“I’m big when I’m standing on my wallet.”
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out when I was ten years old. My parents begrudgingly let me play a few games that were rated T around that time—relatively tame stuff like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or Goldeneye (but only on paintball mode)—but they wouldn’t have let me near something as morally questionable as GTA if they could help it.
I have a vivid memory of an all-nighter at a friend’s house binging Vice City, but my first real exposure to the series didn’t come until GTA IV when I was in high school. Playing San Andreas seventeen years after its release, I was a little bit worried that I’d find it to be too archaic by comparison, but what I found instead was an expansive game that provides a fun, immersive experience and dexterously fulfills its diverse ambitions.
My memories of IV are going on ten years old by now, so perhaps I’m misremembering, but I recall a serious, gritty tone that leaned heavily into realism. By contrast, San Andreas is presented with a pulpy cinematic sheen that allows for the compelling story to be interspersed with silly side missions, ridiculous caricatures, and feats of staged theatricality. I don’t recall anything in IV as over-the-top as shooting goons off of a moving train car while flying alongside it with a jetpack in order to steal government secrets for a perpetually stoned hippie conspiracy theorist. It’s this playfulness that makes San Andreas a blast to dive into.
The game borrows its style from a plethora of gangster and blockbuster thriller films from the ‘90s. You play as Carl “CJ” Johnson, who returns home from exile in Liberty City to attend his mother’s funeral, having left five years prior after the murder of his younger brother. He intends for his visit home to be short and bittersweet but he’s quickly robbed and framed for a murder by two crooked police officers, pulling him back into the world of gangsters, mafia kingpins, drug lords, hitmen, and prostitutes that he’d tried to leave behind.
The story is nothing if not rangy, roughly interweaving various threads into a multi-faceted narrative with a generous offering of mission sequences that spiderweb out across several large cities and involve corrupt police officers, shadow government operations, the Triads, and gangland mobsters. Initially the player is isolated to Los Santos (Los Angeles), which is only about 25% of the map. As you complete missions that are given by CJ’s brother Sweet, his sister’s boyfriend Cesar, his old friends Big Smoke and Ryder, and aspiring rapper OG Loc, the main storyline will spill over into San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturas (Las Vegas), giving the player a large territory to explore/terrorize.
Missions vary from mundane and generic to classic and memorable. For every tedious go-here-kill-bad-guy scenario, there’s one where you’re skydiving out of an exploding airplane or breaking into a highly secure military base or ramping a motorcycle over a moving train while Big Smoke unloads a Tec9 at the fleeing thugs. There are also several missions that are so bizarre—and occasionally frustrating—that they manage to etch themselves permanently in your memory. Consider “Supply Lines,” a side quest granted by Zero, the nerdy owner of an RC toy store, that requires you to fly remote controlled airplane that handles like it is perpetually encountering hurricane-force winds; or “The Key to Her Heart” which has you dress up in a kinky gimp suit and stalk a woman, steal a dildo from a horny man, and enter the house of a sex fiend who has a memory card you’re after.
While the ballooning narrative and side missions tend to get a little bit scattered and thus lose some narrative heft (a common but basically necessary problem for open world games), the cutscenes and in-game dialogue remain strong throughout and help to mask the deficiencies in storytelling. The vocal talent does a lot of heavy lifting here and the cast is star-studded, featuring the likes of Peter Fonda, Ice-T, Clifton Powell, George Clinton, William Fichtner, David Cross, Samuel L. Jackson, Axl Rose, Chris Penn, Faizon Love, Frank Vincent, Charlie Murphy, and James Woods, although the voice you’ll hear most is that of Christopher Bellard who raps under the stage name Young Maylay. Some of these characters are given incredibly fun dialogue, most notably stoner conspiracy theorist The Truth (Fonda) and covert agent Mike Torreno (Woods). Others are not as amusing but no less memorable, such as CJ’s trigger-happy girlfriend Catalina (Cynthia Farrell) and Zero (David Cross1). These goofball caricatures are thrown into close proximity with the slightly more grounded characters which creates a pleasantly janky sweet spot where the story is engaging but also completely ridiculous.
Kid, I’m a hippie. The only thing I’ve shot is acid. I did see a guy snort it once though. Thought his nose was a kangaroo and the moon was a dog!
As you drift in and out of the main narrative, you’ll find that San Andreas is brimming with detail and other random things to do. There’s a BMX course, pool halls, casinos, pickup basketball, triathlons, and in-game arcade games. Stealing cabs, fire trucks, ambulances, box trucks, lowriders, or police vehicles allow the player to pick up passengers, put out fires, shuttle injured patients, steal household appliances, escort prostitutes, and track down criminals, respectively. Less interesting are a smattering of tattoo parlors, hair salons, clothing stores, fitness centers, and burger joints.
Because there are so many different things jam-packed into a single game, very few of the game’s mechanics are polished to perfection. The driving is good but occasionally a fluke accident 85% of the way through a mission will leave you frustrated.2 Surprisingly, the motorbikes and bicycles were both oddly enjoyable to ride. Flying is very underwhelming. The shooting is touchy without toggling on an auto-lock feature that will make the game way easier but comes with its own annoyances (like auto-locking a cop a hundred yards away instead of the gangster that is pumping lead into your face from point blank). Close quarters gunplay is also a risky venture as you’ll often find yourself shooting at the ceiling as the camera spins aimlessly. The AI is fairly dumb, with thugs that will happily eat your bullets and pedestrians who will dive in front of your moving vehicle. But you’ll only encounter these hiccups when you’re doing fun stuff like sabotaging a marijuana field, splattering doomsday preppers with a combine, or destroying a meth lab.
To my understanding, the game world of San Andreas is something like six times the size of Vice City. It really is a remarkable achievement considering how well constructed it appears with its mixture of cities, suburbs, farms, military bases, airports, shipping yards, etc. With such a scale comes lots of driving, unavoidable because there is no fast travel function. While the sheer amount of driving at times became boring, the magnificent soundtrack came through in a big way in helping to pass the time. There are entire stations dedicated to classic rock, rap, R&B, reggae, country, alternative rock, and funk that you can jump between while driving. The tracks are mixed randomly and the radio hosts will offer their commentary on the music and report breaking news that often concerns plot developments. Additionally, there are some superb satirical radio commercials that add a perfect note of humor.
Anything goes in the comically hyper-violent world of San Andreas. You may eventually grow bored of its storyline, the myriad avenues for causing a ruckus and evading the fuzz, launching money-producing ventures, modifying your character and his vehicles, buying safehouses, collecting horseshoes and oysters, but it will take quite a while.
1. Apparently Cross got stuck on the “Supply Lines” mission and grew to hate his own voice because he heard Zero’s instructions so many times.
2. To complete “Vigilante” you must commandeer a law enforcement vehicle and take down twelve criminals. I was fifteen minutes in, tracking down my twelfth lawbreaker in a 60 ton tank, when a pedestrian in a sedan decided to ram into the treads. Somehow this caused the tank to flip upside down and explode.
Sources:
Good, Owen S. “Remember that impossible mission in GTA: San Andreas? Even the voice actor hated it”. Polygon. 6 August 2016.