In the spirit of today's Digital Burnout:

"BlazinAce - Doctor of Internal Combustion" (pbs) 07/13/2014 at 00:14 • Filed to: None

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Here's everything I dislike about driving in GTA San Andreas. Why GTA SA and not, say, GTA V? Because SA is often billed as the best in the series, and sometimes as the best game ever. Why bother with such an old game? Because I'm bored and have to get this out of my system. Plus, I actually like the idea of an open world action game, where you can drive, ride, fly, or boat whatever you feel like and take missions from your own airfield. An adventure game that lets you do that is something I've wanted for a long time and the fact that GTA SA got so close, but at the same time ruined the entire concept is really frustrating, specially when the broken mechanics could have been so easily repaired if Rockstar hadn't gotten hung up on bullshit content. Please note this is all personal opinion, not facts set on stone about how to make the game better.

It's tiny: Before GTA V, GTA SA had the biggest map of any GTA, with three cities and several small towns encrusted in a large highway system. The problem here is that GTA SA lacks any sort of scaling whatsoever. The main cities are small, the the streets are narrow the buildings look more like miniatures. Your hood is a single cul de sac with four houses. Downtown Los Santos is a single, short, slightly wider street. The hills district in San Fierro is a single hill with three or four steps that you can clear in a single jump. You can almost see the end of the Las Venturas strip from the beginning, and that's on a game with lousy distance draw. Most buildings are about as tall as the characters. Bottomline is, you never feel like you're roaming full sized cities, but in miniature towns where you take up too much space. Compare it to the settings of similar games released around the same time, and you'll understand what I'm talking about. Miniature buildings. narrow roads. Small cities. For all of its sheer size, GTA SA feels small, underscaled, incomplete and lacks any kind of variety. Instead of trying and failing miserably to recreate an entire state, maybe the developers should have focused on rendering a decent, interesting city and its outskirts, instead of spreading a single, tiny little city along several similar looking roads that don't really go anywhere.

No decent cars: And I'm not just talking about using real vehicles, though that would be the shit. I'm talking about not being able to actually own cars and use them on missions without them disappearing or saving them properly for that purpose. Why bother saving a car on your garage if you can't put it to use without losing it? All you can do with your "saved" cars is drive them back and forth, never leaving them alone, lest they be obliterated by the game. Go on a mission with your beloved modified Sultan and the game will eat it as soon as you hit the mission marker, burping a Taxi in its place. Leave your lowered, nitrous'd Sabre for 5 minutes to buy ammo and you can be sure it'll be replaced by a Taxi by the time you get back. And that's not even counting all the scripted missions where you don't even have a choice in what vehicle you'll use because the game will automatically put you in a Taxi. I don't even know why anyone would bother modifying a car that's not a Taxi when Taxis are all you get. If you make a game about cars, where the player can drive cars and modify cars, but you don't let players actually own any of their cars or use them as integral parts of the main game, you're doing it wrong.

Lousy driving: I never went into GTA expecting it to drive like Gran Turismo, but I at least expected it to drive. What I got instead was a mess of cars smashing into each other, turning into each other at random, jumping off suspended roads and smashing into things. Player cars aren't much better, with every vehicle feeling the same, accelerating too quickly and unable to brake without locking every single wheel. Speed up a little, and the game's uneven, polygonal roads are sure to send you flying off in random directions, often opposite to where you were going, wasting a good deal of your time. The game's roads and freeways are an undrivable joke, and if this game didn't have GTA in its title, it would probably have been panned by critics because of that. That's hardly the biggest problem with driving though, as it is essentially useless because all you do is commute to and from missions. The few jobs that actually involve driving are nothing but boring, poorlyscripted sequences where someone drives and you shoot. If GTA wasn't an open world game, players wouldn't even have to drive, that's how useless driving is in this game, so, if they couldn't work out a decent driving system and traffic and integrate that into the missions, why didn't they just use a traditional level format and saved us time on commuting? Oh, right, the side-missions.

The Side-missions suck: Go shopping! Get a haircut! Go to the Gym! Date blurry pixelated women! Play choppy Snooker! Play bad videogames! You can do all that in GTA SA. Why anyone would want to, however, is beyond me. That dude above, that's the exact face I made while CJ ogled himself in a mirror after buying some green clothes. And that wasn't even optional, I actually had to walk a person that doesn't even exist to a store and buy him some sort of green clothing. The fact that new shops and salons open as you progress through the game, as if it was some sort of reward, makes me wonder if people actually wasted time playing dress up with a doll that barely even resembled a human being. I'm not gonna judge a game by its graphics, but GTA SA sucked on that too. Anyways, two things here; first, side-missions should have some sort of reward to mark them as completed, not just cash money or fucking nothing, and, second, if you want to give us side-missions in a game where we spend 80% of our time driving, give us some stuff to do while driving. You can go dance at a nightclub but can't pull off a stick up. You can bet up to a thousand bucks on a lowrider competition or a snooker game, but you can't do the same on an illegal street race or sponsored circuit race. Sure, some missions are kinda cool, like the taxi, vigilante and burglary jobs but, as with the rest of the game, they feel useless and incomplete.

Lousy Police: In a game about cops and robbers, I expect police chases to be more of an entertainment or a challenge than a nuisance. Unfortunately, in GTA SA they're neither. There's no police. Tag a rival gang's graffiti and they'll chase you for a block. Mow down a crowd with a machine gun and they'll chase you for two. And don't expect them to resume chase in case you stumble into them again, as soon as those little stars clear, you're a free man. Why not make those stupid little stars stick until you could get to a spray shop WITHOUT the police on your ass? Why not separate wanted levels for cars and characters so that you actually had a reason to ditch a hot car and find another one? Because there's no police, that's why.

Ridiculous mods: Car modding is the stupidest, ricest, most useless thing in the entire game. You can't upgrade performance, you can't save your modded cars and, even if you could, why bother when you can't even race them or use them in getaways or whatever? Seriously, I'm still trying to understand why anyone would waste money on this!

Anyways, there, Everything I dislike about GTA SA, without touching characters and story, because I guess those are more of a subjective matter than game mechanics. Not that those were good either, the whole story was one big annoyance. Save for that part in San Fierro. And Toreno's crazy missions. And the antagonists, those guys were really good. Whatever, here's a good looking chick.

ZiptieMcBumper > BlazinAce - Doctor of Internal Combustion 07/13/2014 at 01:38

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I understand all of those criticisms, and agree with a lot of them. However, I have to really give GTA:SA credit for one important thing: it made me actually want to play the game "cleanly".

In other words, for the first two games, I ran around killing everyone with no regrets; pedestrians, friends, enemies, whatever. In SA, I only did it when I had to. I cared about the character too much for him to be a murderous maniac.

GTA 5 is very much the same. I wasn't really a fan of GTA 4; there was too much of a focus on that tedious stuff from San Andreas I hated.

DanZman > BlazinAce - Doctor of Internal Combustion 07/13/2014 at 01:42

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the best part of this article was the girl at the end

DanZman > DanZman 07/13/2014 at 01:43

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kinda sounded like a dick... not intentional