On the balance, I don't regret the hundred or so hours I spent in San Andreas, but I've certainly been in no hurry to head back.
And now, having returned to the cities of Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas via the Xbox and PC versions of the game, I can't say I'm wholly surprised to find that the experience is still amazing... and that the gameplay is still really, really broken in many areas. Each new port brings with it a handful of new features, yet none of them are anything more than mere tweaks. Meanwhile, both versions introduce their share of new issues to further complicate the already troubled gameplay. This is what is known as "a wash."
For the most part, everything I wrote about the PlayStation 2 version of the game remains true in these ports. San Andreas is still a game of enormous scope, enormous ambition and enormous problems. The script, plot and acting are in a class of their own, but the story-driven action sequences are often poorly designed and stand at odds to the open nature of GTA's "sandbox" gameplay. The world is huge and free, but it's riddled with bugs and glitches. It is, in a word, a contradiction. A wonderful, glorious, engrossing and frequently infuriating contradiction.
San Andreas is at its best when it's letting players go on about the task of simply exploring and enjoying the setting. Containing three massive, living cities and even more rural areas, Rockstar really has created a world within the game. It's certainly the only game ever made where you can fight for turf in South Central with a car full of gangbangers before cruising out to an abandoned Nevada desert airstrip so you can pick up a personal jet pack to fly out to the wooded California countryside in order to undertake a series of trucking jobs via big rig semis while listening to mournful country music.
With the move to new hardware, driving that diesel tanker along a winding, rainy backroad looks quite a bit better than it did on the PS2 — probably the most significant change these ports bring to the table. Admittedly, San Andreas has never sold on the strength of its visuals (the game's graphics could best be described as "competent but sporadically ugly") but the higher resolution and crisper textures seen in the PC version in particular go a long way toward making the game prettier. The Xbox version still suffers from some wicked awful pop-up and draw-in, though; nap-of-the-earth flying remains a shortcut to suicide since hills and buildings have a tendency to appear suddenly on the screen when you're flying along at high speeds.
Less obvious additions include a 30-second replay feature that allows you to capture and save brief snippets of gameplay, which is perfect for showing off some of the game's unique and difficult-to-product glitches or random mishaps. Players can also replace the in-game radio stations with MP3s streamed from their hard drive, although the licensed soundtrack is pretty well fantastic and doesn't particularly need replacing. Also, the PC version has removed the two-player feature, which is ostensibly a loss (but not really, since it wasn't especially fun to begin with).
Meanwhile, the move away from PS2 makes for some nasty control issues. SA was designed for the DualShock 2 controller, and the lack of double shoulder buttons makes for some weird control compromises on Xbox — why do I have to steer my airplane with the black and white buttons? The snappy targeting system is also broken, and some of the button-mapping decisions make the game feel much clumsier than it did in its previous incarnation. The PC, meanwhile, has the usual problem of offering mouselook but requiring gamers without a decent gamepad to use WASD controls for driving and flying. It's not really a good trade-off with San Andreas, since unlike previous GTAs the PS2 version actually featured a targeting system that didn't make gamers want to yank out their hair in frustration, largely negating the need for mouse-driven targeting.
Still, in the grand scheme of GTA's immensity, these are fairly minor issues that don't really detract too much from the overall experience — which, it should be said, is still phenomenal. If for some reason you've never played San Andreas (because, say, you don't own a PS2) there's absolutely no reason not to take this opportunity to try it, either on PC or Xbox. Carl Johnson's tale certainly isn't for everyone (Rockstar has squeezed every last drop of freedom from its M rating), but those with the stomach for its grim, violent style will be rewarded with a vast world to explore and one of the best examples to date of great storytelling in games. San Andreas has more than its share of rough spots, but the rewards certainly make those irritations worth suffering.
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