This is a wee test to see how this journal thing goes. So I'm basically pasting an observation I made on one of the more popular User Created Boards here;

"GTA SA reminds me of Tomb Raider 3 in a fair number of ways.

Tomb Raider 3, IMO looked really ugly. I can remember playing it and thinking it looked worse than the first generation of Playstation games that I played (Destruction Derby, Wipeout, Doom, etc), of course this wasnt the case......it just seemed it at the time because of the ugly textures, bugged up maps and whatnot. The increased complexity of the game just highlighted all the badness, someting a simple-looking game with its basic texture maps didnt suffer from.

Grand Theft Auto SA, as I look at it now.......looks worse than MGS2, Devil May Cry, GTA 3 or Tekken bloody Tag......that may or may not be the case and I might just be a blind mentalist, but.....there is so much going on on the screen with GTA SA that it really just looks like a mess.

The link, in my mind, between Tomb Raider 3 and GTA SA is my bafflement, when seeing them, that such a late generation game could be so ugly.

I'll also add that, because its been so long since I played a PS1 game, Tomb Raider3 came to mind because GTA SA actually looks like it (in terms of the flimsy polygons that are always breaking up and glitching, bland textures, poor frame-rates), looks like a PS1 game.

Interesting how I've gone through the same process of initial awe (Wipeout, Doom and Ridge Racer knocked my socks off) to being rather turned off (Tomb Raider 3, etc) as if as the PS1 aged, so did its ability to produce good graphics, which is of course absurd. The PS2 has mirrored this with its 1st gen (MGS2, Devil May Cry, GT3, ICO) completely knocking me out and its last generation (GTA SA, Killzone, prolly some others if I bothered looking) looking horrible. Funnily enough, Gran Turismo is the one game to buck this trend, the original knocking my socks off late in the PS1's life and GT4 looking better than any XBox game late in the PS2's."

Hmmm, hopefully I can be a wee bit more lucid and elegant in my writing as I go about this journal business.