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How to be a complete bastard

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GTA: San Andreas

13-Mar-2007 'And' is the operative part of 'Andreas'

Once, I crawled into San Andreas on a broken leg, and left on a jetpack. There was blood everywhere. But you've got to laugh.

Except this one time, I didn't laugh. I... well, I killed two policemen under the expressway in San Fierro. I shot them and stood looking at the bodies, but no one happened by. For some freak reason, there was no response. No Wanted stars. No vengeful authorities. I left their cruiser there with its doors still open, empty and idling. Nobody knew what I'd done. Whether it was a momentary glitch or a deliberate effect because I was entirely out of sight, I don't know, because I never wanted to try it again.

Every time I go past the spot, I think, "That's where I murdered those two men." It tears my brain a little, the guilt. It's not like I haven't whacked hundreds already, but that one time, nobody knew what I'd done. And underneath the strange guilt... a nasty dark little thrill. A rude secret. I am going to digital hell.

This oddity was such an affecting moment precisely because there's always a response in GTA; there's always a reaction. No game has a greater range of cause and effect than GTA, and no GTA has a greater range than San Andreas. That's its genius. Ironically enough, if it really did play the way right-wing ignorati believe it does - a consequence-free "murder simulator" - it would be entirely boring. It's the forces of law and order that make it fun; it's pushing against such a wild resistance that makes it a game. Yes, the aim is to get away with it and you're rewarded with toys and cash, but you can only go so far before you're swatted with overwhelming force. Take the consequences away for any longer than, say, one tawdry little underpass cop double homicide, and all the toys in the world won't thrill. If you don't believe me, try removing the heat with the cheats. It's empty like a lawyer's soul. It's horrible.

San Andreas is bigger than the long clean hair of Jesus, yet Rockstar still managed to find the time to add responses where other games barely have animations. Step off a tall building without a parachute, and Carl either curses his clumsiness or makes a final pronouncement to the effect of "f*ck this for a game of soldiers". Bother to go all the way to the top of the Gant Bridge and you'll find a sign telling you to 'go away.' Walk into someone and they'll complain - and react if you answer back. Hit a car and the driver might just come for you. But you know all this.

You might not know just how huge San Andreas really is, though, how gigantically content-rich and diverse. Did you ever really finish it? Forty or fifty hours in, I was stumbling across things I'd just never seen before. The parked Ferrari-alike down the hill in San Fierro. The coastguard helicopter on the beach in Los Santos. The triathlon just next to it.

The North Shore-style mountain bike run on Mount Chiliad. The armour under the tower opposite the Four Dragons Casino. The E-Type-style Windsor in what's nearly the last mission (I paid $120,000 for the mansion opposite Mad Dogg's, just so I could garage the smoking wreck before it blew); I've only just stumbled on the whole town of Bayside Marina, complete with chopper and float plane. The depressed photographer in Flint who walks into the sea. The ghost cars of Back O' Beyond... the Valantino Rossi homage NRG in San Fierro docks, and another in a multi-storey in East Beach. Yes, the scale is impressive, but it's the sheer amount of stuff within it that's genuinely astonishing.

It has its own urban legends. What other singleplayer game has myths? And player-created myths at that? Despite legions of hopelessly Photoshopped pictures fairly obviously proving otherwise, many still insist there's a Yeti roaming the hick woods of Back O' Beyond. Others claim the ghost of CJ's mom haunts the Johnson House in Grove Street, but it's a less popular belief than the Yeti - and not just because it's easier to disprove. The miles of redneck countryside to the west and the desert to the north are creepy enough by night to host a horror film. Or a horror game. There's plenty of space out there to spark your imagination, and enough details to act as lightning rods for your darker thoughts. Shallow graves, discarded shovels, empty idling cars, 60-year-old fighter planes crashing into lonely hilltops with no sign of a pilot, glowing headstones, abandoned wheelchairs...

Get stranded among the firs of Shady Creeks on a rainy, thunderous night, or stumble upon a mass desert grave under the stars and you can see why people Believe. The fog alone is worthy of Silent Hill. For what's always been an entirely city-based game to achieve such an middle-of-nowhere effect, and achieve it so seamlessly, is near miraculous. People still describe San Andreas as three cities, but look at the map. The countryside is the size of three more.

I'll be honest: I disliked San Andreas at first, back around its release in June '05. I thought the dream was dead. I'd spent many hours on GTA streets, starting with the 2D sequel, moving to Liberty and Vice City like every good gangsta should. I'd even gone back to III with Liberty City Stories on PS2, partly for the bikes, but mostly because I wanted to see what GTAIII would have been like without the wit.

But in '05 I'd given San Andreas eight hours, then given up. Drab. Crack-weary. Confusing. It gives up hardly any of its wonders in those first few hours. Hey, that's more than a few.

Then I broke my leg. I had titanium in my bones and time on my hands. Well, crutches in my hands, and Time inside the tubes, seeping through the holes and whistling like school recorders whenever the wind got up. So, somewhat lacking in options and with little hope, I returned to San Andreas, and found two major things. Firstly, I'd been playing it wrong. It's almost another life, rather than a game - play for what you'll get later and it's a bore, as there's a queue of what seem like tedious chores in the way. Want a jetpack, a jumpjet or a room on The Strip? Better deliver this package first. This package of ENDLESS FOREVER.

Savour the moments, however - explore in the strange calm cycling brings, or better still run across the city like Forrest Gump - and you'll find so much stuff, such interesting stuff, the tears roll down your face like giggling Swedish girls in an Alpine field, the sun glinting off their coiling plaits.

The second thing I realised is that San Andreas is bookended with a grim and depressing scenario. Sorry. As worthy as the subjects of deprivation, racism and family are, and as laudable as it is that gaming (or perhaps just Rockstar) is willing to tackle them, the result is not as hilarious as you might think. Moreover, it's a confusing mix. While the first eight hours or so are full of miserably sweary muthaf*****g homies, miserable crack addicts, miserable gang bangers and miserable interiors furnished with Adolf Hitler's Shit-Caked Ghetto Fire Damage range, the solid middle chunk of the game is neon-crazy, jet-stealing, base-jumping, alien-technology fuelled escapism. You work for James Woods, hang out in casinos and drive motor homes off mountain-tops. Now that's living.

Then, just as you're finally relaxing into your private airstrip in the desert, your brother Sweet pops up to call you a 'buster' another 1,000 times, whine furiously at you for having any sort of fun and drag you back into XXL Grim Reality. Sure, call me a buster too for not keeping it real (like J-Lo, bless her ruby-drenched realness), but if there's a choice between (a) a laudable, 'Grove Street 4 Life' sense of brotherhood lived in collapsing poverty or (b) my own hangar with a private jet and a monster truck painted like a flag, I know where my post is going. And hey, Confucius, are CJ, Sweet et al really helping each other up in life, or dragging each other down? Whatever the answer, the 'hood is sigh-suckingly drab. Sorry.

One thing, though. Just make sure you sidetrack into the item collections while there are still missions in which to enjoy the Vitamin D(eath)-rich fruits of your labour. Don't leave it until after you're done with the story. There's a heavy price to be paid for San Andreas's riches in the sweat and fractious misery of Los Santos, so you want to get your money's worth from having all those joy-bringing instruments of death sooner rather than later. It may not be fashionable to say it, but these weaponry treats are most fun within the narrower confines of the structured missions. Sure, the sandbox is wonderful, but you need rules to fight against - there's no friction without resistance. Toys and rewards are sexy, but to really enjoy them you need the organised response of a million freedom-loving Americans shooting you in the face. Perhaps in a desert. That seems familiar somehow.

But this is not art imitating life, or even the foreign policy of a superpower somewhere near Canada, say, because GTA's overwhelming mechanisms of cause and effect mean these guys are shooting for a good reason. That alone is cause enough to spend your hours there, and damn the grim early days in the ghetto. All you need is a relaxed attitude, time dribbling near-endlessly from your hands and a love for the streets. Oh yeah, and maybe a jetpack.

Steve Williams