GTA Retrospective V – Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

• Game: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
• Console: PlayStation 2, Xbox, PC
• Developer: Rockstar North
  
• Publisher: Rockstar Games
• Released: 2004

Massive. Huge. Monstrous. These words were once used to describe the size of GTA games, they now somehow seem redundant when describing just how big GTA: San Andreas is. The game-world is roughly 5 times the size of Vice City and it seems incredible just thinking about the step-up Rockstar has made from its previous titles to this magnum opus. When comparing the game to its predecessors, it seems silly calling them huge, because if they were huge, then what is San Andreas? ‘Supermassive’? I’m not taking about how big the game world is, though, or even how long it takes to complete the main storyline, even though that, in itself, is a huge task. I’m talking about how much content this game provides the player.

When you first play the game, every time you continue the main storyline the game gives you something new to do. The very first mission you’re given is to escape from an enemy gang’s territory on, for the very first time in a GTA game, a bicycle. Not long after that, you’re given a spray-can and are tasked with daubing your gang’s tag across the game-world. Keep playing and you’ll get the girlfriend mini-game, the burglary mini-game, low-rider racing, low-rider ‘dancing’ and more. All this in just the first few hours. What’s notable is the fact that most of these things are completely new to the GTA series. Every GTA game added its own innovations of some sort, but San Andreas went above and beyond the call of duty in every respect.

You can actually do a drive-by on a bicycle, which is quite comical, actually. Freddie Mercury’s spinning in his grave.

GTA: San Andreas has you playing as Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson. Having seemingly run-away from his home city of Los Santos, Carl returns for his mother’s funeral after a phone call from his brother, Sweet, telling him that she was killed in a drive-by shooting. When he returns he is immediately pounced upon by the crooked cop Tenpenny (voiced by none other than Samuel L Jackson), who threatens him by seemingly framing CJ with the killing of another police officer, who was close to outing Tenpenny as corrupt, coincidentally. When he gets home, he finds his former gang in disarray and pledges to help retake the streets of Los Santos for the Grove Street Families, thereby avenging his mother’s death. Events conspire against him, though, which leads him to the different parts of the state of San Andreas.

So even though the first part of the game seems to be ripped straight from ‘Boyz N The Hood’, most of the game takes place far away from this ghetto setting. There’s a countryside, replete with country bumpkins and small townships, farms, a mountain, large expanses of land, forests and everything else you’d expect from such a place. Hours can be whiled away exploring or just enjoying the scenery, becoming one with nature (albeit of the digital kind). Then there’s the next two cities (San Fierro and Las Venturas) as well as the desert between them, which holds just as much as the countryside.

Here, CJ is driving up the game’s mountain; Mt. Chiliad.

San Andreas also adds RPG-like elements to the game, but in its own way. Gorge yourself on Chicken Bell or Pizza Shack and you’ll get fat. The NPCs will comment on your fatness, too, calling you names and such, and you can respond to them in a postive or negative way (this can sometimes, hilariously, lead to a bout of fisticuffs). Want to lose that weight? Go running, go swimming and stop eating so damn much. Simple and just like real-life (although at a slightly accelerated rate). Want to tone up, get some muscles on them bones? Use the weight-lifting machines or dumbbells in the the various gyms dotted through-out San Andreas. You can upgrade your stamina, too, to make CJ run or swim for longer. Every weapon has different levels, making each weapon easier to use and allowing you to strafe the more you use them. Your driving ability gets better as the game progresses too, be it on bicycles, motorbikes or cars. You can also customise CJ by giving him different hairstyles and even more clothing options than Vice City which merely allowed you to wear different suits. You can even give CJ’s skin a make-over and tattoo him, whether he likes it or not!

There are murmurings by some that GTA: San Andreas was too big. Can a game be too big? Certainly, if it becomes a chore, but there’s something about San Andreas that grabs your attention and keeps you held until you complete the game, at least for your first play-through. As with every iteration of GTA, some of the flaws from previous titles are repaired, such as the aiming-system, which works remarkably well compared to past versions, but some flaws return, like draw distances and pop-up and the game can be incredibly glitchy. Sometimes you can drive through parts of the city that haven’t loaded properly, but it’s understandable, what with the game having to stream it all off the disc as you play it. The volume of activities in the game more than make up for such piffling issues like that, though.

This picture is rather controversial. Not because he’s holding two sub-machine guns, but because there’s partial nudity.

GTA: San Andreas might give you the impression that it’s trying to do too much. There is a hell of a lot in there, but most of it is optional. The racing activities, the gang-territory side-missions and such are there if you want to utilise them but you don’t have to if you just want to complete the game. It makes things a little easier if you do these, as it gives you money to replace weaponry should you die (Wasted!) or get arrested (Busted!) and lose your arsenal, but you can still complete the main missions without touching the optional elements of the game. Completionists will have an absolute riot with this game and so will casuals, as it favours different types of gamers, those who jump in for the occasional burst and those who spend hours finding every little thing.

After playing GTA: San Andreas, you’re left thinking that this is what Rockstar North imagined the game being, or at least becoming, when they first started work on GTA III. This was what they set out to create the moment they even thought about making a 3D GTA game. San Andreas is incredible. The story is compelling, each of the cities are completely unique, the characters are incredibly well rounded, the voice acting is superb and the game can look absolutely beautiful at times, especially at sunrise or sunset in the countryside. The soundtrack is probably the best yet in a GTA game, defining the setting and era of the game almost perfectly.

“Ignore the dude with the afro and maybe he’ll just walk away…”

This game marks the end of the GTA III era and does it in style. It’s still GTA III, but it’s been refined and improved. So, the baton is passed to GTA IV. In five or so years will we see GTA IV‘s San Andreas Just how big and just how good will that be?

GTA Retrospective IV – Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

• Game: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
• Console: PlayStation 2, Xbox, PC
• Developer: Rockstar North
  
• Publisher: Rockstar Games
• Released: 2002

You can imagine the board meeting at Rockstar when they were wondering where to go with the next GTA game – there they all are, sitting in their Skull Thrones™, sipping their newly drawn virgin’s blood and having a cash-money fight when all of a sudden Little Timmy, the work experience lad, chimes in: “Imagine GTA set in the 80s. You know, with an 80′s soundtrack. Neon, lycra, spandex, baby blue and pink everywhere, with Bros pumping out of the radio and everybody out rollerskating. It’d be awesome.”

*awkward silence*

After they’d come back from sticking poor Little Timmy’s head on a spike outside Rockstar Towers, Dan Houser (the Vice President, no less) addresses his slavering pack of barbarian programmers: “I think Little Timmy was onto a winner, actually, but let it be known that it was my idea and not some snot-nosed little git who interrupts my blood-sipping session! Although, let it be known that I never mentioned Bros. I mentioned Scarface, I mentioned Goodfellas and I mentioned Miami Vice.” He said it and it was good and GTA: Vice City was born.

To differentiate the game from GTA III, Vice City was set in a sunny clime, rather than the wet and windy of Liberty City. Look, palm trees!

Released merely a year after GTA III, Vice City took GTA to a bygone era, an era some love, some detest, but most can never forget: the 80s. What seemed like a strange idea at the time became quite possibly the best GTA game released and, at the very least, the most unique. But what Vice City did best is capture the 80s perfectly. The soundtrack is spot-on, with tracks by A Flock of Seagulls, Michael Jackson, Judas Priest and Mr Mister amongst others (including some of the Scarface OST) to really capture the sounds of the 80s, as cheesy as that sounds. It’s almost like a tribute to everything about the 80s, only one where you can bludgeon hookers to death.

GTA: Vice City still did what each sequel before it had done and that’s improve and add to the gameplay. The lock-on weapon system was much improved, yet still not without its issues. Bikes were added, as were helicopters, and for the first time, players could buy property and make money from it. Also new for the series was a proper leading man, with a name and a voice. Tommy Vercetti, voiced by Ray Liotta, was the GTA series’ first proper protagonist, and he came with his very own personality and back-story. Vercetti used to work for the Forelli Mafia family in Liberty City before going to prison for 15 years for his involvement with fifteen contract killings. When Vercetti gets out, the Forellis send him to Vice City to act as a buyer in cocaine deals. When he gets to Vice City for his first pick-up, he is ambushed, his bodyguards killed and both the cocaine and the money are lost to his attackers. He gets away, however, but is tasked by Sonny Forelli to retrieve the money and the cocaine and to kill whoever it was that set him up.

The above screenshot just screams ‘EIGHTIES’ at you.

GTA: Vice City was heavily influenced by Scarface and the mansion Tommy comes into ownership of about a quarter of the way into the game is almost a direct copy of Tony Montana’s mansion, including the famous upstairs office where Scarface comes to its thrilling climax.

GTA: Vice City was incredibly well received. It garnered almost universal acclaim and, as of March 26th 2008, has sold 17.5 million units, according to Take-Two Interactive. Vice City is seen by some as the defining point of the GTA series, much more-so than its predecessor. It shows that Rockstar can pull off setting, story, gameplay and size in one easy bound. The fact that it was made in not much over a year goes to show just how talented the people over at Rockstar are. However, the next game would build on Vice City‘s success in more ways than one.

Coming up: GTA grows to the size of an entire state in GTA: San Andreas

GTA Retrospective III – Grand Theft Auto III

• Game: Grand Theft Auto III
• Console: PlayStation 2, Xbox, PC
• Developer: DMA Design
• Publisher: Rockstar Games
• Released: 2001

While the original Grand Theft Auto was a revolution in gaming for the whole industry, GTA III would become more of a revolution of the series, but would have just as much impact as the original when it was released. You see, even though the move into 3D seemed the next logical step for GTA, Rockstar pulled it off with aplomb, whilst using the rather restrictive technology of the PS2. To squeeze this massive 3D world out with hardly any loading screens to kick you out the game, Rockstar, instead of just trying to get the best looking game out onto the shelves, sacrificed the best graphics it could muster from the PS2 for a free-flowing game, all set in an absolutely huge game world. Never before had such a massive and rich game-world been delivered. Grand Theft Auto is all about freedom, and never more-so had a game given this to its players than Grand Theft Auto III.

At its heart, GTA III was still very much a GTA game, as everything you could do in the previous titles was there; steal cars, shoot guns, evade police, etc. There was even a top-down camera angle à la the original game, which, was probably for those who preferred the original games, but more likely that it was the original viewpoint of the game which was eventually dropped in favour of the conventional 3rd person camera. The game also added layers upon layers of extra things to do, to give a little more depth to a world that had come alive in 3D. Hijack a taxi and you could then start a mini-game where you could drive around Liberty City and pick up fares. Get them to their destination within the allotted time and you got paid for your services. This mini-game was the basis for the game Crazy Taxi, yet here it was in a game that let you do this and much more. In Crazy Taxi, if you got bored, you couldn’t just get out of the taxi and blow it up, or drive it off a cliff with your passenger trapped inside just for a laugh or just because you could. Moreover, if you hijack an ambulance, you could search for patients to take to the hospital. ‘Jack a cop car and you could take out criminals trying to muscle in on your territory. ‘Jack a fire engine and you could put out fires from the safety of your truck thanks to the roof-mounted hose. All of these mini-games earned you money for completing each level of them and they got increasingly difficult with every level, in true gaming fashion.

Apparently, the dude you play as is called Claude, even though it’s never mentioned in the actual game

Also, for the first time in a GTA game, your character had a back-story and the game had its own discernible plot that revolved around your character, even though he never talked and apparently didn’t have a name (however, there is some speculation that his name is Claude). The game opens with ‘Claude’, his girlfriend, Catalina (who would make an appearance in GTA: San Andreas along with ‘Claude’) and an accomplice robbing a bank. Catalina then betrays ‘Claude’ and shoots him, leaving him to die. However, ‘Claude’ doesn’t die, and gets arrested. Whilst being transferred, an attack on his police convoy aimed at freeing another prisoner sets him free along with another prisoner named ’8-Ball’. With each other’s help, they flee the scene, with ‘Claude’ driving the getaway car as 8-Ball’s hands are bandaged up. To thank ‘Claude’, 8-Ball introduces him to Luigi Goterelli, who owns the night-club ‘Sex Club 7.’ Luigi sets our hero off on various menial jobs, but ‘Claude’ uses these to rise in power with the various gangs of Liberty City and to eventually get revenge on Catalina.

Another other the features added: Racing!

GTA III garnered a lot of controversy when it was first released, as have all GTA games since. Most notably, though, was GTA III‘s introduction to the series of prostitutes. Bloody violence comes second to sex in the controversy stakes, despite the fact that we’re all more likely to experience first-hand the delight and pleasure of sex than we are to come across a gun-fight racked with bloodshed or to see someone getting decapitated by a sword. Without getting into too much detail about the game’s controversial issues, the fact that the inclusion of hookers in the game caused more uproar than the fact that, in the same game, you can blow someone’s head off with a shotgun is really quite baffling, especially when the act of sex isn’t even shown and only ever implied.

Despite all the controversy, GTA III burst the series into the mainstream. Its predecessors were popular, but were far more underground that the third title in the series. As of March 26th 2008, GTA III has sold 14.5 million units according to Take-Two Interactive. An astounding figure. It has also influenced a fair few games since its release, but we’ll save that for another day. Needless to say, the impact of GTA III is still being felt today, whether from the game itself, or its sequels.

Coming up: we get our 80′s on with one of GTA III‘s aforementioned sequels: GTA: Vice City.

GTA Retrospective II – Grand Theft Auto 2

• Game: Grand Theft Auto 2
• Console: Dreamcast, PlayStation, PC
• Developer: DMA Design
• Publisher: Rockstar Games
• Released: 1999

Released two years after the original GTA, GTA2 continued the top-down perspective introduced in the first game and carried on the game’s basic formula, but set the game somewhere in the future, giving the game a sort of neon-punk feel. There was also only one city called ‘Anywhere City’, its location quite indeterminate. The game still had three levels, but all of them were ‘districts’ of the same city, rather different cities altogether. Firstly, there was the ‘The Downtown Area’, then ‘The Residential District’ and lastly ‘The Industrial District’. It makes the game sound like The Crystal Maze, but it isn’t, obviously.

Erm… ouch!

As with the original GTA, to get to the next level, you had to amass a certain score. The scoring system gives you points from practically everything you do; smash into a car and you’ll get 100 points, blow a car up and you’ll get 1000 (or something like that). The main way to get points, though, was to complete the missions that awaited you at phone-boxes. What GTA2 introduced, though, were rival gangs, and a karma-like system based around them. Each of these gangs were given its own meter in the top left-hand corner of the screen. These showed your standing with each of these gangs. If your meter was swaying to the left, they weren’t too pleased with you. If it was to the right, they were practically in love with you. To gain respect from each of these gangs, you had to do missions for them. However, each gang was always trying to out-do each other, and doing missions for one gang may see you facing off against another gang you’ve been trying to get into bed with. This gave the game a bit more strategy; piss one gang off a little too much, and they’ll try to kill you as soon as they see you. This means you have to pick your missions more carefully, and try to balance each gang’s missions. You can do this or not, but the game would be a lot easier if you did.

Lighting effects FTW

As you can see from the screen above, the graphics were improved for the game, with added lighting effects and higher resolution textures. This gave the game quite a nice-but-gritty night time feel. The cars still looked like toys, but decided less-so thanks to the game’s more futuristic theme. The radio stations were all present, but were added upon, with more songs and radio stations than before.

The game also had a short movie made for it, of which an edited version was used for the game’s intro sequence. Also, if you want to play this or the original GTA, you can download them, completely free and completely legally, here.

Rather than being the next big step in the GTA series, GTA2 is more of an evolution. It carried on what GTA did very well and improved upon it. The graphics were improved, the depth of the game world, the missions, the cars, everything. However, GTA fans dared to dream of a 3D GTA, and they would get their wish 2 years later.

Coming up: GTA gets a three-dimensional make-over with GTAIII.

GTA Retrospective I – Grand Theft Auto

• Game: Grand Theft Auto
• Console: PlayStation, PC
• Developer: DMA Design
  
• Publisher: BMG Interactive
• Released: 1997

The original Grand Theft Auto is the game that started it all. The game that pretty much invented the ‘sandbox’ style that influenced dozens of clones and quite possibly became the most important game ever made. Developed by DMA Design (which would become Rockstar North), Grand Theft Auto (GTA) – originally named ‘Race N Chase‘ – was released on the PC and PlayStation in 1997. At the time, it was hard to imagine just what this low in tech but high in prospect game would do to the industry and what it would become in 11 years’ time.

The game was viewed from a 2D top-down perspective, with your main character appearing as a tiny sprite and cars looking more like toy cars than the authentic looking, thousand plus polygon cars of GTA IV. The game also featured quite a strange control method; ‘up’ was forward, depending upon whichever way your character or vehicle was facing and consequently to that, left was always left and right was always right. The top-down view allowed the developers to create a massive game world for you to commit any type of crime you could imagine (or, at least any type of crime you could actually do in the game). Pedestrians were bumper fodder as well as cannon fodder. Every vehicle in the game was yours to drive whether it had someone else driving it or not, and each vehicle had its own radio, which would allow you listen to different songs from seven different radio stations. All these features introduced in this first GTA game were incredibly pioneering and became synonymous with the series, improving upon these advances with each game, making each new chapter in the saga of GTA seem more like real-life than the last (if in real-life, you could actually get away with it all).

The guys walking in a line are Buddhists. If you run them all over in quick succession, you get a load of bonus points.

The first GTA also introduced three cities that would all get their very own games; Liberty City from GTA III and GTA Liberty City Stories. Vice City, which was based on Miami, would get GTA Vice City and GTA Vice City Stories. San Andreas, which was based on San Francisco, would get GTA San Andreas. What is notable is that San Andreas in GTA San Andreas is a state, as it housed three cities: Los Santos (Los Angeles), San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturas (Las Vegas), but in this game it was merely a city. In fact, none of the cities’ original layouts would survive the transition to 3D. In the original GTA each of these cities were the game’s levels, and would serve the player as such. To get from one city (or level) to the next, you had to reach a certain score. To get this score you would have to employ tactics in true GTA style: cause havoc, steal and sell cars, or just do missions. This gave the game a much more arcade type feel than its successors. The game had no story to speak of and you could pick one of eight different characters to play as: Travis, Kat, Mikki, Divine, Bubba, Troy, Kivlov and Ulrika. It didn’t detract anything from the game though, as doing anything you wanted, anywhere and anytime, as you see fit, gave the game a lot more freedom than any game before it.

GTA also got an expansion pack in the form of GTA London. Set in the 60s, this was the first game in the series to utilise a licensed soundtrack to add to that authenticity the game deserved.

This was what your character looked like, a million miles away from Niko Bellic and the like.

Even though the game had a lot of violent content, it was all very tongue-in-cheek. You could punch passers-by in the face or merely taunt them by burping or farting. ‘Gritty realism’ is a something this game would reject in favour of unadulterated, and rather immature, fun. It really goes to show the farcical nature of some of the controversy over this game.

The game also introduced the ‘wanted level’ system of gameplay. Even though you could do anything you wanted to, it came at a price. Mount up a succession of crimes, be it kicking the crap out of pedestrians, car-jacking, hit and runs etc., and you would release a pack of baying police officers to either haul your ass in to the nearest police station, or ‘take you out’.

Despite its humble beginnings, the GTA franchise would practically know no bounds in the years to come, going from strength to strength, city by city. Literally. GTA tore the gaming community a new one with its freeform gameplay and controversial content. The gaming world would never be the same again, and this was just the beginning.

Coming up – we take a look at the next game in the series: GTA II.