Thursday 28 July, 2011

For my third time playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I decided to ignore the plotline and explore the game for myself. I was extremely disappointed in the lack of meaningful content outside of the main storyline and in other content. I understand that there are missions for driving an ambulance, driving a car, apprehending suspects, etc, but they all have the same thing in common. Namely, they all merely seemed to have the player practice his driving skills. If I wanted to play a game like that, Id play a racing game, not a game that is supposed to be about people in the 'hood. I found the ratio of number of pedestrians to type of pedestrians extremely odd, since there are many people walking the streets. Many of them look exactly the same to me, and shows a lack of creativity in the design of the game, in my opinion.

Due to my dislike of the driving system, which basically seems to be 'use the arrow keys, and if you hit someone, keep going,' I found myself biking around the neighborhood randomly trying to see how far I good get in a good jump onto the highway without the bike falling over. That was fun, since I could try timing it with a car going by. I also got bored from this, and eventually just stole a car and went on a rampage through the city. I guess that that may be one of the issues with the game that others raise, showing kids that when they dont have anything else to do they should wreck stuff, steal stuff, kill people, etc

My overall opinion on the game seems not very complimentary, and thats mainly because thats how I see it. I disliked it because I don't like single player campaign type games due to the lack of; a) mutability, the AI has a limited number of choices, and often the player doesn't know why it makes one over the other, b) social contact with other people, games are often more enjoyable (at least for me) when there are other people I can play with and / or chat with as I am playing. This game does not seem to support either, though as I didn't go through all the options, I cannot state it as a certainty.

"since there are many people walking the streets. Many of them look exactly the same to me, and shows a lack of creativity in the design of the game, in my opinion."

There's also the technical challenges involved. Recall the game was developed quite a few years ago to run on an earlier generation of hardware (PS2).