Don’t Fuck With Grove Street

GTA SA just about stretched the limits of every aspect of the current consoles. It gave the middle finger to the hardware and set out to conquer the universe with it’s demands. What it did though was suprisingly none fatal, and gave birth to the biggest GTA yet. GTA SA achieved so many things, it gave us perspectives of gangstas, introduced some hip 90’s music and even made a scandal that not even the most respected politicians could refuse. Oh, and it’s my fav GTA evar. San Andreas is a weird thing. It’s grouped together by it’s scope and by it’s franchise name. Slap GTA on something and it is bound to sell over a quazillion copies. Unless it’s a DS title… cough cough    . What San Andreas did was something entirely different than the usual spin-off. Vice City was a amazing and a breakthrough title, but San Andreas takes the crown for simply being the best. People say it’s let down though, so let’s challenge them.

San Andreas is said to have a terrible targeting system. But then again, you can free aim at any time – some people think the reticle is too small though. But well, be creative. Instead of run and gunning like normal GTA, take a little bit of cover by crouching or sneaking. Just don’t be in cover all the time because we all know how that turned out as a full feature. Cough cough. Some also say that San Andreas had too much… well, blatent stereotypicism. If that’s even a word. Which they could be right.

Playing as a dark-skinned, gangsta and regular homeboy CJ , you go out to come back and conquer the world. Well, that’s what is put on your plate anyway. Thats one thing that no one doesn’t have a problem with, because at the end, you realise that CJ only came back for a funeral and was lured into moneys. It’s a pretty subtle thing Rockstar put into the writing, maybe they didn’t write any line of “CJ’S BROTHER ASKS FOR A FAVOR”, but at the end it’s pretty weird to have not been the sole purpose of the games plot.

I like my coffee hot. So does Jack Thomspon. When Hot Coffee stormed the politics of the world, every single lawyer lapped it up like it was the last supper and Rockstar was Jesus. In the end, San Andreas got an AO+ rating and was taken off the shelves of most stores across the world. The sex minigame which started it all was just in the code, discarded and only a few models had been made. It didn’t even work properly. Don’t ask me how I know that.

The legacy of San Andreas will unfortunately not be it’s size, scale and scope – it’s general ‘stretching the boundries’ everything and even it’s brilliant setting. It will be remembered for the cold coffee it left on Rockstar’s tabletop of controversies, and probably be frowned upon by nerds, lawyers and politicians alike until the end of time and space. But at the end of the day, it was nice to play a different perspective in the GTA world. Instead of formal gangsta, it’s informal not good at dinner parties gangsta.