John Gillooly wonders if people still know that Axl Rose is an anagram.
It's a gangsta opus from the era when the bloods and crips made headline news worldwide and south-central LA became the epicentre of popular culture. You play as Carl Johnson, who moves back to the city of Los Santos after the murder of his mother. Returning to your hood of Orange Grove in Ganton you find your once strong gang in disarray, under siege from the rival Bollas and splintered into several factions. Tasked with rebuilding the gang, the twisting and turning plot has you framed by crooked cops (wonderfully voiced by Samuel L Jackson and Chris Penn), fighting for gang territory and eventually dragged way beyond the small cul de sac under a freeway overpass that you call home.
Rockstar has pulled out all stops for San Andreas, building a game that is bigger, better, deeper and stronger than its predecessors. Unlike the previous forays into Liberty city and Vice city, San Andreas is an entire state, with three cities and a hell of a lot of countryside in between. It is now almost an RPG-lite, with Carl's look being directly influenced by diet, exercise and shopping habits. You can get tattoos to demonstrate your gang allegiance and even pull together a posse of gangstas for backup or some four gun drive by action.
Like most of the real fun to be had in San Andreas, the need to feed, clothe and exercise is not compulsory at all. It does effect how your character looks, and how the now quite vocal NPCs react to you, but the storyline rarely requires you to delve into this side of the game.
Unlike the other big titles this month, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, the storyline is far from tight, guiding you through the game but allowing you to digress for hours as you explore the world, fight for gang territory or customise your low rider car for some slick bouncy hydraulic competition.
Be it playing a game of pool at a local bar, mountain bike racing down the side of the precipitous Mount Chiliad or sneaking around a house at night nicking electronic goods for pawning, San Andreas is rich with character and diversions. At times it can feel almost too overwhelming, but several improvements like the ability to set a waypoint marker on the in-game map keep the vastness of San Andreas from becoming stifling.
Graphically San Andreas looks so good it exposes nearly every annoying graphical quirk of the PlayStation 2. Jagged edges rip at the eyes, while the lack of mipmapping means constant image shimmering in the distance. Pop-up of cars and objects is still an issue as the game streams the world from disc, though it is less of a problem when you leave the cities. But the game works in spite of the graphical niggles. Even the occasional slowdown that occurs when a large pile up takes place on the highway doesn't impact the enjoyment. The vibrant orange glow of the smog filled sky over Los Santos engenders a wonderful feeling of atmosphere, and little touches like gangstas reclining on porches, blunt in hand, or the sheer Baywatch-ness of the lifeguard towers dotting the beach make you feel like you are indeed living in a cliched version of 1990's LA. One mission through the storm drains even conjures up memories of Terminator 2. In contrast the countryside is at times straight out of Deliverance, or the Godfather movies. Open distances are split between highways, townships and expanses of nothingness. There is plenty of incentive to explore the great unknown, and even just cruising the highways with the radio cranked up is an immensely enjoyable experience.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012