Nearly flawless - The best one yet!!
User Rating: 9.4 | Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas PS2
This incredible third installment into the third person Grand Theft Auto series marks an astounding triumph in gaming. Rockstar North continues to show their brilliance and single-handedly re-invents the very genre that they created with GTA III. The game takes the best aspects of Vice City – A wider variety of vehicles, more evolved storyline and larger playing field – and evolves them into an incredibly impressive offering sure to keep fans of the series firmly affixed to their TVs well into the night for the next few weeks. You start off as CJ, a young killing machine who’s returned to his hood in Los Santos and is ready to start leading a pack of savage street thugs to complete domination of the city. As CJ moves forward in the game, he’ll gain access to a wider arsenal of killing techniques, have the chance to bulk up, get a girlfriend, change clothes and even get out of the hood for a bit. As you can imagine, there’s virtually limitless activities to be experienced throughout the tri-city area of San Andreas. CJ will have the opportunity to slit throats, play pool, carjack, lowride, start gang warfare, do BMX tricks on a ramp, dance on the beach, play some hoops, hijack a train, fly planes, put out fires and dozens and dozens of other well crafted mini games. In short the game is limitlessly replayable – much more so that Vice City – and excels at nearly everything it attempts to do. Now that the kudos are done, I’ll point out a few of the games flaws – yes it’s great, but not perfect. The most notable flaw seems to be in the decision to develop the game on the aging Playstation 2 platform. Frame Rate is, at times, abysmal and while the graphics are certainly the best one could hope for on the PS2 they could be better if presented on Xbox. Game play is generally quite good, but during a few missions, CJ will be far to reliant on the AI of other characters and this can be frustrating especially since this generally involves re-starting the missions from the beginning. On one mission, in particular, CJ must ride the Sanchez dirt bike next to a speeding train whilst his companion – Big Sweet – is firing upon 4 nearly indestructible gang bangers on top of the train. Big Sweet is a terrible shot, and the mission will take a few attempts to master. There are a few other incidents of frustration – but nothing that takes away from the overall experience in any huge way. In short this game is a massive improvement over an already incredible game – it’s a triumph at nearly every level and should cause Xbox owners to dust off that old Playstation 2 that they thought would never get any use again. 
