Summary

My thoughts after putting about 15 hrs into the game: After the novelty and giddiness that comes with the first few hours of play wears off, GTA:SA quickly reveals itself as the kind of game that will appeal to die-hard GTA fans, but likely no one else. If you're not a GTA fan, San Andreas has nothing that will make you want to pick it up, despite all the extravagant praise and the hype shoveled out from the gaming media. If you're ambivalent about whether you should spend $50 for your own copy, my advice is to wait until the price drops and grab the cheat codes--they'll be the only thing that can reduce your frustration to a tolerable level.

Sound

There is no doubt that Rockstar sank a lot of money into licensing fees and the soundtrack is the best part of the game. Not only are there a large number of stations, but you'll be able to catch the better-known hits, along with a healthy dose of tracks that, while not garnering as much commercial success, nonetheless fit the gameworld perfectly. The Old School radio stations give you all the great Gangsta rap hits from the late 80's - early 90's, and the classic rock stations do the same for the new wave/electronica and metal hits of that era. Toss in assorted funk, reggae, and classic soul channels as well and you've got plenty for your listening pleasure. There's even a country (!) station available, although when Banging, it seems more than a little incongruous to have it playing in the background. The commercials that play in between songs on the radio are hilarious parodies of existing formats, and are one of the best aspects of the game's audio. I tried the option of creating my own, new soundtrack, saved on the Xbox hard drive, which theoretically can be imported into the game and formatted as another radio station you’re capable of listening to at will. Unfortunately, as best I can tell, if you have more than one soundtrack on the hard drive, GTA:SA will only permit the one listed first to be imported, usually the one that's been on the drive the longest. The game software seems to "lock" onto this soundtrack candidate, and there's no way you can cycle thru the hard drive's soundtrack listing and select the one you've actually tailored for the game. Maybe this problem was unique to me, but if not, then you're going to have to erase those 'extra' soundtracks from your hard drive in order to force the game to select the one you’re designated for it.

Gameplay

I held off on purchasing GTA:SA until it appeared on Xbox and (as we were told by all the "professional" gaming websites and media) the graphics would improve by leaps and bounds, the load times would dwindle to reasonable lengths, and the Xbox hard drive would allow players to format their own soundtracks. So what do you get for your $50 ? While certainly there are some sublime moments, such as when you and your homiez set out to Gang Bang in style to the sounds of Ice Cube rapping on the radio, 90% of San Andreas is the same old, tired, recycled gameplay of the GTA series, just set in a much larger gameworld. The controls are as awful as ever, the camera angles just as vile, the missions just as frustrating and tedious. Get used to reloading a LOT, as the clumsy driving controls guarantee that you'll need several tries to complete a given mission. For example, one of the early missions calls for you to rob a National Guard arms depot. You have to operate a forklift and place a total of six crates into cargo van. All this time your homie Ryder is fending off attacks by outraged Guardsmen, and if his health falls to zero the mission ends. The operation of the forklift is a nightmare of struggling with poorly designed controls, switching from one defective camera angle to another in order to see what you’re doing, and periodically interrupting your loading to hop out of the forklift and assist Ryder in gunning down sundry opponents. Your frustration will increase exponentially as you inevitably drive the forklift into walls, drop crates or tip them over, frantically manipulate the right thumbstick up and down to raise or lower the lift tines to the proper height, etc, all the while keeping a fearful eye on Ryder's dwindling health bar. Inevitably Ryder gets waxed and you have to reload the mission and start all over again. I finally resorted to the "slow down" game speed cheat and did the mission in slow-mo in order to successfully complete it (a comprehensive listing of cheats is available at the www.teamxbox website). This sort of "failure-based" gameplay is at the heart of the GTA series and San Andreas offers the same old, same old. Missions are all crippled to some degree or another by the clumsy PS1-era control and camera schemes. Gameplay degenerates into you attempting the mission 3 or 4 times until you succeed. There's not much to look forward to when you finally DO complete a difficult mission, because the next mission almost always adheres to the same format. In fact, whenever I undertake a new mission I promptly consult the Gamespot Gameguide to figure out exactly what I have to do and thus, hopefully, grind thru only one or two iterations (three or four !?) before achieving success. I won’t deny there are some fun aspects to San Andreas; the maps are indeed huge, there are lots of little side activities and tasks to perform, and the early 90's West Coast Gangsta atmosphere is perfectly communicated. But these aspects of the game by themselves can’t make up for the fact that Rockstar is resting on the heavy cash flow and laurels that come with peddling yet another iteration of a nearly five-year -old game design, with all the limitations and disadvantages that entails. I have no doubt that the game will be extraordinarily frustrating to anyone playing it on a PC with keyboard and mouse, and I am also quite confident that, despite this fact, "PC Gamer" magazine will give it a grossly inflated score of > 90%. That's just how it goes.