Anyway, San Andreas was a phenomenal game. According to the stat page, I had a 67% completion rating and spent about 38 hours on it, but given that every time I died or was arrested I just reloaded, you could probably tack on at least another 10-20 hours to that for what I really spent on it.
My only regret is that there was a glitch in part of the dating minigame that kept me from actually completing the Casino heist part of the game, but that didn't stop me from finishing the main storyline.
I think I liked this GTA the best of the lot because of a few factors.
A) The controls: The aiming system in San Andreas rocked. It could get annoying sometimes, but compared to the earlier games, it was amazing. I'm scared to go back to the old games because I love the tweaks they did in this one. That, and swimming. Every GTA-clone should have swimming by default now. (Hear that Mercenaries?)
B) The characters: All of the characters were phenomenal in this one. I think that the fact that even the most outlandish of them seemed to be more of a real person than a caricature helped. Plus Mike Toreno is the coolest character in a game ever. James Woods does an amazing job on the voice acting.
C) The music: I was kind of leery about this at first. Sure, early nineties music is ingrained on my brain, but given that so much of the soundtrack was West Coast Gangsta rap, I didn't think I was going to be into the music for this game that much.
Well, I'm not sure if it was the atmosphere of the game drawing me into the music or vice versa, but after a few hours, I was hooked on the music. Not only that, I found that the most subtle and interesting thing was how my listening habits changed depending on where I was in the game.
When I was in the Los Santos (Los Angeles) area of the game, listening to anything but the hip hop and rap just sounded wrong. However, once I left town and was roaming the countryside, I got hooked on the country music station. Then when I was in the desert, I was listening to the classic rock station almost exclusively.
Each part of the game had a completely different set of radio stations that fit with it. I could have just listened to rap for the whole game, but it just didn't work when I was riding my ATV up the side of a mountain.
Anyway, that's about it for GTA for me for a while. I will probably sit down with Vice City sometime before this parental leave is over and try to finish it up too, but for now I'm going to say goodbye to the gangster life and get back to being a secret agent and/or saviour of the world.
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What I'm Reading: Still reading Apocalypse Array, but not for long.
What I'm Playing:
What I'm Watching: 24, Corner Gas, The Daily Show
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