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Friday 19 January, 2007
GTA: San Andreas is the third and seemingly final game in the GTA3 series. Grand Theft Auto originally was played from an overview perspective but still had the distinctive design of having a large degree of choice in what to do in the game. With GTA2, the bird's eye view was still used but updates were made. With GTA3, which was set in Liberty City (which I think is supposed to be New York City), Rockstar Games pioneered a genre which has been often imitated. Part RPG, part 3rd person shooter, the GTA3 series has closed and it will be interesting to see what Rockstar does with GTA4.
An interesting aspect of San Andreas is the safehouse, which allows the player to possibly play for an extended time, outside of the missions, without dying or being arrested. In the safehouse, the player can change clothes or save the game (which gives 100% health and takes away the cop heat. While unrealistic, this feature allows for more fluid movement from city to city and permits the player to stockpile weapons, which can be expensive early in the game (unless CJ goes to the horse track). The addition of gang wars is very fun and is an easy way to get a lot of weapons, assuming you already have some. Although only played during the Los Santos section of the storyline, I used a save file to allow me to go back to the gang wars. This is what I did when I played GTA: San Andreas for this game log.
Being successful in gang wars is all about location. If you are in an open area with few obstructions, the gang members, who come from different sides, will converge on CJ quickly and from all angles. It is important to engage the different groups seperately because they simply have too much fire power to take all of them on at once. Sometimes, the gang members will become stuck on the corner of a building or fence and this makes it much easier to finish the wave. I think the game designers may have purposely made the gang members easily dispersed because it would be nearly impossible to kill them all if they were tactical. At the same time, it seems that everybody in San Andreas acts in a similar way.
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