Wednesday 21 January, 2009

San Andreas round 3:

For my third session, I chose to play past the first couple missions in order to open up the game a little more. The farther you play in a GTA game, more and more features are made available to you. Having progressed a little farther in the story at this point, I was able to access some of the newer features that were added to San Andreas

Some of things I was encouraged to do were go to the gym and work out, eat food to gain health (but not too much or I'd gain weight), and find a girl to date. I did not like the addition of these features because I saw it as an attempt to make the game more realistic, which is not what GTA is all about to me. This game is meant to be anything but reality, because in real life I would never drive my car onto the sidewalk to smash a group of rival gang bangers, or run around trying to kill as many people as I can before the cops get me. I don't want to play a game that lets me do so many bad things, things that are frowned upon by any contributing member of society, and then have to go work out in the gym in order to impress a girl. This game is not meant to be reality, and these features are an attempt by the developers to blur the line between video game and reality, and for a game like San Andreas, I just think that is a bad idea.

All in all I don't think much creative effort was put into this game. Like I said before the story and dialogue is uninspired, and it seems like it was done to piss people off. The game play is almost identical to the previous games in the series, with the setting being transplanted to a west coast city filled with stereotypical gang banger characters. The developers tried to add a few new features to the game, but in the end I think they took away from being able to just have fun playing the game.

Interesting comment about the food system. You could also argue, however, that there is additional satire and social commentary in these systems that builds upon the other elements in the game.