Plus the union busting controversies and the fact that V is overrated and has imo a quality of writing deterioration from IV approaching the level of a Bethesda game.
In other news, I finally got 100 % in the good version of San Andreas. (pictured, the tutorial screen I got after I wanted to go on a rampage with the free tank to celebrate)
Absolute banger of a game, a definite masterpiece. Even as updates have taken away songs from the radio, or the ability to mod the game (which I was never able to get back without having the game become too unstable). Annoyingly, there was a bug that caused it to freeze for good whenever some menus loaded in, requring a restart. Especially in clothes’ stores and, most annoyingly, the racing minigames. Those were a pain, also especially with how AI traffic likes to change lanes with no warning and make you crash.
The early game and the Las Venturas part are by far the best. San Fierro’s story is kinda weak compared to the rest of the game, and the return to Los Santos is kinda monotonous in forcing you to take over a set amount of gang territories before you are allowed to get to the final mission, especially after that excellent Casino Robbery arc in LV and other iconic missions, such as the one where you get the jetpack. But basically my only bone to pick with the story is how Ryder’s betrayal and character arc were handled. That is alleged to be due to a dispute between Rockstar and the VA.
100%-ing the game for the first time took me 37 hours. In a more modern game, probably double that. The 2000s were truly the peak of gaming, and I am saying this because of my own age’s bias. Hardware that was suddenly technically advanced enough to allow experimentation and ambitious projects, but not enough to allow the current amounts of bloat or free money features.
San Andreas really is the peak of that series. What is the best way to play it these days?
I’m still a sucker for Red Dead Redemption 1 & 2 as far as Rockstar open world slop goes. I think I’m more generous when they’re trying to evoke a specific time and place.
I’ve played the original, the mobile port and the “HD” version. No matter how technically accurate they were, some of the jank was a part of the experience. The “fog” preventing you from seeing the whole ass map the second you got in a plane was a technical limitation, but it’s also retroactively an artistic one. The draw distance was a good thing, rather than a bad thing.
Tl;dr pirate the original.
The flying mission section on mouse + keyboard is a pain, but its still preferable than the ports.
Yeah being able to see the whole map from the air would definitely make it feel much smaller. I also agree with @Gosplan14_the_Third@hexbear.net that the early game and LV sections were where it peaked.
The late game return to Los Santos was also wild because it was supposed to evoke the LA riots of 1992 but stripped of their historical context which was pretty fucked up.
Yeah, the mention that the HD releases are missing some of the music seems like a big loss since the soundtracks really made San Andreas and Vice City evoke thier settings.
I was actually playing the original version I bought on steam like a decade ago. It still removed music through patches whenever licenses ran out.
Sometimes I dust off my PS2 purely for San Andreas and Vice City. S tier games.
NGL, if i dusted off my PS2 I’d be playing Zone of the Enders or Zeonic Front or something lol (or I’d just emulate since I don’t have a CRT)
I think I still have San Andreas and Vice City sitting around somewhere. They were super fun for their era.
i can’t get over the camera shit but i know people who insist vice city stories is even better than san andreas
On pc with mods
The original game then install SAMP and have some real RP fun. GTA 5 RP is ass compared to original SAMP servers.
Although SAMP is abandoned and open.mp or MTA:SA are the newer clients.
I was big into playing SAMP for years. I spent maybe five years playing daily. I mostly just play single player now, but still have the SAMP client installed. Used to hit up RP servers wearing one of the homeless skins and holler Marx quotes. Would text random phone numbers Marx stuff too. I miss that part a lot.
Not really a gamer anymore but San Andreas is amazing and I couldn’t believe how boring V is.
San Andreas had the most culture in any GTA game . Having three cities was a strength .
Best gamss are made by small teams, there’s literally no mainstream title I would splurge that much money on.
Tbh, I’m still playing V, but it has more to do with the aesthetics than anything else. It’s flat, feels unalive, and apart from the story mode main quest(s), it feels very detached, even from itself. Sunsets on the beach are still fucking gorgeous tho.
Can’t afford a PC that can run something like that anyway.
I have no interest in the game, but there’s a whole ass year before anyone is gonna be worrying about running it on the computer.
if they gave us IV again with a few quality of life updates and no story missions, just rambling around with a custom character doing rando shit, i would pay some bucks for it.
i do not hate the lore or the guardrail missions that tell the story, but the long term appeal for me is having a little world to just run around and get into shit with. collecting/customizing cars, wearing clothes, blowing shit up, jumping out of planes to try and land on buildings, riding bikes by people and punching them in the back of the head.
like if i could just walk into a store and immediately be able to mix-match all npc clothes, heads, bodies, that would be perfect. i could absolutely dick around with that for years.
i do appreciate the details added in V, like how when you do wack shit people nearby pull out cellphones to record you. people carry drinks and drop them. the massive amount of stored things NPCs say, many of them off the wall bananas. i walked by a guy on his phone once who shouted into his phone that he had to take a big shit before hanging up. that’s beautiful. i’m sure 6 will have a lot of convo snippets.
i’ve been playing no man’s sky this last year and it’s unreal how much stuff there is to get into that appeals to me. that is a unique game for sure. it’s made me realize that, for games, i can make my own entertainment if given a place to play. stories and missions should be just enough to show me the ropes and give a glimpse of the potential. terraria is that way too. like there’s a whole big series of bosses and events and it was very cool to get through, but i can also just start a world and fuck around, getting lost in my own evolving set of goals. that’s why i still fire that shit up sometimes.
The Vice City map for Gta6 got leaked in the GTA5 Source code leak lol. Can’t wait for someone to make a mod from that.
i’m a sucker for Max Payne 3, there’s something about it, every bit of it, the shooting, the setting, the piss-filter, the characters it all just clicked. its like a really fucking good action movie, which makes sense cause they were probably watching City Of God and that BOPE movie on repeat while developing it. incredible stuff. its been said one quadrillion times already but outside IV, they just can’t make em like that anymore.
the worst thing about VI is that it probably won’t have the snappy, ragdoll-fueled shootout mechanics from MP3 and itll just be V’s point n click auto-aim shit all over again and also that it will not run on anything on the lower end of an rtx quadrillion
It’s really oldschool game design in the sense that it’s just level -> cutscene -> level but between how tight the gameplay is and how good McCaffrey delivers Max’s snark to everything and himself they really just knocked the two major components out of the park.
I’d been sitting at the bar for 3 hours or 5 years, depending on how you looked at things.
I still play San Andreas and SAMP weekly. Aside from playing minecrap with my kids it’s really the only game I play anymore.
I used to play a homeless character who ran around hollering Marx quotes at everyone. Haven’t recently, maybe I need to lean back into it. SAMP’s player base is mostly non-existent compared to ten years ago but there’s still some role play servers I visit occasionally.
