A day in San Andreas
Since I’ve not played anything new in quite a while, I picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas yesterday. Short summary: It rapidly proved just as intoxicatingly good as previous installments in the series and so it didn’t get put down until long after I should have been in bed.
While I played, I jotted down some notes - things I noticed about the game’s design, things I liked and things I didn’t, obvious things and subtle things - various thoughts provoked by playing the game. Some of these probably merit closer inspection in the future, some of them are pretty minor observations. For now, I felt like just throwing them out there in a relatively raw fashion and so, what follows are my observations from a day in San Andreas.
On foot
- I like the overhaul the pedestrians have received. I was always surprised at how willingly they would take a beating in previous GTA games, so imagine my surprise when, after slapping a random prostitute to see what would happen, she pulled out a knife and stabbed me. Dead.
- The conversations between pedestrians are pretty amusing. They end up quite nonsensical for the most part, but I get the impression the intention here was to establish a technological beachhead rather than a perfect implementation. I’ll be interested to see how things turn out with a bit of spit and polish in the next game.
- Red-faced from my stabbing at the hands of the local prostitute, I found it noteworthy that killing one gets you a one-star wanted rating.
(Does that sentence make me sound like a psychopath?)Was it like this in previous games, or is this a silent nod to the game’s critics? (One of the most frequently criticisms of the series has been the ‘elicit services from prostitute, beat her up to get your money back and more, with no consequences!’ mechanic.) - What new gameplay will be opened up by being able to put fifty or a hundred characters on screen instead of just ten? Defend yourself from a neighbourhood hue and cry? Hide from your pursuers in the crowd? Incite a stampede? Flee from your admirers, Austin Powers style?
In the car
- I love just cruising around and exploring in games, so San Andreas is a little piece of heaven for me. I haven’t unlocked San Fierro or Las Venturas or half the countryside yet, but even so, the amount of space is almost overwhelming and the variety in my surroundings is thrilling. Vice City never really felt twice as large as Liberty City (something Rockstar said it was), but San Andreas is tangibly huge.
- The countryside seems to work really well. There’s a sense in which you wouldn’t expect it to - it’s natural to anticipate that there will be a much lower density of ‘potential cool stuff’ in a big field than a city block. I haven’t done any missions outside the city limits yet, so it’s too early to say for sure, but a nighttime drive through winding mountain roads and darkened forest lit by lightning as the thunder and rain beat upon my car was great fun just by itself and suggest to me that they’ve probably nailed it.
- I like that, when they have to put blockades in the road (to stop me going to cities I haven’t unlocked yet), they are put at T-junctions and crossroads, so I never have to turn around and go back the way I came.
- I bumped into a guy’s car and then drove off thinking nothing of it, but then bust out laughing when he came chasing after me, doing his best to ram me off the road. Little things that show that the world will respond to what a player does and that defy the player’s expectations (from previous games in the series), add a lot of fun.
- I like that racing markers now reach up into the sky and tell you whether you’re going to have to turn a corner. A small change allows the track designers to really open things up and make the courses much looser (by putting the markers much further apart) and allows a player to concentrate on actually racing rather than devoting all their attention to where the course goes.
- I like how the decrease-wanted-level stars are placed to promote dramatic driving. (Not really a particularly novel observation, I know.)
On a mission
- I was thinking to myself the other day about how the camera language used by game cutscenes is almost always either cuts between rigidly static positions, or ultra-perfect swoops and glides around a scene. I couldn’t think of a game that employed the shaky, handheld-camera techniques of Cinéma vérité, but now I have one for that list. Did Vice City do this too? I can’t remember.
- I like how each character’s missions normally have a particular gameplay theme, as well as a personality theme and I like how they build and play variations on that theme until it reaches its climax.
- Big Smoke’s various bike missions have been totally rad.
- The addition of a second potential reward for completing a mission - respect - seems to have allowed the developers to further tighten up and add depth to the role of money in the game world. I’ve not really seen respect in action yet, so I wonder how that will turn out.
- I’d heard lots of people say that this installment in the series had forgotten its roots and took itself too seriously. How can you say that after meeting OG Loc?
In abstract
- Why isn’t there some easy, obvious way of reviewing old tutorial text messages? There have been several times that I’ve wanted to go back and reread something, but haven’t been able to.
- Would your average games player (i.e. not hardcore) understand the concept of ‘player stats’ if they hadn’t been popularised by The Sims? And so, if The Sims didn’t exist, would that have affected whether Rockstar would’ve been able to add stats to this game and whether they would have been as successful? (Perhaps you could say Final Fantasy instead of The Sims, for some players.) It’s interesting to think about the cross-pollination of gaming concepts between titles, for a non-hardcore player (since they won’t necessarily be familiar with even a fraction of the range of gaming concepts that a hardcore player is).
- The controls seem to be really squeezed towards breaking point in this installment. (I’m playing the PC version.) There are four potential places for my hands to be, at various points in the game - the main two (WASD for movement and mouse for looking around), but also the number pad keys and the right-hand side of the main keyboard. As a consequence, there’s the occasional awkward shuffle around the keyboard, which is really jarring and takes my concentration away from the game more than I’d like it to. There’s also some quirky inconsistencies where similar gameplay modes will require different controls - some rhythm mini-games use player movement controls, others, the numberpad controls; some stealth missions that require you to use a slow-walk key, others, the crouch key.
- Grand Theft Auto is often cited as the kind of game where real in-game advertisements would be a natural fit, but really, how much would they suck? Billboards for a real life deodorant or pizza might make the game world seem more real, but adverts for ‘True Grime’ and the ‘Brown Starfish Cafe Bar’ make the game world more fun.
