Nick Postagulous
Thursday, October 28, 2004
First Impressions of GTA: San Andreas
One of the reasons I really never played Metroid Prime past the first mission was that, though I found it to be technically excellent, with wonderful controls and lots of neat stuff to do, I just didn't like being in that dark dingy world. Such is the case against GTA:SA so far.
I'm CJ, some poor wretch who's friends are stupid (I think they are supposed to be funny. Ho, ho, look at the wacky druggy I HAVE to work with). I've got around $600 to my name. I lose four missions and reload for every one that I get. There is no easy way to make money, since YOU DON'T GET MONEY FOR DOING MISSIONS. So, the last time I got over the $1000 mark, it was because I mowed down a crowd of people with a stolen car, shot any who survived that, and took all their money.
However, while the core of the gameplay is turning me off majorly, the side stuff is amazing. You can play pool. You can shoot some hoops. You can walk up to any arcade machine and play it (though I must note that the early 90s were a very low point for stand alone video game systems). But, when you play pool, you do so in a dingy bar. When you shoot hoops, you do so in your crap neighborhood where weeds have overgrown. The arcade machines are in dilapidated bars or convenience stores.
I'm hoping Rockstar planning it this way. Because if they were trying to illustrate the plight of some poor kid born into the Compton type area, the captured it. I have no money and no way to make it without random killing. Heck, the game even offered that if I can find a certain type of truck, I can start braking into random people's houses. Sarcastic Whoop! Most missions are me working for either the brain dead druggy pal of mine or for Sam Jackson's character, a bad cop who makes me work for free. I'm limited to about 1/5 of the map that I can see. But this 1/5 is about twice as large as all of Vice City. About 4 times as big as all of GTA3 (using math, that makes San Andreas about 20 times the size of Liberty City).
But I'm constantly frustrated. I have no money. I only have 17 bullets left. Oh, and I forgot about the messups. If you are in a firefight and pull out your camera (yeah, more extra goodies, you can take pictures and save them), the game just might lock up. If you run your favorite mountain bike that you had since you stole it early on in the game into the basketball court, you can't get back on it since it's "inside".
I don't know where any body armor is. The cops are everywhere. The missions don't let me progress any. And I know from X-Play on TechTV that after they played for 10 hours, they still couldn't get out of the crap neighborhood.
Oh, and I took today off work to play this. I think I'll give it another try and, if I'm still discouraged about it, hold off and play Front Mission 3.
After all, the new Ratchet & Clank will ship next week, and the week after that it'll be The Urbz.
Sometimes it's good to be swamped with games. Because, no matter how brilliant a game is, if I don't like it or I suck at it, and both are true in this last GTA, then I might not play it.
I mean, how the heck do you screw up GTA?
