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reaper0grim's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)
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| [October 5, 2010 04:50:35 AM]
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AN: I just wrote a entry for this game, but when I pressed "Add Diary Enter" it just went back to the home page and didn't post it. This has happend twice now. Has this happend to anyone else? Anyways, I'm gonna attempt to remember what I typed earlier.
Sex, drugs, and violence seem to be a reoccurring/major theme in GTA: SA. You can't avoid it because in order to move the story along you usually have to kill someone or steal something. And if you don't have to commit to violence and/or sex, if you volunteer to sex or violence you end up gaining something.
For example, you you're running low on money, all you have to do is beat up somebody and that their money then run from the police.
Another example is if you were running low on health. The easiest thing to do is find a hooker to pick up. Fork over some dough, park in a hidden area, a little bow chicka wow wow and boom, your health is back up.
Now for a combination of both. If you ever find your self running low on money and heath this is what you do. Find a hooker, then fork over the cash to get some. Once your health goes back up, kill the hooker. This was you get more health and your money back plus more. How ridiculous is that? Though I'm sure this type of thing happens in real life. We hear about similar things on the news all the time.
Now for a mix of all 3. There is one missions where CJ and another gangster has to barge into some "baller's" house and take him out. Right as you walk in, smoke fills the air, from which I assume is weed smoke. That's one out of three. Then a you walk in a little more, you notice a male and female having sex in the background. That's two out of three. And finally, the whole point of going there was to kill some "ballers". That's all three.
I've also noticed that CJ's friends are always smoking or drinking or both. This game heavily implies the stereotypes of African-Americans smoke a lot of weed and like to get drunk. Especially if they are "thugs"/"gangsters".
Though I do think this game is a terrible game, it does a very good job of portraying a side of society that don't have the pleasures of good parents, an education, and a safe environment. San Andreas is a place that is ruled by the gangs and the authorities have very little influence.
All in all, I don't believe that the themes and situations portrayed in GTA: SA make for a good game. It maybe mindless fun for the first few hours, but it's a crap game as a whole. But then again, it was awarded the 3rd best selling video game by Guinness World Records as off 2009-2010, so it must have some kind of value. Who knows. Maybe the 21.5 million people who purchased a copy wanted to analyse the morals of the game as we are.
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| [September 29, 2010 07:38:09 PM]
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Today I decided to try doing some vigilante missions. I've never played this game before so I'm assuming that in these missions you perform good deeds that help society. I wouldn't be surprised if certain v. missions cause you to loose rep.
This is a little of topic, but I wanna mention that two CJ's attributes include Fat and Sex Appeal. I thought that was kind of funny. In most games you have things like strength and defense (as seen in most RPG-ish type games), or hunger and happiness (like in Sims).
In order to do a v. mission, you must be in a cop car or bike. So before you can do something good, you have do do something bad. Then again, vigilante isn't necessarily "good". It's illegal, but it can potentially get more good done than just the cops. I mean, look at Batman and Spider-Man for example.
So I just stole a cop bike and was told that there was a suspect somewhere. I guess I have to go find this suspect now. I have a time limit to capture him/her.
So I just finished my first vigilante mission. All you have to do is find the suspect and shoot them down, that's just about it. I was expecting a little more to the missions. Like save a bunch of hostages from a bank robbery of something.
The more vigilante missions you do that harder they get. For the first two missions, I just had to locate one guy, but for the third one there were three guys that I had to kill.
I don't feel like this is an accurate representation of vigilante. Actually, I take that back. I just don't think it's the right way to go about it.
To provide an example, think about Walter Joseph Kovacs (aka Rorschach) from the comic and/or film "The Watchmen". He is a vigilante super hero who believes in killing the criminals he captures. He believes that this is the true way to remove evil from the world. The first time he ever killed a criminal was when he was investigating the kidnapping and potential murder of a young girl. When he found out that the kidnapper had cut the girl up and fed them to his dogs, he killed the dogs and put a butcher's knife in his head. From then on he realized that it was his mission to rid the world of evil.
Bruce Wayne on the other hand (aka Batman) believes that killing a criminal is equivalent to being a criminal. Murdering a criminal is still murder. He also has a no gun rule, which prevents him from having access to a weapon of death if he were to ever want to kill someone (as if he couldn't kill someone with his bare hands). At one point, Nightwing (aka Dick Grayson, the original Robin) beat the Joker to death, but to prevent Nightwing from having the blood of the Joker on his hands, Batman revived the Joker.
Going back to GTA. The v. missions are more like Rorschach's ideal of vigilante in which you kill the suspects that the cops are looking for. I agree with Batman. I think that the morally right thing to do is to hand them to the law and have them decide his punishment.
Well, that's it for now. Time to use the flying cars cheat and fly around San Andreas.
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| [September 28, 2010 05:18:53 PM]
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From playing the first 30 minutes of the game, I can tell that this game primarily focuses on the stereotypes of urban areas, aka "the hood". The main character, Carl "CJ" Johnson, is returning to the hood form the East Coast after learning that his mother was murdered. As the game starts, Officer Samuel L. Jackson recognizes him and takes his money (that he says is drug money), drove him around and threw him out onto the street. This implies that CJ has a criminal background.
From what I understand, after leaving the hood, CJ lost all of his respect from his friends and is trying to gain it back by doing stereotypical "gangster" acts.
Just about all of the featured characters are stereotypical black guys from urban areas. They curse a lot, use ebonics and incorrect english, smoke, fight, steal cars, drink, have no respect for the authority, and say the N word and "foo" a lot. And they all have nicknames (or gangster names?), like Ryder and Sweet for example.
The first time you go to the local pizza parlor, your friend Ryder takes his gun and attempts to rob the place. CJ tells him to stop and Ryder says that he's still a bitch and isn't hood. the mission afterwards is to go tag their names on a bunch of buildings. This is an example of a stereotypical gangster act. Each mission gains you respect, or "street cred". My guess is that the point of the game is to bring CJ's rep up so no one will disrespect him around the hood to make it easier to get info on who his mother's killer is.
The violence in this game is limitless. You can fight anyone and steal just about everything (well, mainly just cars). If you kill someone, the cops will chase you and you can try to escape or go to jail. I don't really care for this aspect of the game. It's just mindless and stupid.
Now that I have a fair understanding of the game and the story, the next logs will focus more on the missions and what CJ has to do to build his rep as well as the respect between his gang and other rival gangs.
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