to earn cash and unlock a neat little side-benefit - those missions alternate between "take your time" and "OH MY GOD GET TO THE OTHER SIDE OF TOWN", which is nice.

Basically, this game is not a rental.

But it's cool just driving around LA, uh LS.

The point's been made, here and elsewhere, that San Andreas is a great toy. I disagree with Ben in that I liked a lot (but oh my god hell no not all of them) of the story missions - what I would have liked is, at the end of the game, the ability to return to hot spots on the map to replay any mission you previously cleared.

I was really hoping that Rockstar would drop something like an expansion pack or whatever for SA: simply put, I adored the setting, and even though I played the game for fuck*ng hours, I was sorry when there was pretty much nothing left that I wanted to do. You can tell a lot of time and care went into building San Andreas, and yet it seemed to me that some areas were grievously under-used. Los Santos is pretty much packed with things to do, side missions, distractions, etc.; by the square inch it is the richest area in San Andreas. I wish they'd spread some of that around to the small towns, wooded areas, and suburbs.

People with the PC version - I hear you can custom-build your own radio station(s)? Tell me all about this feature; it alone is almost enough to make me check this game out again.

[St_Zartan]

One more thing I wanted to mention about SA:

I got the feeling that, at the beginning of the game, you're basically a good kid thrown into a bad situation. I liked that - Vice City starred a sociopathic vacuum with a charmingly smart mouth who was also thrown into a bad situation, and I thought this was a neat narrative change of pace.

By the end of the game - and I strongly doubt I'm spoiling anything here - you're a mass murderer. There's no way around that.

When I heard about SA's plot, and then all the attendant crowing about "open-ended gameplay", I thought to myself - OK, there's going to be several ways to beat the missions; surely at least one path allows CJ to keep his humanity (such as it is) intact.

I think the story, for all its length and breadth, needed to reflect the fact that you have gone from a halfway-decent individual to a cold-blooded thug who has gunned down hundreds of people - or offer a way to avoid that path. Yeah, you're reading that right: I was disappointed because a game called Grand Theft Auto did not offer enough non-violent options.

[slink]

I'm with Zart in that I enjoyed most of the story missions. Some of them were real bitches, but I always felt it worthwhile, since the cut scenes in the GTA's tend to be great.
I played most of it on the PS2, but knew I was going to get as much play as I did Vice City on the PC so went ahead and got it.
Have to say, I would also dig a way to go back and play some of the old missions. Was the same way with the last two.

I must admit I'm biased, in that I've loved GTA, despite it's flaws, since the start, but especially since 3.
Oh, and it's all just worth it for Woozie.

[Ben-San]

When I heard about SA's plot, and then all the attendant crowing about "open-ended gameplay", I thought to myself - OK, there's going to be several ways to beat the missions; surely at least one path allows CJ to keep his humanity (such as it is) intact.

I believe I said this during the initial pre-SA's-release rumormongering: People who call GTA open-ended are dirty liars or do not know what the term means.

In an open-ended game, you would, as you say, be able to choose a non-criminal path, or even at least a different criminal path; so many missions in SA could have easily achieved the same stated goal with theft instead of mass slaughter or other alternative methods. ("Life's A Beach" is the early example that sticks out hugely in my mind: in a game called, as you note, Grand Theft Auto, you need something that's locked in a car... so you enter a dance competition to win it. What?)

GTA is not and as far as I know never has been open-ended. You have no control over what missions you do, what general order you do them in (beyond situations where you have Missions A, B, and C and must do all of them in any order before D opens up and the plot continues), or what direction your story takes. A few missions are optional, but have no effect on the plot. You can spend as long as you like doing random crap between missions, but if you want to go outside your prescribed area you have to do more plot missions, and when you do the plot picks up right where it left off no dustier for the week you spent using a tow-truck to hurl cop-cars off bridges. The game is as on-rails as Super Mario Brothers, but without warp zones.

Is this inherently a flaw? No, not really. For fairly obvious reasons, open-endedness and depth of plot tend to be conflicting design goals, and San Andreas has a better plot than any of the GTAs before it. The reason I get all ranty about this is because people constantly claim GTA is open-ended when it blatantly is not.

Oh, and Zart, about those hundreds of deaths CJ caused? They were mostly optional and therefore not relevant to the plot. It would be interesting if the game kept a killcount and changed your ending to suit, though.

Edit: Regarding useful non-plot criminal activity, a few other options do become available over the course of the game: hijacking freight trains, burglary, etc. I do miss Vice City's holdups, though, especially with the huge number of new stores scattered everywhere in the game. Going into a store and whipping out a gun only to have everyone cower and no wanted level appear was a little disappointing the first time.

[jough]

Yeah, I tried to rob a convenience store only to be disappointed that I couldn't grab any cash.  I just ended up trying to shoot everyone in the store in the head, which isn't easy when they have their hands over their heads.

I got stuck on a few of the missions (I'm stuck on two of them right now and keep going back and forth between them, trying not to cheat) like the Drive-By which was hard until I realised that you DON'T have to listen to the NPCs in the game - they'll keep calling you an asshole and telling you to speed up.  But don't, and they'll just kill the enemies and you'll be on your way.

The Sweet's Girlfriend mission was also one that took me a few turns.  The trick?  Before taking on the mission, steal a 4-door sedan and bring it to in front of sweet's house.  Then recruit three gang members (you'll need a high enough respect rating to be allowed to have three followers, so get a few tattoos and wear some decent clothing) and THEN start the mission.  When you go to Sweet's, bring your bangers with you.  Then you can run over a number of the enemies with your car, and your homies will drive-by shoot a few, and then you only have to waste one or two of them.  Piece of cake.

I found the missions REALLY difficult until I started going to the gym to build muscle and stamina, and then gathering a few homies to go to an enemy gang controlled neighbourhood and wasting a bunch of enemies to get more guns and ammo, and build up gun-skill levels in the various weapons.  It's nearly impossible to aim and shoot if you're not at least rated a "gangster."  

There are a dazzling array of stats that the game keeps track of.  Like how many people you've killed, how many cops, how many head shots, how many wheelies, distance travelled in various vehicles, etc.

The missions are already starting to get a little tedious for me.  For instance, there's one early on (I'm still very early in the game) where you have to "dance" a car with hydrolics.  I have yet to figure out how to do this with a keyboard and a penis - especially when it wants you to bounce the car in a SW direction.  Do I press Left and Down at the same time?  It always tells me that I'm too late.

I'm not going to buy a game pad just to play this game.  Besides, aiming with the penis is a lot easier than trying to aim with a joystick.

So now I'm stuck on that mission as well as the one where OG Loc tries to escape on a motorcycle and you try to follow him through sharp alleys that result in you falling off your bike every two seconds.

I've been spending time just driving around the highways and countryside on a bike just to build up my motorcycle skill, and I've now taken to my own mini mission of exploring the city and painting over the rival gang signs to unlock new weapons and stuff.  It's really hard to find weapons if you die or are arrested - so much so that if I fail a mission I just re-load from my saved game rather than try again from the hospital or police station.

And yes, there have been times where I had to go somewhere and needed to drive all the way back to CJ's crib just to save my game.  The lack of being able to save anywhere is a little frustrating.

[Ben-San]

Always make notes of where weapons are located. There are lots of them lying around if you know where to find them. It took me a surprisingly long time just to find all the weapons lying around the vicinity of CJ's house.

The gang tags are a good idea to do. The weapon pickups that spawn aren't amazing, but they're better than other stuff you'll get before leaving Los Santos. Iirc they also make your gangmates better-equipped.

Run and bicycle everywhere to build up your health and stamina. (Also, bicycle skill is fun because when you max it out you can bunny-hop onto rooftops.) Hitting a car's tire counts as a successful shot for building up your gun skills even if the tire is already popped and doesn't damage the car's body, so if it doesn't give you a feeling of being a cheater you can very quickly max out your gun skills on a parked car.

Buy every safehouse you can; as you say, it's a pain to have to drive a long way just to save, and saving restores your health and clears your wanted level. You can get enough money for this by killing drug dealers, which also slightly increases your respect and thus the number of gangmates you can recruit.

Anyhow, that's just my crappy advice. I learned it by playing around and seeing what works, so.. yeah. Do whatever.

[St_Zartan]

I've been spending time just driving around the highways and countryside on a bike just to build up my motorcycle skill, and I've now taken to my own mini mission of exploring the city and painting over the rival gang signs to unlock new weapons and stuff.  It's really hard to find weapons if you die or are arrested - so much so that if I fail a mission I just re-load from my saved game rather than try again from the hospital or police station.

There is no shame in using a strategy guide or FAQ while finding all 100 gang signs etc. I did just that - even knowing where they all were, the process took literally hours, and, cynically, I wasn't too surprised to discover that some of the hidden items in this game are so completely fuck*ng obscure that they could only really be found with a strategy guide or a hardcore case of Asperger's. I think my enjoyment of San Andreas was greatly enhanced by having readily available weaponry (as an aside, there's conveniently located armor in the drainage canal behind Sweet's house) - the game is challenging enough as a game without the added tedium and frustration of making tedious, complex FedEx trips all over town to replenish weapons / ammo.

If you go around finding the signs on a motorbike or a bicycle (and you'll certainly need that manuverability), you can pretty much expect to max out your stats in those vehicles. I really did appreciate the way SA implemented the improvement mechanic - you really can feel a difference in both shooting and driving as time goes on.

Oh, and it's all just worth it for Woozie.

I feel the same way about Toreno. That was a wonderful piece of casting, and yet another reason why I wish I could replay old missions.

People who call GTA open-ended are dirty liars or do not know what the term means.

Yeah, you know how buzzwords get thrown around in the wild world of games journalism. Hell, remember blast processing? I think people were pretty much using "open-ended" as a synonym for words like "flexible" and "rich" - you can, as you pointed out, take a break from the plot to spend a week BMX racing or staging spectacular crashes or just about whatever else you can imagine* without being penalized.  Hell, it's practically encouraged - in Jough's case, he'd be well-advised to forget about that irritating OG Loc mission until he built up some motorcycle skillzzz. Oh, and remember "Farewell, My Love"? Ugh.

In my ideal situation, the entire map with all non-story missions (schools, properties, etc) would be available right from the start. The deliberately inaccessible nature of a lot of things is almost mocking. That there is a PC version gives me hope that the game will eventually be modded to allow conceits like this.

I have to disagree about most of the murders being optional - even apart from the alarmingly frequent assassination / HOLY SHIT KILL ALL THESE GUYS missions (for a game all proud of having added "stealth elements", they sure didn't get a lot of mileage out of them), you've got the whole gang turf thing. This isn't Planescape: Torment - you're not going to talk the Ballas into giving up their territories.

The whole mass murder thing is fine when you're controlling what is more or less a cypher, like in, say, Time Crisis. But when you try to shoehorn a complex plot / character into that role, it feels weird, especially at certain dramatic points in the game in which CJ seems almost reluctant to and sheepish about simply pulling the trigger on his antagonists. Oh, earlier you popped the skull of some anonymous blowjob because you wanted to drive his Corolla into a river, but now you've got a Very Bad Dude dead to rights and suddenly you're Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

[Ben-San]

Fair enough on the killings. Perhaps rather than 'optional' it would be fair to say 'extras'.. if he's not a named character with a credited voice actor, he doesn't count. And if someone dies and it's not in a cinematic, it also doesn't count.

And seconded on the gang tag map thing. I get the feeling that the gang tags are really intended to be an optional bonus that only the super hardcore will get, except that you will have giant headaches if you don't do it. It would be way less head-slamming-against-wall-inducing if you got one pickup every twenty or so tags like in previous games instead of a bunch when you finally get all 100. It would defuse some of the sense of futility you get while tagging before you give in and download a map of their locations.

[jough]

I found 52 of the tags just by wandering around the city and exploring on BMX or motorcycle (it's almost impossible to "sight see" in an auto).

I haven't used any cheats yet (actually, I tried a bunch of them and some are incredibly hilarious, like the clown town or ninja town cheats, and the Mega Punch cheat that sends people flying down the street is fun too) but I quickly quitted the game and restarted again to get to some serious playing.

I did download a map from GameFaqs to find the rest of the tags.  Some of them are hard to find even when you're standing on top of where the map tells you they are.  But I'm at about 70 now after spending a couple hours finding and tagging (and getting shot at a lot, and wasting a lot of gang members, and running from the police, and watching my motorcycle get stolen and having to find a new one, etc.).

I'll find all of the tags because I'm committed now, but then I hear that there are oysters, hossshoes, and photos to be taken?   I don't know if I can go through another 250 of these things after the next 30, especially since there are no interim bonuses like in Vice City or III.

I like how fast the traffic is on the freeway, but the number of accidents is just astounding.  And I'm also annoyed by how cars will just keep ramming you until your vehicle explodes (although it does seem to take a lot more to make a car explode as compared to Vice City).

I found the pimp mobile and am enjoying the long drives of the pimping mini-missions, and while I've only done two pickups I'm hoping it's not like the old ambulence or vigilante missions where you have to do ten IN A ROW without the car getting too damaged in order to get your pimpin' bonus.  I also stored the Broadway (the pimpin' car) in my garage.  I'll be a little annoyed again if I pull it out of the driveway, press 2 to start a pimpin' mission, and find that somehow it's been downgraded to a regular car because I didn't pick it up at a designated pimpin' location.

I'm not too worried about the other areas opening up as I'm still getting lost in the remarkably huge Los Santos.  The level of playable land area, and the details that go into the various roadways, is incredible.

I'm most impressed with the highways and road structures of this game.  I wonder if they hired city planners to help with the layout, because the roads in this game are better designed than the roads around Philly.

Anyway, right now I'm just ignoring the missions and finding tags, doing some pimping, and getting into minor skirmishes to bolster my gun fighting skills.   I did the gym thing for a few "days" early on and now my stamina and muscle are maxed out.  And I tend to just buy meals five or six at a time and just work off the fat through running or bicycling.  It's better than having your muscle and stamina decrease because you haven't eaten.

I can see having to find food will become annoying after awhile, though.  There really should be a way of either not making repetitive tasks tedious (through variety or something) or else mitigating the necessity of such things through completing an asset - like you complete the five "Burger Shot" missions and after that you don't have to eat anymore.

So basically I just want to have fun and blow stuff up.  Some of the missions are really fun but I've found most of them I just want to "get through" so I can find new missions that may be more fun.

I'm sure I'll break down and use cheats after awhile, although there's no cheat that will make the Dance Dance Revolution type of car bopping work.  So another nice feature would be to have a "mark this as done" feature so you could just be DONE with a mission that's obnoxious and move on.

I mean, the game shouldn't get in the way of your enjoyment.

[jough]

Oh, also, finding the Terminator 2-esque drainage ditch system (gloriously trafficless) has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of getting from place to place.

The tunnels aren't that complex, and you can get to and from any major area of the city through them in about 1/4th of the time it would take to drive through traffic, and the nice long stretches of nothing tend to be a good place to built up your driving skills, too, since the levelling-up for vehicles seems to be based on mileage and nothing else.

[Ben-San]

Most of the cheats aren't actually all that helpful, I've found.

Saving the game removes your hunger; another reason to snap up safehouses.

I still haven't collected the oysters, hossshoes, and photos. I keep meaning to, although the oysters would be completely useless to me now.

The freeway accidents are just hilarious. I've taken to standing by the side of the road and watching the carnage.

Every Broadway is a pimpmobile, no matter where you find it. It's a lowrider, too, so you can get it tricked out at the lowrider place and even use it for the annoying DDRmobile mission if you like.

[jough]

Ben-San, are you playing the PC version or the PS2?

I'm amazed by people playing the PC version talking about things in the Las Vegas-esque city already - I mean, I don't know how many hours they must play the thing, but I'm in no hurry.  I've been playing Vice City a little over the past year, and yes, I've played through the whole game thrice (well, not to 100% completion) but most of the time it's just driving around, blowing shit up.