Lessons in leaking

 

There has been a shifting of the balance of video game news since the turn of the century. The power is no longer in the hands of the creators, nor the marketers who own them, but now in the grimy paws of the hackers and leakers and people driven not by passions but something baser and impossible to explain. Is it clout? The potential for profit? The desire to prove oneself as having worth? Or maybe just the spurred desire to watch all the world crumble for your fun and profit? Whatever the situation, we've seen much in the way of projects, in the gaming world, having their debutes marred by early releases, unfinished glimpses and just recently in a turn that feels pretty unprecedented- a complete early game build that people have ran off with and, much as I insinuated, have already managed to get playable. But not everyone is really built to be a victim in this world.

Nintendo are a company renowned for their zero tolerance policy on anything regarding their owned properties, as though they see themselves as the Disney of gaming and must impart similarly draconian measures upon the world. Woe be those who fall under the Nintendo hammer for the crime of, loving their games enough to make a totally original game set within their worlds- yes they've gone after unique fan-made Pokémon games before. They will come down on people with the wrath of the gods if they are caught using ROMS or porting a game to the PC even though Nintendo will never try to cater to that market as long as they live- and we've even heard stories that Nintendo get upset when people play their games totally legitimately but not in the fashion the developers wanted. Let the story of the Nuzlocke challenge which was vetoed by Nintendo never be forgotten. They also hate mods, because of course.

But another company with such a reputation has been the big boys of the development world themselves: Rockstar Games. All the way back during the days when they still visited E3, (we're talking pre 2004) Rockstar suffered the brunt of a leak thanks to engaging with the convention and entrusting one of their builds with said staff. The leak ended up revealing content that was never intended to make it to the final game, but which ended up causing much controversy and getting Rockstar in trouble with certain advisory boards for pushing the boundaries of sexual content. Boundaries, I remind you, that they never actually intended to push in the final game because the whole minigame was just a test build which was ultimately scrapped for whatever reason. Since that moment, like a supervillain origin story, Rockstar became a lot more serious about how they maintained their data.

Rockstar had themselves one of the most profitable franchises in entertainment media, and they realised with that kind of acclaim came a lot of jealous eagerness to step on their image. Rockstar became recluses, locking themselves out from the public discourse of convention shows and gaming news outlets correspondence. They refused to let outsiders in to see what they were working on or even to know about their development practices in even the most abstract sense. Marketing, when deemed absolutely necessary, was handled with the secrecy of a CIA operation. Materials went out earmarked, investigators were on standby if any piece of information went errant, and I can only assume they had secret contracts with black van kidnapping crews just in case they ever needed to go that far. The way we hear former Rockstar executives tell it, they got scary with how they handled the mythos of their company- correctly assuming that premium reputation was tied in with the success they enjoyed so liberally.

Somewhere along the line that bulletproof reputation got lost and disseminated. They grew complacent. Pliable. And then- boom, Grand Theft Auto Six gets leaked. A game that has yet to be officially announced, and certainly hadn't been revealed- was open for the public. And sure, there had been some narrative leaks a few years earlier. We heard details about probable scenarios and characters- but it's easy to brush that aside as idle speculation. Just like when I saw someone summarise the first 3 chapters of Assassin's Creed 3 in the reveal trailer the day that game was announced, they were absolutely right- but I still shrugged it off and the spoiler didn't ruin anything on the day. But when you see hordes of gameplay footage featuring the new playable female protagonist, and the recognisable locales of Vice City, and some of the new mechanics which haven't been officially announced yet and so I won't mention them- that's a bit harder to brush off.

The responsible party, led by a severely autistic hacker armed with an Amazon fire stick, a Hotel TV and a Mobile phone managed to make off with indisputable proof of Grand Theft Auto 6's existence which he spread liberally around the Internet. And no, before you ask- I have no idea how he manged to pull that off with the tools mentioned. (I assume he is a wizard.) Seeing as how I know so much about the lad, however, you can probably predict that the hack did not go so well for him. Whatever grand ideas he had about clout and infamy will unfortunately have to go brushed aside as the lad is served up to the legal system after being hunted down in no time flat. But not by Rockstar's elite recovery team. It seems this leak caught them entirely by surprise, law enforcement had to get involved. The spotless Rockstar doublet got itself tarnished.

Of course, the police did not need to look very far in order to find the hacker, considering he was already in their custody. The kid was already on bail and in Police Protection for the hacking of Nvidia and BT, he did this hack in his free time, which is about the worst time to perform a follow-up you could pick. Originally details on this case made it seem like the prep was on the fast track to a slap on the wrist, but considering the details, as well as the aggrieved party in question- that possibility vanished quick. As of now the boy has been sentenced to life within a Hospital Prison, after being deemed remorseless and dangerous, essentially cutting short all potential the kid had of being covertly recruited by M16 like in the movies... or, maybe providing the perfect cover to discreetly slip him out of the public eye and into M16! (Oh, I may have stumbled onto a fresh conspiracy!)

All this goes to show you that on the otherside of things, there really is nothing at all to be gained from leaking. Even the tiny scraps of attention are often vastly outweighed by the crippling punishments, if not the vast amount of anger you stir up. Remember the amount of disgrace thrown at the guy who leaked the audio of the Cyberpunk 2077 closed doors demo? Now, do you remember his name? Google barely does. And yet we come back here time and time again. So the moral of this little lesson? Don't mess with these big scary companies who care more about asserting their authority than the little people they step on to do it. If they're willing to squeeze their own fans just for liking their games a little too much, just think what they'll do to you!

Okay; GTA VI prediction time!

 The Florida man, cometh!

Western Versus Eastern Product Placement

Devil in the background details.

'Product Placement' is the term we give to a very specific type of advertisement as it exists within entertainment. What we see as the breaking of the sanctity fictional world to introduce real world brands and logos, usually in the pursuit of subliminally advertising related products to the audience. Sure, you can hire the current James Bond actor to star in commercials driving your cars and wearing your watches so that movie fans will equate the suave and cool Bond with those products and thus seek them out in emulation, or you can literally show James riding an Aston Martin in the movie and let the prestige rub off from there. It's a very pervasive and well acknowledged branch of the advertising tree, if somewhat controversial depending on where you hail from and the marketing morals you grew up with. 

But what if I told you that somewhere out there, under the spectrum of differing cultures, some people don't just accept product placement but actually really love the idea of the real world infecting their virtual and fictional spaces? It's seems such a wild perspective in the West, where many of us are taught at a young age not just to recognise what we're being sold but to be actively weary of the idea of aggressive and subversive salesmanship. Remember how in the time before regulations were introduced, kids cartoons used to try to blend seamlessly with adverts in order to fool the child audience into the agency of the ad. Tell a kid that a toy version of the Transformer they were watching is in mortal peril unless they buy that very figure from the store, and the parents will have to endure endless nattering for the next few weeks. Nowadays we are sharpened to be more weary. Not only should I recognise the advertisers attempts to represent themselves and mentally separate it out of the contained story, but I should be aggrieved about the placement to begin with. I cannot speak for everyone, but that was a precedent I remembering being introduced and imbued into me during school; English Class. And yet I see that same sort of perception towards product placement all across America too.

And I think you know where I'm going with this, don't you? Over in the East, perception towards product placement tends to trend in the exact opposite fashion. Product placement isn't just accepted in films and games over there, but actually encouraged and preferred. In some small part due to the way that it works to ground fictional worlds that are supposed to be set within the recognisable and observable world we inhabit. Because afterall, if you're supposed to be watching a fictional story set within modern day Tokyo, wouldn't it make sense to see the same shops and brands that anyone would normally see when walking across Akihabara? That mindset doesn't just stop in places where it's fitting, however; as I'm sure most bewildered Western gamers came to see when they were confronted with Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding.

Now Death Stranding is a very emotionally intelligent game about forming connections across a bizarre post apocalyptic space seemingly purpose-built to encourage isolation. The America of that world couldn't be more conceptually distinct from the America of the real world in all manners except basic Insitutional fundamental values aped by the Bridges organisation. As such, there really is no reason on earth why Sam should have a replenishable stock of Monster Energy drinks at all of his bases. Nor is there any real reason why Sam should comment on 'Riding with Norman Reedus' when mounting certain bikes designed for tie-in promotion. They're both blatant slaps out of the immersion of the world which Western media consumers are taught to hate, but in inspection might actually serve some sort of artistic purpose. Really confronting the world of Death Stranding for what it is, and how it reflects the emotional state of a world drifting slowly apart, the fictional game world can actually seem dramatically heavy as it weighs on the soul with topics like extinction, repression and abject hope-crushing loneliness. Those small stabs of the outside world, shaking you out of magic box conceptual, can be seen as little lifelines by the designers, bringing us out of the world where everything seems so utterly insurmountable back to the real world, where things don't seem quite as bad in comparison. 

  

Of course, that is by no means the only style with which Japanese developers approach product placement. In Metal Gear Solid 3 you'll find many allusions to real brands among the tools you pick up, not least of which being Snake's favoured rations, his munch bars of Calorie Mate; a chronologically appropriate food item related to the role and world that character, as an American Green Beret, would have been part of. The Yakuza franchise too, smothers itself with brands and brand iconography in their wonderous depictions of various analogous Japanese districts. You'll find Sega Sammy branches, Don Quijote retail markets and innumerable in-print magazines and news rags stored in their isles. Yakuza even tends to feature real-life Japanese celebrities either in cameo roles or playing characters within or around their core stories, all just to sell the illusion that this is a Japan recognisable to the people who play. All in tune with a franchise quietly about celebrating modern Japanese culture.

Of course the Western world is no stranger to their own games seeped in a modern culture, but their approach to product placement is distinctly different. Look at Grand Theft Auto, a sardonic fun-house mirror thrown up across various aspects of America. Though the shape of the cities and people those games are set mimicking always bear some recognisable similarity to the real inspiration, you'll never find a real brand that has made the journey into the visual depiction unmolested. Instead you'll find parody after parody, brands depicted in a manner that is recognisable but slightly skewered to either fit a pun or just be legally distinct enough. 'Mustang' becomes 'Stallion', 'Ikea' becomes 'Krapea' (creative), 'Kawasaki' becomes 'Nagasaki', 'Sprite' becomes 'Sprunk'. (And there goes my appetite for lemonade.) And yet we don't see the world of GTA as an inferior depiction of a real-life location, to our sensibilities this all just makes sense.

It's so bizarrely common for Western games to conjure their own universe of similar sounding but crucially distinct corporate entities that I even see small scale indie games do it and I don't even think they know why. The amount of contemporary-setting indie games with their own version of Twitter and Instagram is so mind numbing that at this stage I'm actually more happy when the devs don't even bother and just reason neither company has the free time to sue their small studio over a literal nothing burger. And you can't tell me some part of you doesn't recoil everytime you watch a movie where a character has to look something up on the Internet and they scroll through a site that is the splitting image of Google but has a name like 'Goggle' or something equally as stupid. In some ways that sort of stuff knocks me out of the immersion more than the intentional product placement did.

At the end of the day I guess it all really comes down to the intention of the placement, which in turn informs the purpose of the set-up. If you go out to try and subconsciously get the audience to buy a Coke by placing that can in a scene with the logo conveniently turned in the direction of the camera, the contrived nature of that shot will shatter the otherwise carefully built moment. Litter the world with a sense of reality, using real brands as simply another means by which to convey that truth, and you'll have yourself a much more receptive audience to the brands present. Perhaps that is the key distinction between why the West intrinsically hates product placement and the East seems to love it. Of course, then I'm brought back to the Monster Energy in Death Stranding situation and it knocks me back out of understanding leaving me just asking 'why'. (I'd rather headbutt a Beached Thing than drink a Monster Energy myself...)

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City Review

"I'm the only man in history to have the hottest gay and straight club at the same time, and I'm about to lose everything!"

If Grand Theft Auto 4 was the game that I forgot about (so totally that I couldn't even remember Niko's most bare basic character motivation until I played it again) Episodes from Liberty City is the game replaced it totally in my mind. I played GTA 4 a lot back in the day, but I played Episodes a simply obscene amount of time, to the point where there were certain beginning cutscenes I could recite by heart like I was playing Skyrim. It was eerie how deeply I ingrained these two campaigns in my heart over years of playing and replaying them, all the while never quite acknowledging the fact that these were, indeed, smaller slices of game than the main chuck. I always thought back in the day that together these games were about the length of GTA 4, but today I can see that was nowhere near the case. These were spin-offs there to supplement and complete the open spaces intentionally built into the GTA 4 campaign, not replace GTA 4 in it's entirety.

After the release of GTA 4, Rockstar had a plan to do something they had never done before and don't seem willing to do again anytime soon (but we'll see what those greedy Sony execs do) they bought an exclusivity deal. Now back in the day we weren't as familiar with how these deals work as we are today, so when news came out that 'Episodes From Liberty City' was going to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, it was like a seismic wave had rocked the world; people couldn't believe the reality of living in a world where half of GTA's fans, or more, would be barred from the franchise. Of course, in hindsight that was obviously going to just be a timed exclusivity, GTA was too grand to be limited to one platform. Keeping it off the PS3 would simply be theft. Honestly, a port might well have been automatically in development. But even with that expectation, the manufacturers went so far to print that ratty 'only on Xbox' tag on the front of the packaging. Can you blame little-me for being fooled?

It felt like my duty to pick up 'the GTA game that went too far for Playstation', and maybe that sense of compunction was what encouraged me to live with the disc as a permanent feature of my console's disk tray for the next few years. I believe that may have been one of the first occasions wherein I allowed myself to be truly swept by the hype train. I watched and rewatched the trailers, memorised the dialogue, counted off the days on my calendar; I devoted myself to the coming GTA game knowing that I was going to love it. And coming back to it after all those years it's inevitable that some of that residual love is going to reside, like leftover mucus in an emptied wind-pipe; clogging up my precious objectivity! But I've held my head as straight as I can and think I can approximate a non-biased judge just long enough to write this blog.

Episodes from Liberty City is a game of two halves, following the story of the other two protagonists who make up the first Trio of  the HD era. (It's going to be weird going to only two protagonists for GTA VI... maybe they'll throw us a solo DLC; give the fans what they crave.) Our criminal tales are told adjacent to the events of GTA 4 proper and feature plenty of cross-over between characters, and mission locations; and even some missions themselves. 'The Lost and Damned' follows Johnny Klebitz, temporary road captain for the Lost Motorcycle gang and 'The Ballad of Gay Tony' features Luis Lopez, business partner and official full-time bodyguard and maid for the 'queen' of the Liberty City club circuit; Tony 'Gay Tony' Prince. Narratively 'The Lost and Damned' should be played first, but for some reason 'The Ballad of Gay Tony' contains all of the basic control tutorials when you first start it up. The biker one doesn't. (Strange little oddity, that.)

The Lost and Damned is, and I mean this without sarcasm, Red Dead Redemption 2 with bikers. Honest to god, if you take the bare basic elements of Red Dead Redemption 2's narrative and squeeze it into as tight a campaign as it can possibly get, replace the horses with horse power and shave Arthur bald; you've got 'The Lost and Damned'. (So there's the solution for folk who say Red Dead Redemption 2 is too long; you get the worst GTA HD game to enjoy. Lucky you!) Okay that's being a little mean, but I don't retract it. Grand Theft Auto has a high enough quality bar for each of it's games that calling this the worst of the HD era is by no means a brutal condemnation of it's quality to total crap tier, but I don't think anyone would disagree that for some reason, this tale of bikers and betrayal just isn't compelling in the slightest. So much so that in GTA V- actually, we'll get to that in my GTA V review, I have a theory about that scenes significance.

The Lost and Damned is no great revolution on the basic elements of your typical GTA experience, you wander the open world of Rockstar's highly detailed New York clone, Liberty City, and accept missions between bouts of, typically chaotic, freeroam fun. But there is a twist. In the Lost and Damned you have the might of the Lost motorcycle gang a mere phone call away and most conflicts in the game are specifically designed to be fought with an entire posse of AI bikers at your side. You can even summon them out of mission to help you fight off the police if you so desire, making them better buddies than the GTA V crew, who don't even bother answer their phones if you call them doing a police assault! So how are these AI companions? Rough. They can't drive those bikes they love more than life itself very well and for some reason they seem to jump in front of live-fire exchanges believing themselves to be bullet proof. (They are, in fact, not.) The game has an in-universe memoriam board that mourns the loss of any gang member you lose in the line of duty. I had that wall filled up before I was mid-way through this campaign; there's no saving these chumps.

But I suppose their impending doom fits alongside the decidedly distinct cinematically appealing thematic choice that fundamentally shifts The Lost and Damned away from GTA 4's realism. Stylistic flourishes and fonts have been baked into the UI with a scratched aesthetic on top to play up the rebel rider concept and the colour saturation has been tweaked in a manner to make the world feel like it's being played on an old tape. An aesthetic completed by one of my least favourite graphical tricks: (one which thankfully has a toggle in the options menu) screen noise to make the visuals look like a literal mess... What it all says is pretty clear, the art is no longer interested in making you feel part of a world that feels real, this story is going to be about the melodramatic tragedy of a biker club doomed to blow itself up in a blaze of glory.

Alongside the general aesthetic there are actually in-game mechanics which lean towards a style I would describe as 'arcade like'. GTA 4 changed pickups to no longer be floating icons but items actually placed into the world with a slight orange glow so you can make them out, probably figuring that the floating item icons break the illusion of the faux physical world. The Lost and Damned (and TBoGT, for that matter) veers away from this with the whole 'ride formation' system when you follow behind the Road Captain and have to line yourself up with a giant emblem that magically appears behind him in order to get an inexplicable boost to your health and/or armour. We also see this shift in the new 'Gang Wars' and 'Bike Races' job system which, rather than requiring the player to call up a potential job giver on the phone and risk them not being there, presents a steady string of dynamically spawned missions all over the map like Ubisoft mission markers that constantly replenish themselves allowing the player to grind them over and over. (For a pretty underwhelming reward, mind you. Weapon spawns in your apartment aren't worth the 50-mission minimum.)

This presentation of quick and constantly accessible action is in line, again, with the more explosive sort of gameplay that these spin-offs play to. Every mission tends to result in heavy gunfights with dozens of participants aided by a couple of new powerful fun weapons like a sawn off shotgun that can be used on bike-back and a grenade launcher which always seems to launch it's payload under and then behind cars you want to blow up. (It does explode on impact but good luck nailing that trajectory.) It all fits closer in line with the bombastic campaigns of GTA past with the added bonus that, since this is supposed to played after GTA 4, you don't have to sit through the relatively tame intro chapters before you get to the chaotically charged 'kill a whole gang' missions. This abundance of action does, however, prove GTA 4's point with it's decidedly more tame presentation. Restrained and relatively rarer bouts of action tend to be more impactful than sustained explosive content that desensitises the user. 

Honestly, there were only a handful of The Lost and Damned fights I enjoyed as much as GTA 4's and think that's a testament to the strength of 4's slower but more enduring structure. The other part of equation is however, the stupidly large battles you'll fight both in missions and gang warfare during which the progression of battle is decided by your swarming and stupid AI companions rather than the pace of the player. Trying to keep up with their mindless wanderings can too easily land you in the middle of a killing floor of gunmen whilst you end up firing wildly everywhere. Exciting perhaps in a very base sense, but lacking in the insightful structure that can benefit from clever escalation and spikes in tension. Everything just sort of stays at the same violent base-line, and that can make the action stale quicker. But we're talking about the higher theories and concepts of game design here, stuff that most games don't ever consider anyway; let's narrow our scope to a much more universal aspect of games; the narrative.

Much as I said before, The Lost and Damned is a Red Dead Redemption 2 predecessor, telling of the downfall of the The Lost's Road Captain, Billy, and how he brings the gang down with him, peppered with an ass-kissing side character who you hate, a man versus mentor split and a 'Wild Bunch' finale at the end. Bikers are often considered the modern day cowboys, so the parallels are fairly strong. Johnny Klebitz is a much more active antagonist than Niko was, with actual compunctions and choices he makes for himself, and moral boundaries he chooses to uphold. Niko's descent into the underworld perhaps necessitated his somewhat inactive observation of the narrative that unfolded around him, wherein he simply grumbled about jobs and then did them anyway; but I prefer the sense that my protagonist has a direction he's going so that even when the thrust of the narrative isn't present in the immediate, I still feel like we're progressing in some fashion. Sure, Johnny is still a belligerent arse in a manner that is meant to reflect the wider Biker culture, but he also posses protective leadership principals and some jaded, but still potent, solution of loyalty and duty that sets him apart from the likes of Billy.

My problem with The Lost and Damned actually comes from its tiny campaign, in which the ideas and characters that Rockstar are explored struggle to fit themselves in. A lot of the side characters don't get so much as a single piece of meaningful development or introduction; we know that Angus is in a wheelchair but unless you call him up between missions you'll have no idea what his importance to the club even is. And Billy is a pale substitute for Dutch Van Der Linde. The man is an dickhead and self absorbed clown of a leader, and we're given absolutely no explanation of why he's like that or who the man must have once been in order to serve as an effective leader of the gang once. We see the characters around him act with shock and confusion as he makes blatantly destructive decisions for hardly any reason whatsoever other than to soothe his bloodlust, but we have no reason why they're surprised. As far as I know, Billy has forever been a terrible leader.

The highlights of the game are really the way it slides in and out of the GTA 4 narrative, and even slightly touches on TBoGT. We get to learn a little bit more about the diamonds and who's hands they changed with, and I like the through line of these valuable cure-all money injectors that everyone swaps hands with and no one benefits from. But The Lost and Damned mostly keeps to it's own undercooked narrative with climaxes that feel rushed and unearned and a cast I never really had a chance to understand and so didn't get attached to. I only really like Johnny in comparison to everyone else he interacted with, and even then there's a shade of narrative/gameplay dissonance that makes it hard to fully immerse myself with him. Such as how the Gang Warfare minigame pits you against any gang in the local area, not just the rival biker gang you start beef with in the narrative. Which is odd given that Johnny is against senseless fighting, but then has no problem picking fights with the Yardie gangs out of nowhere or even the mob... when he's supposed to be working with the mob for most of the story! It's just confused, for the most part, which is probably why most people choose to forget The Lost and Damned altogether.

The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the otherhand, is TLaD's antithesis. A colourful champagne-popping alternate face of the spin-off with popping glitzy glamour all over the UI and a brighter night-time palette tint to highlight the main attraction of this ballad; Nightclub life! Much as I did enjoy the utter desaturation employed by GTA 4; getting to see actual colour in the world even at night is a nice return to normalcy for me, as this is the game in the GTA 4 trilogy which best recalls one of the most important side-elements of older GTA games; a celebration of hedonistic excess! Not to the extent where that's the entire crux of the game like some of it's contemporaries, but enough that you can enjoy yourself in a simulated world where nothing matters without having to reflect on the harsh turmoil of life as an impoverish immigrant who drags himself through the criminal underworld, building a name for himself but isolating himself in the same breath. 

The nightclub life is more than an aesthetic, it's a genuine optional gameplay mode where you 'manage' the club by being a bouncer during the night. It's painfully boring to do so, basically just being a walk and stand simulator until a cutscene happens or some other event drags you away, but at least you get to soak up the very well realised atmosphere of "the hottest straight club in LC". I doubt a ton of concept and thought was pushed into realising this idea beyond figuring it would be fun if players got to soak in the Nightclub outside of missions, which remains just as true for the other minigames that TBoGT adds to the minimap including Drug Wars (which is literally just TLaD's Gang wars), Parachute trials and Dance minigames. I'm going to be a little unfair here, but there is a comparison to be made... GTA's club themed minigames suck next to Yakuza's. Their dancing minigame is rhythm based where you have to jab the joystick in time to the music (which is pretty odd and uncomfortable) and calling the Bouncer job a 'management' mode is ridiculous. Where TBoGT brings it's best, however, is in the narrative.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is, throughout it's playtime, a celebration of all the crazy excess that the Rockstar franchises are capable of, often to the detriment of the cohesiveness of events, but you know what; I don't care if everything that happens makes sense when the writing is this good. The Ballad shares the same rough length of The Lost and Damned but that length shoots past like lightning because the characters are all infinitely more likeable and you'll find yourself greedily vacuuming up every single scene. Pretty much since Vice City the quality of narrative and character writing at Rockstar has been at a higher level of quality where dialogue is clear, characters are popping and the narrative is engaging; but The Ballad of Gay Tony might be the only game, and I'm counting GTA V in this too, where the dialogue, in particular, is a knockout in practically every scene.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that Gay Tony is perhaps my favourite character in the GTA franchise, as the aging neurotic nightclub owner who's too busy snorting half of South America up his nose to deal with his empire crumbling down around him necessitating Luis, a frankly stellar straight man, to patch the holes in his sinking ship. A character like that can so easily be unlikable and annoying but Tony is just that perfect mix of witty, pitiable and manic to worm into that special place where you can't help but love the man. But not just Tony, all the side characters are to some level worthy of their time on screen. From the obligatory man you love to hate; Rocco, to the guy too rich for his own good but honestly more of a socially-illiterate weirdo than an actual scum bag, Yusuf Amir. This game even managed to make me somewhat like a character I couldn't stand in GTA 4, Brucie, by introducing us to his considerably worse brother, Mori, and exploring how his inferiority complex led to his apparent overcompensation.

Luis is sort of a character without any significant compunction of his own, but in his role as Tony's wet nurse he is perfectly placed to be the guy who suffers for every enemy that his boss makes. You never worry about the progress of the narrative feeling sluggish because of the relative shortness of the narrative, and rather cleverly Rockstar found a way to wrap up The Ballad's narrative, the diamond overall subplot and GTA 4's last hanging loose thread all within a neat campaign. And with missions that are simply insane and rememberable, such as when you snipe a tank out of a sky crane, or fight off police helicopters from the roof of a speeding train with your explosive pellet shotgun or turn an experimental military attack helicopter on a yacht full of international gun smugglers you just stole it off. All of these missions are the kind that sound crazy on paper and live up to that fully in the flesh, the best of all worlds!

I consider The Ballad of Gay Tony to be the 'Assassin's Creed Brotherhood' of GTA 4, as in the follow-up experience that shaves off all the chaffe of the long base game without losing what made it effective and fun; and sprinkling excitement all over the package to make it ridiculously fun. The free-time conscious who find playing through an entire GTA intimidating can find themselves perfectly served with this masterfully balanced slice of everything great about GTA; explosive action, memorable characters, varied side activity, (although not always fun) and a satisfying narrative experience. And it's the first Grand Theft Auto game in the franchise's history to realise that it's campaign is so good that it needs a replay mission system. Even The Lost and Damned, which released on the same disk, didn't have a replay system. I don't... that really doesn't make any sense to me. (Red Dead Redemption 1 had a replay; they really should have learned.)

Playing through the GTA 4 trilogy again after all this time has been a delight; and I've loved relearning what it was about this era of Rockstar that made their games industry juggernauts. Finishing off these two side games has been like coming back to old friends and remembering their wrinkles and their wit at the same time; where some have grown long-toothed and rambling, others have matured perfectly with age. I don't think my view on these two games will be any great upset for commonly accepted opinions on the quality of this trilogy amidst the community, but I've enjoyed reaffirming for myself what I always quietly believed to be true. In terms of ranking, The Lost and Damned is going to miss my recommendation just slightly with a B- Grade, being my least favourite of the trilogy. The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the otherhand, demonstrates the potential of leaner, better, experiences and pushes itself to an A- Grade; with my tacit recommendation for open world lovers and even Saints Row fanboys. I think the whole spectrum of open world enjoyers can find a lot to love in the Ballad. This whole era of reviews was supposed to lead me to another Rockstar property, but have instead sent me a little astray to another franchise my subconscious told me was probably a damn decent spiritual successor to what GTA 4 was trying to accomplish. Come see if my subconscious callously lied to me when I review 'Watch_Dogs'.

GTA VI should focus on being more progressive?

A respectful rebuttal.

Grand Theft Auto is one of those old school scapegoats for violence portrayed in media ever since the day of it's top-down conception. Afterall, it was a game about stealing cars, committing crimes and making money; clearly the devil was inside that machine just desperate to corrupt the innocent souls who fed themselves to it! The waves of moral panic always come and go in vast tides that fissile away once the world becomes more familiar with this strange new 'corrupting' topic and common sense seeps back on deck; but the panic always leaves it's mark. Evil Dead may not have been banned for being an evil video nasty that would turn you into an axe murderer; before that was revealed to be ridiculous; but that panic still led to English ratings boards to dictate who could watch movies, and that movie has a stigma atop it in certain circles. Rock Music absorbed so much moral panic in the 50's that divisions grew off of classic rock to embrace the accusations of Satanism and purposefully feed into the counter culture. So was it the same with Grand Theft Auto?

Throughout the years that special brand of criminality and chaotic carnage which Grand Theft Auto offered has withered from it's place of exclusivity. In fact, these days there are game franchises out there which would make late 90's parents faint on the spot if they knew about them. Imagine if parents found out that Mortal Kombat has only gotten bloodier and more anatomically accurate in it's years! (And imagine if they heard the fact that the team studied actual dead bodies to research one of their games. That's a fact that even I find a bit beyond the pale.) But still that target which was originally affixed around GTA specifically marks that game as the whipping boy whenever video games are the targets of the latest moral outcry. Luckily we're no longer quite the hot newness, now that Social Media and Tik Tok has the media's attention; but brows still frown our way when people remember we exist.

And as far as poster children go; Grand Theft Auto is an actual stellar example of the industry for people on the outside looking in. Perhaps a bit too clean, when we remember the absolute deluge of sub par boring wastes of games that flood our industry most of the time. (Hmm? No, I never even said the words 'Gotham Knights'; why ever would you bring that game up...) GTA is a franchise that is always on the forefront of ambition, of gameplay or world forming innovation and of sheer brilliant spectacle. It's what they're known for. Well, that and being the giant sticky magnet in the middle of the industry to which all the filth and accusations are attracted; like moths to the world's most explosive night-light. If there's any issue someone has with the general gaming market, chances are they'll have an example about it they can use GTA to demonstrate.

Sometimes that is totally warranted. The modern trend of games to try and artificially elongate themselves beyond the scope of their fun and potential to try and suck time out of players forever is demonstrated very well by GTA Online. As is the greed of modern live services and the absolute fall-off for quality of services. GTA Online has done just about everything bad that an online game can do beyond shutting itself down prematurely; to me it makes for a fine demonstration. Although they've yet to tie in lootboxes and battlepas- wait, no they actually did introduce a Battlepass recently; how could I be so silly to forget!? But then there are times when I have to wonder if the person voicing their issues has actually taken the time to play the franchise they're critiquing; or if they have generalised industry gripes that they decided to try and blindly embody in Grand Theft Auto without really slotting things together in their heads first.

I'm talking, of course, about a recent article I read entitled something to the tune of "GTA Six needs to focus more on being Progressive and less on being an Edge Lord." And that made me frown, it really did. Because out of all the plethora of adjectives and pig-nouns I'd use to the Grand Theft Auto series over it's polymorphic history; never once would I land on the label 'Edge Lord'. And that's led me to address exactly what that term even means, what it means to be 'progressive', and whether or not Grand Theft Auto really does have a path of change required ahead of it in order to improve into the future. And we can start down this train with a definition: What exactly is an 'edge lord'? Simply; an 'Edge Lord' is someone who intentionally attempts to be distasteful and offensive for the sole purpose of making themselves look rebellious and non-conformist towards the standards of moral decency; which by extension is commonly understood to be 'cool'. That, in broad strokes, is an edge lord. But is that GTA?

I've said it before, but the heart of Grand Theft Auto is satire. Mockery through exaggerations and mocking depictions that are designed to point at loud aspects of American or just modern culture and invite the player to laugh along with them. That is why so many of the characters are larger-than-life, why every single company imbued in the world is a play upon a real world company, typically with a pun. Criminal life is the lens through which the narrative is shone, but criminality is not the extent of the parody; it flys left and right to the point where everyone, even the player character and the person playing as them, are targets. But is it ever mean-spirted or punching down? That really depends on your ability to compartmentalise entertainment and differentiate between the real world and that of fiction; a divide that is becoming more and more blurry in today's age.

Having just played through the Grand Theft Auto IV trilogy (the original, I feel the need to say because Rockstar are inevitably working on remakes as we speak) I can highlight one aspect of those games that some people who think ill of GTA might take Umbridge with; the use of slurs. Pretty much every slur you can think of, save the N-word with the hard R, (I think, there might have been one in The Lost and Damned. That one was about Bikers, afterall) is uttered throughout GTA VI, and if you divorce every such swear from their context it can absolutely feel like Rockstar are trying to be provocative for the sake of humour. But context is important. Observe the people who speak like that, who they are and how the game presents them, and you'll notice a couple of things. Firstly, that the people who act that way are never the sympathetic characters we're supposed to like, (except for Yusuf Amir; but he's just terrible misguided and out-of-touch) and they're all the butt of the joke.

So why do they speak like that? Typically because it's a decently accurate depiction of the sort of nomenclature and attitude typical of that snippet of culture. Are wiseguy mobsters going to be pointedly racially insensitive? Of course they are, their entire criminal structure is based on racial superiority! Bikers being racist? Their movement is seeped in white supremacy. Homophobia? Ran rampant throughout the 2000's; that's just how people talked. In fact, TBOGT was actually praised at the time for perhaps the first depiction of a major gay character in gaming who acted like a real person who happened to be gay; and Tony is a perhaps one of the funniest characters in the entire GTA franchise; his lines are all gold. Does that sound like the attitude of edgelords who are trying to be mindlessly provocative, or satire artists who are trying to depict a world for you to experience?

I have a lot of problems with the way that Rockstar handle themselves in the real world, but when it comes to the games the team have surprisingly been more mature than many others in the space. Saints Row prided itself on edge lord behaviour (to a modest degree) so much it became a part of it's identity until the reboot sucked all the life out of the property. Watch_Dogs lacks the conviction to really address any topic of the world's it creates with anything tougher than kiddy-gloves- resulting in consistently limp narratives. Grand Theft Auto of the modern age is loud and eccentric, but also clever and occasionally touches on pathos and darker themes therein. Grand Theft Auto VI shouldn't pull back from the sardonic depictions of criminals, it should broaden their net to leave nobody out of the introspective eye.

Grand Theft Auto IV Review

This is the victory we fought for.

After playing through the entirety of the Grand Theft Auto 3D saga, it was only a matter of time before I moved onwards to the HD era of GTA games; an era so named for it's total transition of the very gamified PlayStation 2 era of Grand Theft Auto games to a much more grounded vision with a greater focus on nailing a convincing world simulation. Of course this would mean coming back to one game that I've held something of a stigma towards for many years now for being the dour and boring uncle of the Grand Theft Auto pantheon. Not quite a true sequel to the ambition of San Andreas, but not quite a spin-off title worth being pushed aside in this impromptu journey across the Grand Theft Auto franchise. And in refreshing my memory of Grand Theft Auto IV I was happy, although not entirely surprised, to find my concerns and prejudices to be somewhat overinflated and exaggerated. I'm glad to say I quite enjoyed my GTA IV playthrough.

But why was I so stand-offish on GTA IV from my first playthrough? (which I did back when it first launched) And why was that playthrough the only one I did? (I played the 'Episodes' spin-offs countless times more.) It was an impression I believe was born both from the drastic shift in tone that IV mounted in comparison to the last game, the just as strong shift in innovation priority which defied my natural expectation as a consumer who just wanted bigger and louder and the wave of pop culture diluting my own recollection into remembering GTA IV as much more boring than it really was. We've all seen the old memes about the hang-out system and Roman constantly bugging the player to go bowling, and somewhere along the line that impression of the package melded into my own.

I think the greatest offender for this light brain-washing was a contemporary of GTA IV that I was quite infatuated with. Saints Row 2. That was a game that embraced it's silly goofiness in order to differentiate what was initially a very derivate gangbanger franchise and become the zanier, more adrenaline fuelled cousin of boring old GTA. Most famously celebrated in a trailer that literally compared the most boring aspects of GTA IV (going bowling, watching TV etc.) to the silliest moments of Saints Row 2. (Setting yourself on fire on a buggy, spewing septic waste on passerbys.) It was a propaganda video, and intentionally very tongue-in-cheek; but it's ultimate legacy might have been more effective than the team were going for because when I think back to my childhood, the GTA they painted was the game I remembered; not the one I just played through right now.

Of course, none of that is to say that Grand Theft Auto IV wasn't in anyway a slow and sometimes tedious experience; in fact I think there are some considerable problems with pacing and narrative, as well as the frequency of certain activities, which bar me from considering this the Masterpiece that some of the community assert that it is. But when I take the game for all of it's successes and judge them up, I can certainly see the ground those people stand-on when they make their hill to die on. Grand Theft Auto IV is a worthy sequel to San Andreas, just not in the way I expected it to be when I first played the game all those years ago, and I very glad I took the time to relieve that experience and clear up those murky recollections once and for all.

Firstly, I want to talk about that tonal shift I keep alluding to which colours a lot of opinions about Grand Theft Auto. Before IV and even after, Grand Theft Auto had this aura of flamboyance about it's action and presentation that served in the creation of the satire-world that GTA inhabits. Whether that was with cartoony violence, thematically over-the-top UI script, or huge ridiculous spectacle; Grand Theft Auto leaned into the flashy and loud over the serious and contemplative. IV doesn't abandon these principles entirely, and the Rockstar flamboyance is still stretched over the skin of the world and some of the sillier characters and dialogues, but narrative weight is a new prime focus of development and you can feel that hanging off of every new system IV introduced. This time it was all about nailing the story of Niko Bellic. 

To this end the entire presentation of Grand Theft Auto IV was toned down significantly, to a degree that would come to be the style of that generation of games. (Thanks in no small part to this game.) The UI is minimalistic and dynamically fading, monochromatically coloured with a stark unembellished font. The general world palette was seeped into duller and more mundane characters, to some degree better fitting the entirely built-up environment of New York based-Liberty City, whilst to some degree taking the artistic direction even further than that. During nights in particular the colour seems to literally drain out of the world to the point where your screen is almost approaching grey-scale; indicative of a world that attempts to better explore the grim toil of a life drowned in shades of grey.

I think that the renewed focus on systems that have been characterised as 'mundane', such as managing friendships by keeping in touch with people, living in run-down apartments and never expanding to the mega mansion of late-game San Andreas and even being forced to slow down and pay your way through toll booths on a certain overpass; all contribute to that same vision. A vision of a world that is not quite as glamourous and glitzy, but rough and real and even grimey at times. I've bought this up before, but it's impossible to review Grand Theft Auto IV without addressing the phenomena where creating a world that feels bound by the constraints of the real world inherently makes it so that when the player breaks free of those constraints and does something wild, like get in a close-range shotgun fight with Italian mobsters or blow up a car in traffic with a rocket launcher, that juxtaposition heightens the impact of the excitement. Of course, this approach does have it's consequences too.

Some of the innovations that where tipped towards feeding this theme for GTA IV push over the line to being tedious for the sake of being tedious. Forcing players to walk around clothing stores to find the piece of clothing they want to wear and then trying it on to see if they like it and then buying it is just several steps too many to show off an interactive dynamic context window. Cutting back on the RPG elements and car customisation of San Andreas, on the otherhand, just feel like downgrades from their previous game, and yet I'll bet that at some point in development the team's refocusing away from expanding those sorts of features was justified with "Those ideas don't quite suit what we're going for this time around."

Additionally, I think this thematic shift tainted the team's approach to mission design in an overall negative fashion, particularly in the beginning opener levels. The first string of missions in GTA IV, forming the entire first act pretty much, are painfully slow as the game walks you through practically each new innovation that game has to offer barefaced and bald. As in, some of these missions are so rudimentary and bare faced that they literally exist only to introduce the new physics system, or the new Internet Café, or whatever new thing the game has to show you, and then immediately ends. Ideally you want tutorial missions to be woven into actual narrative progression so you're being taught whilst pushing forward the story, but early GTA IV has absolutely no interest in moving the plot along or even laying out the foundations of the plot beyond the bare basic. 

You're an immigrant who has little problem working with the mob. That's literally your only motivation for the entirety of the first act of the game. San Andreas may have offered very unspecific and soft edged motives, such as 'cleaning up the hood' or 'bringing back the Grove', but at least that was something to cling on to. Early Niko seems to stand for practically nothing and want seemingly nothing which makes it annoying to endure that snore-fest of an opening act until the later missions where general events start actually happening. Pretty much from the moment you're pushed into killing your first main character, the actual narrative picks up and begins to propel itself. (Which, incidentally, is also when you learn that your main character has motives! Something I actually forgot from when I first played the game; I'd wiped my mind of this game that thoroughly!)

The passive protagonist is a common problem of open world games and Grand Theft Auto games in particular, but for the majority of the time it's not a huge glaring problem because the storylines are just vehicles for causing carnage that aren't really supposed to make any real sense. GTA IV changes that expectation with a personally driven revenge plot, but does very little for fixing the passive protagonist problem beyond having Niko loudly exclaim about the people he's looking for every now and again. Not too much that it get's annoying, but rare enough that you can begin to forget exactly why you're stealing Heroin from the Triad for small-time Italian gangsters. One of the criticisms that Red Dead Redemption received when it first released (Which I heavily disagreed with at the time) was that the narrative spins its wheels as the player is constantly doing favours for pay-offs that never come. But for GTA IV getting stiffed out of your promised favour is like a core running theme; and it can start to make the story feel a little structureless after the fourth contact you've burnt with nothing to show for it.

But there is a formula which drives the plot, and it's a time honoured tradition of Grand Theft Auto spruced up with a constantly repeated, but effective, cap. You are ferried across three islands that are initially blocked off from you but get slowly opened up as you become more familiar with the city and the 'Six Degrees of Separation' start connecting you to all the filthy hives across the city. I actually really like how well this game does integrating you into the various walks of criminal life from street dealers to community pushers to organised gangsters; you really do touch every division of the underworld throughout your journey into the muck. And most of the contacts you make are capped off with a point at which you have to kill a named character you've worked with, cutting off that contact entirely. It's an effective stopgap which is recycled three of four times throughout the game and though it begins to become a bit predictable by the late game, I like how it reinforces that previously untouched moral of this new face for GTA: the wicked dig their own graves.

Morality stings at the heart of GTA IV in a way I don't think the franchise has every really addressed before, at least not with a totally straight face. The scars of the unspecified war which Niko waged are addressed frequently and the unspoken question of whether his quest to vindicate the dead is making him worse than his quarry touches at the edges of the narrative tapestry. There's not so much pathos of this theme, however, which can make it feel somewhat unfulfilled by the final credits; like a balloon blown up but never tied off. I suppose that sort of introspection is better suited for Rockstar's other franchises like L.A. Noire and Red Dead Redemption. I applaud them for even going that route, and think it serve the general emotion this game was going for well; I'm just unsure if that hollow empty note after the final monologue was played as effective as it could have been. A solid ending could have very easily been a poignant one with a little plot retooling and rewrites.

I was both impressed and pleasantly surprised to find the game has multiple endings, and though they wrap up in very similar fashions to one another, their distinctly different consequences are intriguing and unavoidable. (Rather unlike GTA V's somewhat cop-out 'Choice C' ending.) On a curious note, it really struck me, at the crossroads moment where you choose one path or another, how strikingly similar this last choice was to the finale of Red Dead Redemption 2's main narrative. Only Red Dead Redemption 2 did such a good job tackling the concept of morality and corruption that I think even that very easy and obvious choice between the 'right' and 'wrong' path evoked somewhat guttural emotional decisions. I know I was practically vehement when I made my choice at the end of RDR2; whereas in GTA IV I really just picked the option which I thought would be more satisfying narratively. (Only to find out that in the other ending, Niko gives a much better final speech. Bugger.)

There is no possible way to talk about GTA IV without at least mentioning the three-way narrative, and how cleverly that was pulled off. For those that don't know, GTA IV is actually the most substantial chunk of a trilogy of games that all tell concurrent narratives which cross over with each other here and there. The crossover is mostly on the diamond plotline, which is more important for the other two narratives than it is for Niko, but the deft with which the team managed to weave these other characters in and out of the story (both obviously and in the background) is applause worthy. At the very least it makes it a necessity for anyone playing through the mainline GTA games to also put up with Episodes From Liberty City. No great chore, those snippets of game are great as far as I remember. (We'll see when I review both if they live up to memory.)

Functionally, GTA IV was another step-up in terms of gameplay into basic cover based shooting mechanics which, whilst not exactly competitive in today's landscape, worked well enough to make combat more exciting than painful. (I still get GTA 3 nightmares for it's awful combat.) I really like the sound design on every weapon that wasn't a pistol. The rifles and shotguns all sounded brutish yet muted in that realism-style, whereas the basic pistol just sounded pathetic and the combat pistol lacked the whack that it's actual bullets landed with. Driving too is heavily improved to make cars weighty and heavy, so as to be less prone to rolling over quite so easily; which brings the driving up to the stellar standard that Rockstar has solely maintained over the vast majority of the open world gaming landscape. Only Sleeping Dogs really has driving controls that are anywhere near as good as what GTA has rocked throughout it's HD era.

In Conclusion, Grand Theft Auto IV is an unfairly maligned entry that dared to go against the grain of what Grand Theft Auto had come to stand for in order to stand out for the new generation. It pushed innovation to create a realism-based sandbox and maybe pushed a little hard into monotony is some small areas. It's narrative is ambitious and grander than it's scope at times, but paints refreshingly life-like characters in an impressively deep recreation of GTA's oldest haunting grounds: Liberty City. Playing it again after all these years proved enough to get me hooked and slapping a recommendation for lovers of open world and stories with a gentle sprinkle of grit and grunge, is an automatic act. As for the arbitrary score... that evades me. On one hand the game is timeless for what it does well, on the other the first act drags so much it makes me wonder if I could even stand another play through in the near future. Balancing everything together, then throwing it away and going with my gut instinct, (as is my typical MO) leaves me with a respectable B+ Grade to slot into my scale of game scores. Stroking greatness on account of it's own ambition and falling just a hair short for that same hubris. But I'll take a game that tries over one that plays it safe absolutely any day of the week. 

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas Review (The Original)

All you had to do was follow the damn train, CJ!

Nearly a full year ago I began my journey of replaying the entirety of the 3D era Grand Theft Auto games in protest of the godawful 'Definitive editions', as well as in celebration to the original's shining greatness. That was an exploration into nostalgia and fond memories cut a little short by my rather sudden obsession with clearing the Master Chief collection which over-road my little GTA series not long after I got done with Vice City. But in truth there was actually a couple of reasons why I just wasn't in the right headspace to review San Andreas at that time. For one I was really replaying the GTA games that I didn't remember quite so well to remind myself what was good about them, and San Andreas has been such a constant presence in my life that I really didn't feel like I needed the reminder. For two, I was planning the next game I reviewed to be Bully, but I couldn't figure out how to get the controller working with it and I refused to play that game with a keypad. (As it turns out, the solution was remarkably simple and built into the ingame menu.) And for three, San Andreas is just a damn hefty game to get through. I didn't know if I wanted to go through the entire game just to review it here.

But after a year of faffing about I feel like it's time to put a capstone on this review trifecta for no other reason than it will free me up to do literally anything else with my freetime. (Having this hanging over me has been a weight on the ol' psyche.) Plus, with the renewed interest in the Grand Theft Auto franchise following the blow-out leaking of VI (Take-Two have finally managed to scrub that footage off the front page of Youtube. Only took them a month.) the impetus is there to drive me to complete this game and explore the wider evolution of GTA. If not to 100% completion, at least far enough to recall what that core experience was like and impart it outwards in this here review. Who knows, maybe my years of growth would have altered my tastes so much as to no longer like the crude style of GTA's sardonic depiction of 1990's LA. (Spoilers: they haven't.)

At the time I remember thinking of San Andreas as the magnum opus of everything that Rockstar was trying to do with III and Vice City, and even now I still feel that way. Everything about the gameplay loop of what makes a GTA game great, the city simulation, dynamic-feeling world interaction and penchant to cause chaos is in a whole different league in San Andreas than it was in Vice City. Back for Vice City, all of those factors felt constrained in a limiting sandbox. The world, it's inhabitants and it's life were dictated by the tightly wound rules of the developers, NPCs act how their told, Traffics turns were it's told, the world turns as it's told to turn. And whilst systematically the same has to be true of San Andreas, back then and now it feels like some wild poltergeist slipped into San Andreas' formula and breathed a genuine soul into the world simulation. Back in the day I remember seeing a stunt plane crash right in the middle of a residential neighbourhood with no interaction whatsoever from me, recently I saw a Police car fall straight down, out of the sky, into the ground and explode. There were no high surfaces nearby, the thing literally dropped from heaven. I cannot convey the amount of charm such insanity breathes into the world you're running around in except through offering the largely empty platitude of : San Andreas' world simulation feels like a world that keeps turning after you put down your controller; and that makes it all the more fun to turn it upside down everytime you pick it up.

In terms of design, the map of San Andreas is still compared to modern open world games today. Not so much in comparison of size, because SA's map is actually rather small compared to most modern open world games, but in the manner of how that space it utilised to convey the impression of vast distance. San Andreas features such variety across it's three main cities, from the suburban LA streets of Los Santos to the hilly mountains underneath 'San Francisco-inspired' San Fierro to the rocky desert sands surrounding the Las Vegas parody, Las Venturas. Crossing these biomes as they naturally flow into one another, broken only by cities, bridges and that beloved fog effect, feels like a cross-country trip from the middle-state hick towns to the metropolitan West Coast tourist traps. All in a map that is dwarfed by the likes of most every game today. Yet this is the example people keep coming back to, because Rockstar did it so right this one time. Behold the power of intelligent art design!

The basic gameplay of San Andreas marks the point at which Rockstar finally managed to develop their little open world crime spree game to actually feel intuitive to play. Free aim and lock on naturally flow in and out of each other so you can fire how you want, crouching and rolling adds versatility to positioning even without a cover system. The RPG elements wrapped into your specific gun proficiency encourages the player to pick favourites, but also experiment with other weapons to bring their skill bar high on their entire arsenal. Carl can actually swim, making huge swathes of the map a whole lot less dangerous to traverse. You've got stamina based sprinting, eating and gaining muscle mass and/or fat, 'girlfriends' to maintain and keep happy for special benefits; this is that evolution pinnacle point where everything GTA bought to the player's arsenal coalesced into a gameplay experience where the player felt free in how they wanted to play and weren't wrestling with controls that sometimes don't feel like they want work with you or a world simulation that falls a little flat when you poke at it. Again, a breathing and tangible and insane open world is the legacy of San Andreas. 

Vehicle controls are improved on, obviously as being one of the key tenets of Grand Theft Auto, and whilst the 'driving proficiencies' skill level don't provide quite as tangible benefits as some of the other skill tress; (falling off your bike is something you want to not be thinking about, so the less you do it the better) the skill-dependant races and Derbies lit up across the map provide enough incentive to want to improve your driving game. And the various vehicle schools, whilst frustrating at times, are great benchmarks for improvement that can bring clumsy drivers to a point of genuine skill. I know because I used to be one of those insanely clumsy drivers back when I played GTA SA for the first time all those years ago, and this was the game which taught me, through fire, how to handle the Grand Theft Auto driving mechanics. Hiding an in-depth and complete driving  tutorial as an in-game obstacle course that both celebrates all of the improvements to the driving simulation and teaches you how to exploit them is just another genius bit of game design from the company who wrote the patent on smart game development ideas.

In narrative, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas lays out the story of a gangster from the hoods of Los Santos embarking on an adventure of gang warfare that expands out into an struggle against corrupt cops, Vietnamese gangsters who use Japanese-style Katanas for some reason, mafia run casinos and even a bit of intergovernmental conspiracy. (Although you're, very intentionally, not really integrated too much into the specifics of that plotline to avoid the narrative slipping into 'spy-action' territory.) As opposed to some of the earlier GTAs (specifically 3) where it can kind of feel like you're passing through these sectors of criminality in order to tick off their appearance on some overarching list of criminal representation, San Andreas is big enough for the player to take their time getting into the gritty of each seedy underworld and learning the distinction between each one. Of course, these are very surface level distinctions, in gameplay just about every enemy acts in the exact same way just as they've done through GTA history, but in the narrative you really tackle every grift the devs could think of, so that when you're out on the otherside it really feels like the whole West Coast is beneath your foot. (With the exception of the Mafia. Even if I know that Salvatore Leone couldn't die, because his appearance was a cameo anyway.)

The only part which I think severely lets the general package down is the structure of the missions, which I think takes far too long to evolve into anything approaching complexity. Throughout the early game you're being presented with extremely straightforward missions with one or two objectives tied to a simple format, by the mid game that hasn't changed and it's not really until the set-piece endgame moments like the Mansion Raid, Casino Heist and final mission that we get these more involving missions with multiple layers that stretch beyond that basic premise of 'Go here and do the objective, great job mission complete'. This makes a lot of the smaller mid-game missions feel almost like side content that get forgotten about as soon as you're done with them. Perhaps there was a little bit of 'quantity over quality' buzzing around the mission dev department. At least those final few missions were fun.

Talking about the quality of the voice cast almost seems like a waste of time because you merely need to look at the names of the cast to know exactly the level of performances San Andreas has in store. One of the main villains is played by Samuel L Jackson, for goodness sake; there really was no expense spared. But in terms of writing; Rockstar did a perfect job nailing the colloquiums and verbiage of this sort of world in a way that is both entertaining and natural, almost in stark contrast to what another gangster-themed game, Saints Row, has recently done. Would I go so far as to say this is an improvement over the great job that Vice City does? I think it's ultimately a question of taste; I prefer this style of dialogue and story to the mafia/Scarface themes of Vice City and so I like this game's dialogue more, but in terms of quality I'd argue both are as good as each other. Prime quality voice acting, as Rockstar always demands.

Oh and lastly I want to mention the endgame state which I think was, at least to some degree, designed to be a direct foil to GTA 3's endgame state. The narrative of GTA 3 made it so that every gang wanted to kill Claude, ultimately making free roaming post the main story next to impossible in highly concentrated gang areas thanks to how quickly you'd get shot to pieces. San Andreas has an entire riot phase of the city which is meant to mimic the LA riots. San Andreas focuses more on depicting general chaos between citizens by making the AI hostile to one another, putting a smoke effect over some buildings, depopulating cars that aren't police cars on the streets and making those that do spawn close to exploding, and throwing in a unique animation or two of citizens running down the street holding a TV. Free roaming through all of that is pretty miserable, thanks to the constant chaos, but it's used as a back drop for the narrative that is entirely reversed by the end of the game. Meaning that unlike GTA 3, you can still go around in your completed save and enjoy the game world without being gun downed the second you enter Leone controlled territory. I appreciate that.

San Andreas is a piece of my childhood and always will be, a guilty pleasure I remember waking up in the wee hours of the night to play just a little bit of before anyone could spot me. So I'm going to be biased towards the thing, that's just how it works. But even with that bias, I think it's hard not to see that for the 3D era of GTA, San Andreas is the perfected state of everything the company were trying to achieve with their open world efforts. Everything felt improved and remade to such a standard that it fit together in a seamless package of moving parts so intricate that the untrained eye never even sees the inside of the clock in motion; a standard which Open World games have been required to meet ever since or face being labelled 'dated'. It's my favourite of this era, and still close to my favourite Rockstar game ever made, which is why a nostalgia driven grade of A should surprise nobody. If you can swallow 2005 graphics, the game still functionally holds up to tell a fun gangster story across a sprawling open world that breathed before we even knew what that style of open world even meant. A benchmark in the history of games, that I still heartily recommend.