Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Special Edition) [PS2]

Johnson N The Hood The storyline of San Andreas should feel somewhat familiar to fans of 1990s cinema. Borrowing rather heavily from John Singleton, Spike Lee, and Ernest Dickerson pictures, this iteration of GTA is all about the thug life when it was still in its infancy. Following the exploits of young Carl Johnson, the game begins as CJ returns from his exile in Liberty City when he learns that his mother has been killed. Carl is pretty torn up about coming back too, because the whole reason he left Los Santos in the first place is because his younger brother Brian was gunned down five years ago. Nevertheless, family is family and Carl returns home to pay his respects.

Within seconds of arriving in Los Santos, however, CJ is met by two bastardly police officers: Frank and Eddie. Rotten to the core, the pair of crooked cops robs Carl of all his money, frames him for the death of a fellow officer that's on to their schemes, and tosses him into the middle of enemy gang territory. Weaponless and outnumbered, CJ is forced to run back to his old neighborhood to try and survive. Once resolved, things really begin to take off and players will meet a huge assortment of characters -- CJ's older brother Sweet, his sister Kendl and her boyfriend Caesar, Carl's buddies Big Smoke and Ryder, and massive galleries of supporting personalities all weave an intricate plot for an overall great storyline.

In fact, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas probably has the best narrative of any of the GTAs thus far. It's certainly more multifaceted than 2002's Vice City and offers up a large selection of interwoven and completely independent plot threads that really help tell an effective story. And while the characters don't grow or evolve the same way they would in an adventure game or an RPG (save for CJ), they're still vastly different from one another and do a great job of keeping things interesting. Those that are ethically opposed to the content of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, however, aren't going to find anything different this time either. The plot is still brutal, the characters are still ruthless, and the moral of the story is that there isn't really a moral. So yes, this still isn't the type of fairy tale you'll want to show to your children (unless you want to show them what NOT to do); but for adults who love crime dramas, action films, and gangsta rap, the devices here are strong and offer up a great deal of twists, turns, and interesting visceral situations. It even ties in rather nicely with Vice City and GTA3 for fans of the series.

Menace II Three Societies One of the reasons that the game is so impressive is because of its technology. No longer restricted to just a single city, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is huge: almost six times the size of Vice City and even more so than GTA3. Broken into three major metropolises (Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas) the map's major designations are separated by countryside, desert, mountains, and a dozen smaller towns in-between. Though not an official time stamp by any means, it took me more than half an hour to drive from the southern-most part of Los Santos into the west through San Fierro -- and then Northeast into Las Venturas. Keep in mind; I didn't stop for anything along the way and avoided traffic as best I could. I didn't stop off at any of the smaller towns either. Enormous doesn't even begin to describe how big this monster really is.

Making the trip even more jaw dropping is the fact that the entire state of San Andreas streams entirely off the disc -- with no loading screens to be found except for when transitioning to the indoors or when activating missions at key points. Even then, the waiting time tops off at about five to six seconds before starting again. Vice City worked on this same technology, but the number of framerate hitches and pop-in issues are much lower here than before. Granted, you will run into slowdown and a few bizarre glitches here and there, but as I said, its frequency is more than forgivable when weighed against how smoothly the game usually runs