Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Games originating on another console which are eventually ported to PC effectively turn out to be the whipping boys of the gaming industry. Seasoned gamers will typically approach most games of this nature with an instant air of disdain and skepticism, immediately expecting numerous gameplay faults, control problems, and assorted technical issues. And for the most part this skepticism isn’t unwarranted – most games originating on a console which are directly ported to the PC platform do turn out to be crap. Halo is a fine example of this, as are other games like Red Faction or, notoriously, Metal Gear Solid 2. But thankfully, one shining franchise which has survived the conversion process from PS2 to PC (and even Xbox) with grace time and time again is the Grand Theft Auto franchise. In spite of long load times and some overarching gameplay bugs, I loved the hell out of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on the PS2 (as my past review should have been a clear indication of), and was all too eager to get my paws on the newly-released PC version of the game. So, how does the game truly stack up as a PC title in today’s industry? Let’s take a look.
We’ll get started with a quick overview for newcomers. The plot to San Andreas focuses on Carl Johnson, a gangster from the streets who left his home town of Los Santos several years ago after "some bad shit went down yo". Having just received word of his mom’s death from a drive-by shooting, Carl has returned to Grove Street to try and straighten his life out. Of course, upon leaving the airport he’s promptly abducted by a pair of bent cops and ends up being ditched deep in the territory of enemy gangs, with little more than a bicycle and his fists to depend on for his survival. Feature-wise, San Andreas is a huge improvement over the previous releases of the game simply due to the sheer MAGNITUDE of the environment. The starting island alone is about as large as a good chunk of the entirety of Grand Theft Auto 3, but the developers went one step further (or two, rather) by adding two more islands to the game, creating this astonishingly large environment that offers tons of exploration potential. Perhaps the most impressive thing is that it isn’t just miles of copy/paste geometry – the developers actually went to the effort to carefully plan out each segment of land and ensure it was interesting in some unique manner. On top of that, the game now has an integrated stat system for things like "muscle", "stamina", "fat", specific weapon skills, and of course "sex appeal", almost turning the game into some kind of ultra-personalized version of "Sim Gangster".
Of course, all of this is augmented by the same free-styled gameplay that has made the Grand Theft Auto franchise so popular to date, and players can explore this massive world Rockstar has created as they see fit – to a gradual extent, of course, as any attempts to cross over to an island that has not been opened up in the plot line yet will result in a suicidal multi-star police rating. The really great thing is that there is plenty for a player to do in this world, such as playing pool at a bar, buying snacks and drinks, mugging the local "24-7" convenience store, testing his weapon skills at the local shooting range, and of course the usual gamut of taxi / ambulance / firefighting / vigilante mini-games, as well as oh-so-much more, and it is this kind of thing which sets San Andreas above and beyond other games which promise a similar manner of free-form, expansive and interactive environment, yet don’t actually offer all that much to do. Of course, the main plot missions are also pretty cool and presented well, with a nice cast of supporting characters (both new and old – you even run into the "GTA3 guy" at one point) and attractive storyline. A few of the more challenging missions seem to have been modified a little for the PC version (and Xbox version, from what I hear) too, particularly the notorious "Supply Lines" mission, which previously resulted in many smashed PS2 controllers due to the difficulty of flying that remote-controlled plane and the fuel limitation for that mission (which some are claiming has been increased for the new version). Otherwise, all of the content is intact and available in its complete form.
Of course, not everything has undergone the transition to PC gracefully. One of the largest issues I had to work around initially was dealing with the control scheme. Way back in the day of GTA3PC the default control setup worked just fine for my needs, but the gameplay has advanced a lot since then. Motorcycles and bicycles have been added, airplanes and choppers are now fully flyable (as well as certain military aircraft, including a VTOL-supporting Harrier), players can take a variety of boats to skim over the seas, and even certain cars have been riced up with bouncy hydraulics. Obviously this means that at least a couple more buttons are required to handle all this stuff, and trying to find a suitable medium that would satisfy my needs for a smooth experience both on foot and in-vehicle proved difficult. I actually ended up settling on my flightstick setup which worked surprisingly well, with the exception that I had to fall back on a few driver-based configuration hacks to get all the inputs bound properly because, for some reason, the game refused to let me directly rebind most of my joystick’s axises. This has actually been the subject of anguish for many PC players who have broken out advanced controllers of their own and are irritated that the same control-binding issues which plagued previous games in the Grand Theft Auto franchise still exist today. At least being able to aim with the mouse is nice… almost a little too nice however, as it made certain missions that were near-impossible for me in the PS2 version suddenly insanely easy. While it was nice being able to finally aim properly, I find it depressing that a game’s difficulty curve could be so grossly affected by the artificial inflation caused from an inadequate control system. Say what you will, but the fact is that you just cannot match a mouse when it comes to precision weapon aiming, and Rockstar should have taken this into account when checking over which missions they could have revised a little when making the transition from the PS2 version of the game.
Naturally one of the other big selling traits for people wanting to get their digs into the PC version of San Andreas will be the improved graphics. Yes, everything’s improved and much, much clearer and cleaner-looking over the PS2 version (the art style overall feels a bit less "muddy" and dark too, probably thanks to the added clarity), but to what extent? Sadly, the aging engine San Andreas is based on is really starting to show, and the low-detail character models and occasionally awkward animations really stand out to prove this. The visibility distance (while very impressive for a game of this detail and scale) could still easily be bumped up a bit further (and has – I’ve heard murmurings of a mod that totally removes the backdrop fog from the game, so chalk one up for the community), but most importantly is the "render bubble" around the player, which causes everything from entities to pick-ups and even high-detail world objects (like, say, trees, when you’re barreling down back roads at stupidly unsafe velocities) to only appear in a specific distance around the player. Given the huge scale of the game world, this kind of thing just becomes increasingly noticeable as the game goes on, and I sincerely hope Rockstar improves this process with their next game engine.
But aside from the low level of detail (which really isn’t all that bad, it just takes a bit of getting used to after having blown through Half-Life 2 several times in a row), the game also suffers from an unfortunate gamut of technical problems and gameplay bugs – far more than I’m really comfortable with for what should by all accounts be a golden release. The game’s sound engine automatically enforces the use of EAX, which isn’t a bad thing if you have one of the three sound cards in existence that actually plays nice with that audio standard, but for the rest of us, it means problems like cutscenes going out of sync and all game sounds disappearing permanently every time it rains, with the only fixes being either obscure workarounds or random driver updating until something else breaks or the problem goes away.
Graphically the game engine holds up okay, but as previously mentioned there is still a very restricted "spawn bubble" around the player which affects numerous world objects, and this can actually become a gameplay hazard when you have obstacles that don’t actually start rendering until several seconds after you’ve plowed into them and have flipped your ride. Now this didn’t happen very often unless I was going very, very fast, but it was still common enough to be more than annoying. The vehicle persistence code is also more flawed than ever, and the game can’t seem to ever make up its mind on if it will let a player’s abandoned vehicle remain in the game world for a long period of time, or just remove it the second he turns his back, though of course the real fun doesn’t start until you notice this applies to garages too. Yes, the supposed sanctuaries for your precious ghetto cars from the evils of the game’s automatic clean-up code are no longer entirely safe – I’ve witnessed at least three of my favorite rides simply vanish into thin air one day, and when you combine this with the new ability to customize your own vehicles for vast sums of money, problems like this become very depressing. At least the framerates managed to stay consistent and I never ran into any major hideous graphical errors – though judging by some comments I’ve witnessed by the general community, it’s a totally hit-or-miss affair for how well the game will actually run for you.
Players like myself who are fond converts from the PS2 version of San Andreas will probably find themselves much more tolerant of the problems the PC contains simply because we already have experience with the game, and we already know how much ass it can kick and how tremendously fun it can be. But what about newcomers who didn’t want to (or couldn’t) check the game out on PS2 and are just digging into it for the first time? Well, steel yourself, because you may very well be disappointed. Sure, the gameplay and storyline are as tight as ever, but the sheer number of bugs, technical problems, and just all the crap the average person will have to put up with before he can settle into the game in a "playable" state is nothing less than unnerving. I would still unquestionably recommend this to any Grand Theft Auto fan as "the best of the series" just because of all the sheer content it has, but I honestly cannot give Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas a decent score in good conscience just because this could have easily been so much better as a PC title Let’s hope some patches roll around quickly to resolve the worst of the damage.
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