| VisibleMan's GameLog for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC)
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Tuesday 19 January, 2010
♪ ♩ ♫Da na na na na na na V I G I L A N T E E E E E E ! ♬ ♪ ♫
♪ Beating up criminals... with his over-sized cellphone! ♩
♫ Cleaning up the streets with trusty pistol GLadDOS! ♪
♩ Tak'n out Ballas with an ambulance! ♫
So in case you haven't already inferred, I decided to try out the vigilante missions. Now, unless I'm doing something wrong, vigilante missions are quite difficult. To start off, you have steal a police vehicle. This generally involves driving erratically until you get some attention, but usually by the time you're in the vehicle and get the mission, you already have two stars. Next, you have to drive, often to the other side of town, to the criminal in question with the police on your tail. If, by some strike of luck, you actually find the target, you now somehow have to kill them. My method of choice was to just repeatedly ram their car until it exploded, but that didn't work too well and usually resulted in my car exploding as well. Another option might be to snag a police motorcycle, as you can fire submachine guns while riding, but I didn't have enough ammo to destroy their car that way either. The one time I did manage to take out a target, all I got was $50--nothing compared to running the ambulance service. So after multiple deaths and a pile of traffic violations, I retired as the vigilante and returned to my day job as a gangster. It wasn't very morally sound, either. Often you don't even know what you're chasing the person for, and you're expected to kill them.
Thankfully, all that manic driving practice came to good use in my next mission, where my gang drove through Ballas territory and shot the place up. I also got some more practice running people over, and dodging cop cars.
Since this was my final play of the game for the gamelog, I figured I'd have some fun and see how many stars I could accumulate. Starting with just one clip in a MAC-10 sub machine gun, I managed to get my rating up to three stars. I spent the next ten minutes running from the police and plowing through their road blocks, until I finally went out in a blaze of glory that ended with a shotgun to my face just as my forth star appeared.
If there's one thing this game excels at, it's letting off steam. You just can't be mad after a fun ten minute high-speed chase.
One interesting thing I've found is how dangerous the civilian NPC drivers are. Now that I've completed enough missions, the rival gangs open fire at me on sight. Naturally, I return the gesture--it's only polite that the bullets fly both ways. Well, this one time, the police showed up much faster than I expected and completely crammed the intersection. Well, those NPC drivers have got people to see and places to go, so they just try to plow right through; running over cop and gang member alike. Eventually, with all the bullets and collisions, cars just started exploding. Of course, I got my fair share of it; I was pinned against walls and my car was flipped over several times during this strange turn of events.
Overall, I think GTA:SA provides a fun, exaggerated environment to temporarily let loose the shackles of society. Is it an ethical game? No, hence its rating. Does it have anything to teach us about society? No, but it has a lot to teach us about ourselves. Is it fun? Strangely so.
That said, the PC port is terrible. Maybe not as bad as Red Faction: Guerrilla, but you can tell the menus were designed for a joystick, and the default control scheme is unintuitive, awkward, and unorganized. If there's one thing that bugs me more than anything on a PC game, it's a menu system that is unresponsive to the mouse. Really, it shouldn't be that hard to rewrite.
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| Comments |
| 1 |
"Is it an ethical game? No, hence its rating."
Hang on, are you saying that a game that depicts unethical conduct is inherently unethical? I'm not sure that I agree with that...
Thursday 21 January, 2010 by jp
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| 2 |
jp wrote:
> "Hang on, are you saying that a game that depicts unethical conduct is inherently unethical? I'm not sure that I agree with that..."
Hmmm, you bring up a fair point and I can see how the statement would suggest that. I should have better qualified it so it wasn't so ambiguous.
What I was trying to get at is that the game is not an "ethical role-model", so to speak, and as such is rightfully restricted to more mature audience. These users should (hopefully) have a more developed sense of ethics and understand that the game offers a satire by scaling things to extreme levels. This being opposed to a younger audience that could potentially make the jump that this behavior is acceptable (which almost sounds like a slippery slope argument, but I think most would agree based on experience that it does happen to an extent from time to time.)
Thursday 21 January, 2010 by VisibleMan
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| 3 |
Ah, ok. That makes more sense! I agree that it's definitely not a game for children and I don't think children should play it. Thanks for clarifying.
Friday 22 January, 2010 by jp
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