Brief Musings on GTA: San Andreas

Last night I played some GTA: San Andreas; god damn that's a sad and lonely game. A bit less so than Vice City, since at least the guys giving you missions are your friends (in a fit of White Boy, I can't think of how to spell "home-ees". Homeez? Homyz? Homes? Homez?), but it doesn't feel much better when you're slitting throats to steel a book of rap lyrics for a guy you don't even like. Contrary to popular belief, I actually think Rockstar's Quantity over Quality approach to designing the GTA iterations has kind of crossed the line and backfired a little; there are so many different things to do in San Andreas, the majority of them feel under-developed, tacked on, and mostly, tokenism. I mean, stealth – who honestly thought that stealth missions would improve GTA? But everyone else is doing it, and it's easy, so fuck it, chuck it in. Instant boring-ass missions. The stat improval is pretty much the same; basically, to power your character up, you have to play about five minutes of button bashing sub-games per play session – dull. Incorporating things like the stealth missions has also kind of sucked the life out of some of the games' vitality – in Vice City you didn't really mind playing certain missions over and over again, since different random stuff tended to happen each time – now, and awful lot of the missions happen in buildings or in secluded locations instanced away from the main city, eliminating this random element – it makes for more elaborate set pieces, but loses a bit of the games very fragile heart – a loss I'm not sure GTA can take much of, at least for this gamer.