You get off a plane ride and collect your bags. After some hassle and long lines at the airport you get into a rent-a-car and start driving back to your "good 'ol days". Then police sirens come from behind you. You pull over only to be hassled even more and arrested for no reason. This is GTA: San Andreas, it captures the full look and feel of the inner cities and puts you smack dab in the middle of gang wars. Though the only difference between the gang wars in SA compared to Vice City or the orginal GTA III is that its a whole lot easier to tell the different gangs apart. No more of just driving around and the first people that start shooting at you are the ones that don't like you. I've played all the GTA's and i have to say this one is better then all of them. Rockstar video's made the game more free and user friendly. Still the same old stuff, steal cars, cause some havoc, out drive/manuever the police and of course the always fun romp in front of the a car as your health starts going up. The gameplay in this game is very simple and keeps with the basics of its predecessors. Though you'll start to find out that a lot of the buttons start to overlap depending on what you're doing. A lot of times one single button will have multiple uses depending on the situation so it really puts your memory to the test to remember. The only bad aspect is that on the PC the keys really make you feel like you're playing "twister" with your fingers. Other then that the gameplay is quiet smooth and easy to handle. The graphics on the other hand kind of caught me off guard because i was expecting to have some good looking graphics since this is the third in its series. Though low and behold the graphics look like they are about 4 years old. Even people with high end computers will be disappointed by it. The character models seem to take rather simple shapes and when it comes to the limbs (arms/legs) they tend to be really angular. Though what the character models lack the rest of the game takes care of...somewhat. The cars, motorcycles, bikes, planes, etc. are detailed very nicely and down to the engine. You can actually look at your cars engine if you can accomplish knocking your hood clean off and each car model actually has its own engine look so they aren't all the same. Though if you hit anything it really makes you do a double take by the horrible look of what happens to it when it falls to the ground. After hitting a light pole it tends to fall and actually falls right through the concrete which i didn't think was possible. If you hit a traffic light pole the traffic light will actually come apart before even hitting the ground and the destruction looks a lot like somebody just dropped a "large lego's" tower. The sound in this game is very well done and like everybody says, you can't really screw up sound unless you don't even put it in. Even though some of the lip syncing is off with the talking of the characters the camera shots let you ignore it easily. Though the speech in this game really sticks to the inner city lingo right down to the nitty gritty of ebonics and really holds the scenes well. Sooner or later you'll start to hear yourself talking like they talk. It also appears that they have a lot more content for the different radio stations so you won't hear repeats a lot at all which is real nice. I have to say the overall judegment on this game is a must buy because even though the graphics really need some help and the mapping of the keys on a keyboard, there's enough story and enjoyment in this game to let you ignore all the con's. But to anybody wanting this game and reading the reviews for the PC better turn away and walk over to teh consoles because the game plays a lot better on a console rather then a keyboard.
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