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When you talk about this generation of consoles there are two names that come to most people’s minds. You have Halo the franchise which helped launch the Xbox platform, then having a successful sequel. You then have the Grand Theft Auto series which helped to define the mood of games this generation with open-ended gameplay, themes tied closely to gangster movies, and tons of violence. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas improves on much of what GTA III and GTA: Vice City created but at the same time it has tons of issues that the guys at Rockstar should have ironed out in the first place.
San Andreas takes place in the early 90’s, starting off with a “Boys n’ the Hood” inspired attitude, and you are Carl Johnson. San Andreas itself is comprised of three cities; one is Los Santos, based off of Los Angeles. San Fierro is the game’s San Francisco, and lastly Las Venturas, which is based from Las Vegas. As “CJ” you are coming home to the ghetto of Los Santos from Liberty City to attend your mother’s funeral. Your mother has been killed by someone in the ghetto, and from the start you get a huge dose of harsh reality. When CJ gets there, he realizes that the city he grew up in is falling apart and that he needs to stick around to help get things running right again. You are accompanied by three of your friends, the overweight Big Smoke, the Eazy-E lookin’ Ryder, and your brother Sweet. Together you guys have to try and make a name for your gang once more. That is your goal in the beginning in the game, but unlike the past Grand Theft Auto’s your main goal will constantly change from one to another in San Andreas and if you gain power or not is just a side-effect of these goals. Along the way you meet a lot of memorable characters, see cameos from previous GTA characters, and do tons more.
When I say there are three cities, these are three full cities with all kinds of things to do in them, with countryside in between them that also has things to do. The land mass is huge in the title, it would probably take you about thirty minutes to get from one end of the full map to another. While there are you missions that you do to progress the story, you also have tons of little things you can do that will take up your time. Such things like spraying graffiti tags, doing race challenges, taxi driving, putting out fires with a fire engine, secure gang territory, parachuting off of a mountain, and so on. Then again you can always do my favorite GTA pass-time, and go on massive killing sprees. Early on in the game you become extremely powerful and have plenty of money and guns to help make the game easy, but the developers did a good job of knocking you down a few pegs shortly after gaining all this wealth and power.
The two biggest additions to gameplay are the ability to ride a bicycle and swimming. Bicycling means you can now get around much faster since a bike can fit through tighter areas, but it is also easier to crash on one. The more you use a bike the better you get at it, so that you can bike much faster, and bunny hop higher. It becomes ridiculous to a point though when you are out-biking cars going at full speed and bunny-hopping over five cars at once. There are mini-games that go along with bicycling though, which brings some more depth to the title. The swimming aspect frees you from the deaths you would get in the previous two that you would get if you accidentally crashed in to a waterfront. It is pretty straight forward when you swim, and you can actually find some special items under water at times.
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