24 / 07 / 06
Game Review: Grand Theft Auto San Andreas
Yes, I know, it's an old title. - googles quickly - 2004, huh. So it is even it's anniversary. Funny coincidence! So I played Sand Andreas for the 20th anniversary this year (unknowingly). The reason is a very different one though.
A friend of mine wanted to look into a game called lostgamer.io, it is basically GeoGuesser, but for video game worlds. One of those worlds is the one from GTA San Andreas. We jokingly played some rounds, and I said I wanted to look into my old knowledge of San Andreas and see if I could get a good score in there. And I surprisingly remembered a lot of place from back in the day, when I was addicted to the game.
Back then we had no hour counter for games, because I just installed the disk and played the game, but I am sure I spend hundreds of hours in the game. I completed it normally, I modded it, I made a cheated play through. I tried to get as much out of the game as I could, and I did. But after I milked it long enough I was done and moved on to new games.
Until now that is. I picked it up again, because it peaked my curiosity. I wanted to relive the story of the game, that I basically had forgotten at this point, except for all the memes of following trains and big Taco Bell orders. And I did it in a new way, on my newly acquired Steam Deck.
After the hump of "Old games have weird controls" I came back into the Groove quite quickly (See what I did there? Haah, I am so funny). I knew the characters, I knew who would betray you at the end, but I didn't remember all the details, or what their motivations were. And also this time around, with an adult mind at play, I still needed to listen carefully and think about some of the things said to finally understand the why and how of people's behaviors. Maybe this is also fault of the game being a bit older, but the story writing is by far not as obvious as one might be used to from newer games.
Overall I had a good time though. The game holds up well in its original form and you can play it well. But just as a tip, if you play on hardware with more than 30 FPS and get into the swimming missions, try to lock the FPS with the ingame option for it. You will have a much easier time with it ... and you will be able to finally dive.
Finished on: 16th June 2024
Time Played: 45 hours
(The hours may be quite inflated as the Steam Deck counts sometimes the hours in standby as well)
Rating: 8/10