Monday 9 October, 2006

OK so I just got done with my first session of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for Xbox. I had already been playing when the assignment was... assigned. In any case, I'm less than half way through. I"m at a point where I've effectively been exiled from my inner-city empire in Los Santos (Los Angeles/Compton) and am now working to establish myself in San Fierro (San Francisco). Right now I'm stuck on a particularly frustrating mission in San Fierro so I stopped working on the storyline and now I'm working on collecting "tags"; pieces of graffitti spread throughout the Los Santos area. Spraying my own gang's mark on top of all 100 of these is supposed to grant me some free weapons, as well as lots of gang respect. I'm currently on 77 or something like that.

They're hard to find so I cheated a little and am using a map to get the ones I haven't already gotten. The process is complicated by the fact that at this stage in the game, the vast majority of the city is infested with members of various chapters of the Ballas, the hated and sworn enemies of my own gang, the Grove Street Families. They attack me on sight. This last run of Tag collecting has opened my eyes to how disappointing the Los Santos Police Department is. Normally, the Police won't engage NPCs who open fire in the city, though they will engage you. However I thought if I could get a policeman involved in a battle directly he would defend himself at least and provide me with some cover. I ran from enemy gang fire, putting a policeman in the corssfire. He simply bolted and ran as soon as he was hit. I decided that meant it was ok for me to fire back since he was out of sight, but as soon as I opened fire on the enemy gang members he turned around and ran towards me, intent on the arrest. I was forced to jump off of a nearby bridge in order to avoid drawing the conflict out and risking the gang or the police calling for reenforcements.

Hi,

That's an interesting issue you noted about the AI being very selective of who it targets. (it sounds like it will basically always go after you, but never anyone else?)

Do you think there is any social commentary there? So, would you think that the cop is corrupt and favours the other gang? Is the other gang also African-american ? (say, it the other gang was hispanic, could you think the other cop is racist?)