Title: GTA
Album: San Andreas
Manufacturer: Rockstar north
Publisher: Rockstar North
I just bought this game for the PS 2 last night. I must say I had high expectations and I am not dissapointed. The sound track is the best yet(GTA series is know to have good sound tracks). For those of you not familar, while drive cars, motor bikes, or most any form of transportation you can listen to the radio. You can change stations to about 10 different radio stations.
Sound track includes
Easy E
Dr. Dre
Snoop
Guns and Roses
Rage Against the Machine
Slick Rick
Doc
Ice Cube
and many more
You are a black man this time. You have been out east in liberty city(New York in GTA world) and you come back to San Andreas(LA in GTA world) because your mother was killed in a drive by shooting in her house. You used to belong to a gang and your older brother still dose. You are thrust back into gang banging in the early 90's.
You have more to account for in this version. YOu have to earn street respect, build muscle, stamina, sexual appeal, keep fat low, eat, work out. Instead of looking for hidden packages this time, you have to tag over rival gangs tags. There are 100 of these to do.
You can now ride bicycles. As a matter of fact this is the first thing you will ride. You can do drive by's on bikes. You also have to build your biking skills up. You have to build your driving skills up.
The game starts and no one respects you. it seems our charater was a punk before he left. Your friends are used to you bailing out at crucial moments. They keep refering to you as a busta. And say, don't bust on me.
A few other things different this time, You can now climb walls, fences, boxes, etc. You can now reply to people on the street when they say things
[<] for a negative response [>] for a positive response. Hand fighting is more realistic and gets quicker as you build up stats. at fisrt you can go toe to toe with a hoe for a while before you get her money. You have to eat in this one. There is a meter for this. If you eat too much your fat count will go up, if you do not eat, you will loose energy and not be able to run fast as far.
Things that are the same. You can still do taxi missions to get cash, ambulance missions, I have not yet done a police mission/vigilante mission.
I played for 6 hrs so far. I have yet to cover 1/8th of the board map. I started in the south east of the map. I drove north for 15 minutes and didn't hardly dent the map. I still have just barely looked at the city. And this is not because I was blocked. The city is HUGE compared to the last 2. Plan to be playing this for a long while.
Oh one cool but so far useless thing is the ability to better customise your charaters dress. You can go into a store not and shop. You pick the pants from a list, the shirt, hat, jewlery, the works. This is a slow process. You can not see itemes until you have your chartater go into the dressing room, put them on and come out for you to look. then you can buy or try something else on. This is a pain. This aside, Rockstar did it again.
Some screen captures
http://www.gta-sanandreas.com/screenshots/index.php I give it **** ot of *****
Graphics (skins on people could be better sometimes boobs are lumpy faces have edges to them)
Lighting is great
music is perfect match for timeframe
cars have better paint skins this time.(some better reflectiveness)
some controlls are different and this is sometimes more cumbersome. Not sure I like these changes so much.
All in all, 4 out of 5 from me is and awsome score. It isn't the best graphics. There are far worse, but I want much better than GTA 3 2 version later. I want easy controllls, and I think the shopig for clothese will most likely not make it to the next game. This is just too tedious and pointless.