One of my all-time favorite games, and one that I've beaten all of the way through about 4 times I think, 100+ hours in each play through usually.
Also, probably my
most owned game, in that I've bought like 8 different iterations of the game across half a dozen consoles/systems.
- Original PS2
- PC retail release
- PC Steam/Valve sale release
- Two Pack for Xbox Originals (360) with Vice City / San Andreas
- Xbox 360 Digital version
- Xbox One backwards compatibility
- Android / iOS version
And I feel like I'm missing a purchase somewhere in here.
What's funny is I didn't even
like the GTA games before San Andreas. I bought GTA III and GTA Vice City but I never played them because, when I was in college, if I ever sat down to play aGTA game, someone else would come by and ask to have a turn, and inevitably it'd just turn into wreaking mayhem and never playing the story content. So, I never really got into the stories, never played the games much, I thought GTA was fine but just wasn't my cup of tea... that it was boring going around and blowing stuff up or shooting something up, dying, and repeating. Randomly, my mom got me GTA:SA for my birthday which happened to fall on the first day of my summer vacation in college. Working a bull shit summer job I decided, fuck it, I'm going to play this game and see what all of the hype is about... Force myself to do the single player. I ended up freaking
loving the game, and got so immersed in the world, story, characters, side activities, and everything else. I bought the PC version the following summer and did the same thing, beating it again, and then replayed Vice City and GTA III and (mostly) loved those. I still get legitimately
nostalgic thinking of flying around San Andreas listening to KRose, or driving through the desert listening to K-DST
Running Down a Dream or what have you. San Andreas is one of the few, or maybe only, games to make me a fan of music artists in the game... It kicked off a minor obsession with Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, and old Rod Stewart for me.
GTA is now my most anticipated series, usually, with every new release just filling me with hype more than any other game series. I don't think they've made a game as complete and as
good as GTA San Andreas, though, which is something that's disappointed me for years. Hell, GTA San Andreas
still has a better car ownership and property ownership model than GTA V. I was so disappointed with how GTA IV took a step back from the "build up your property ownership" model of both Vice City and San Andreas, completely abandoning it, and replacing any sense of vehicle ownership with just random cars that always appeared in front of your shabby apartments. GTA V kind of brought that back, but about 1/10th as well as GTA SA did. The fact that making money in GTA SA actually sort of meant something, where you could buy property, which gave you more save points, and more garage space around the map was a major benefit to making more money. You kind of forget that, in San Andreas, if you beat a mission your game didn't save until you ran home and checked into a save spot, and your vehicle was gone if it exploded, so you were super careful to stash great cars all around the map. GTA V sort of has some vehicle ownership, but barely, as any stolen cars you commandeered would usually get replaced by your character's default car.
I still think it has the best GTA story and some of the strongest characters, a game from 2004 with strong minority and female leads, something that the industry still struggles to do 13 years later. And beyond all of it, San Andreas still has, in my opinion,
the best antagonist of any videogame ever:
Officer Tenpenny (Samuel L Jackson)
Not only is he voice acted amazingly well, but Rockstar did such a great job at making him a constant shit heel to you so that you actually
hated him, yet, you couldn't get to him to take him out because of clever narrative. Other GTA games have completely lost this since, where the antagonists either don't exist and aren't realistic or meaningful threats to you (GTA IV) or in GTA V where the antagonists exist but there's no logical reason why your character doesn't just kill them. In GTA V, antagonists simply lie to you in every mission and you -- the player --
know they are lying to you, but you -- the character -- are too stupid to do anything about it, and it ruins the narrative because there's no
bad guy. Tenpenny, on the other hand, is a
constant nuisance in CJ's life, from the very first cut scene to the very last cut scene when you finally let him die, and yet, there are always logical reasons why CJ doesn't just blow him away. Tenpenny always has something over CJ, either a bogus cop-killer murder conviction (the first section of the game), actual power through crooked police (the exile), holding CJ's brother hostage (the backwoods/San Fierro section of the game), threats against CJ's business empires (Las Venturas), and CJ doesn't get rid of Tenpenny until he settles all of his other debts in the game and takes over as the kingpin of Los Angeles.
And then CJ gets to exact his revenge, but Tenpenny is a constant, ever present threat to the character, and it makes a far more rewarding narrative than the lousy, cliched bad guys that Rockstar has put out there for GTA IV, Red Dead Redemption, and GTA V.
