Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas 
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The first things we want to do in the GTA remastersOct 11, 2021 - PC GamerGTA 3 was mind blowing in 2001. It was a whole city at a time when 3D games had only just started to break out of rooms and hallways—it's only three years removed from the original Half-Life—and unlike most games, it wasn't sci-fi, fantasy, or kids' stuff. It was rude. There were swears. You could run people over indiscriminately, but unlike Postal, which was purely about upsetting the media with pointless violence, it took place in a world people lived in, one that seemed to function without you... Read more.Five of the Best: BikesMay 1, 2020 - EurogamerFive of the Best is a weekly series about the small details we rush past when we're playing but which shape a game in our memory for years to come. Details like the way a character jumps or the title screen you load into, or the potions you use and maps you refer back to. We've talked about so many in our Five of the Best series so far. But there are always more. Five of the Best works like this. Various Eurogamer writers will share their memories in the article and then you - probably outraged we didn't include the thing you're thinking of - can share the thing you're thinking of in the comments below. Your collective memory has never failed to amaze us - don't let that stop now! Today's Five of the Best is... Read more Forget Red Dead Redemption 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is Rockstar's most ambitious projectNov 11, 2019 - PC GamerYou can fit San Andreas into Grand Theft Auto 5 several times over, yet the former still feels bigger. That’s the most surprising takeaway from my time revisiting Rockstar’s ’90s crime epic, which has sold a staggering 21 million copies in its lifetime. Released on PC in 2005, a year after the PlayStation 2 version, it’s a massive step up from the previous game, Vice City, in pretty much every respect. In the early-to-mid 2000s you couldn’t move for GTA clones: True Crime, The Getaway, Scarface: The World is Yours, Saints Row. But while these games were largely, or entirely, set in a single city, Rockstar used its unmatched financial might (and, some might say, hubris) to take things to the next level, presenting an entire state to cause mayhem in. California analogue San Andreas contains acres of country, a desert, and three cities: Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas. The first 15 hours of San Andreas take place in Los Santos, Rockstar’s satirical recreation of 1990s Los Angeles. This is not LA as it really was, but an exaggerated version of the city viewed through the lens of movies such as Boyz N The Hood and Menace II Society, and through the music of Snoop Dogg and NWA. It’s all lowriders, orange sunsets, police helicopters scanning the streets with searchlights, and gangbangers swigging forties on the corner. Protagonist Carl 'CJ' Johnson, an ex-gangster, returns home to Los Santos from Liberty City to bury his mother, but soon finds himself tangled up in the life of petty gang violence he tried to leave behind. To prevent you from immediately just leaving Los Santos and heading out to explore the rest of the state, corrupt cop Frank Tenpenny (played brilliantly by Samuel L Jackson) warns CJ that if he tries to skip town, the full weight of the law will come crashing down on him. Of course, you’re still going to try. The first time I played San Andreas I made a beeline straight for San Fierro, the game’s version of San Francisco. But the moment you leave the boundaries of Los Santos you get a maximum wanted level, surviving which is pretty much impossible. Today, open worlds rarely keep you contained in one part of the map—and certainly not for as long as San Andreas does. But for a game this size I think it’s a good idea. Country life When you finally finish the first act, you almost feel like you’ve been in Los Santos for the length of an entire GTA game. Which makes the moment when CJ is dumped in the countryside by Tenpenny even more exciting. Gone are the traffic-clogged streets and the endless sea of buildings. You’re surrounded by trees, mountains, and rivers. Even the cars and pedestrians change to reflect your new surroundings, with the lowriders and gangsters replaced by hillbillies and trucks. Rockstar pulls the same trick here, containing you in the countryside as you complete a series of...New GTA: San Andreas trick slashes speedrun from four hours to 25 minutesOct 12, 2019 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunGrand Theft Auto: San Andreas once took almost four hours to speedrun, even in the anything-goes Any% category. But that time s been slashed down to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 25 minutes thanks to a new trick discovered this week. It s a breezy 40-step thing which includes instructions like reset if no cop bike before 7:46, Avoid Vending Machines, and just get lucky loool. Speedrunning is good. You can see the new record-setting run below. (more…) New GTA: San Andreas speedrun trick cuts world record from 4 hours to 26 minutesOct 12, 2019 - PC GamerThe discovery of a new GTA: San Andreas speedrun trick that skips you forward to the game's final mission has slashed the world record from nearly four hours to just 26 minutes. The new record holder is Powdinet, and you can see their run in the video above. The process, which only works in the Windows Store version of the game, lets the player warp to a later mission after performing a series of complex steps, and is based on a similar technique used in GTA: Vice City speedruns. The actual moment of the skip happens around the 16 minute mark in the video. Powdinet detailed the full technique in this Reddit post: it has more than 40 steps, the first being to start the game and find a police bike. In the final step, starting an in-vehicle vigilante mission during a specific part of the mission Ryder makes the game jump forward, with the landing point linked to the amount of time since the run started. "With the ability to execute any line of script code, we can warp to any mission we want," Powdinet explains. They've been searching for this type of glitch for three years on and off in San Andreas and found a version of the warp "months ago", but couldn't get it to stick. Now, they've finally managed to make it work, and they expect other speedrunners to shave even more time off the record by using the glitch. Powdinet completed the game in 25m 52s—the previous record, set by Ielreset, was 3h 52m 07s, according to speedrun.com. Thanks, Kotaku. This Spider-Man mod for San Andreas almost looks like the PS4 exclusiveJul 22, 2019 - PC GamerSwinging through New York as a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man is just about the most satisfying thing you can do in a videogame. When it's done well, like in Spider-Man 2 or the recent PS4 exclusive, it's a hypnotic acrobatic display that's graceful but still lets you go at buttock-clenching speeds. While the latest Spidey outing won't be gracing PCs, modder J16D has rather skilfully incorporated some of its best bits into a GTA: San Andreas mod. J16D has been working on their Spider-Man mod since 2015, but the latest video shows that the new game has become a source of inspiration, with J16D mimicking some of the animations from Insomniac's game, along with costumes and even the UI. It looks fantastic. San Andreas isn't quite as vertical as Liberty City, which is based on Spider-Man's stomping grounds of New York, but Spidey still very much looks like he belongs. It's impressive how much of a resemblance there is to Insomniac's version, with movement being almost as fluid, given that we're talking about a pretty old game. Spider-Man 2, arguably the best Spider-Man game adaptation prior to the latest, came out in the same year as San Andreas, though you couldn't tell from the video. While I still have plenty of fond memories zipping through Manhattan in the early 2000s, J16D's mod looks like quite a step up when it comes to the swinging animations. There's no word on a release date for the mod, but expect more videos soon. J16D's To Do list includes interacting with objects while in the air, more swing animations, evade animations, combat, wall running and a HUD. Cheers, Kotaku. Why I love fake gambling and in-game casinos according to a psychologistFeb 8, 2017 - PC GamerHere's the thing: I don't gamble in real life. Glasgow, where I live, is full of bookmakers and casinos, and while I don't take issue with anyone who does throw money at roulette or horses or sport—so long as it's lawful—it's just something that's never interested me. I've worked in pubs where Racing UK was as much a regular as old Jimmy who drank a pint of Guinness and a half measure of whisky, and I've had a season ticket at my favourite football/soccer team for almost 20 years; yet parting with my cash against someone else's odds has never struck my fancy. In videogames, though, it's a different story. Perhaps it's the notion of spending someone else's money—albeit a videogame avatar controlled by me—that I find so alluring, or the fact that I know there's no real risk in bankrupting my virtual earnings besides the chore of regenerating my money pot in whichever way the game in question allows. My first in-game casino visit occurred in 1992's Mercenary 3: The Dion Crisis for the Atari ST. A game well ahead of its time, Novagen's Software's open-world exploration adventure offered multiple endings as the eponymous mercenary set about bringing down the game's corrupt antagonist PC BIL. One such way of toppling the unscrupulous politician's regime involved bankrupting his debt-laden empire—a feat which could be achieved by winning large sums of cash at Uncle's Casino and Bosher's Bar. A well-positioned magnet could swing the odds in your favour, however hitting the jackpot by virtue of one-armed bandits and Wheel of Fortune machines was an absolute joy—particularly when it meant usurping BIL. Years later, I fell in love with Fallout 2's mining town Redding, as it offered a wealth of gambling opportunities in arcade machines, roulette, and the rather unsavoury Molerat Mambo. Bioshock's infamous Fort Frolic zone housed Pharaoh's Fortune, wherein slot machines cost an asynchronous ten dollars a pop; and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas' Las Venturas mirrored real life Vegas as a desert city brimming with casinos such as The Camel's Toe and Caligula's Palace. Away from these games' central narratives, I thrived in bankrolling frivolous expeditions to in-game casinos and bars where I'd spend hours on end frittering away my in-game budget or delighting in the occasions where I won big. But why? Why did I care whether or not I won or lost or broke even—especially when I didn't give a toss about gambling in real life. Why do I find betting fake money in virtual casinos so darn enjoyable? Psychology professor Graham Scott of the University of the West of Scotland suggests anonymity and a lack of empathy could be what drives my weird misplaced passion. "When you consider theft," says Scott, "there's a higher number...Surviving Grand Theft Auto's pedestrian cheatsApr 8, 2015 - PC GamerWhy I Love In Why I Love, PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it's brilliant. Today, Phil explains the joy of GTA's riot mode cheats. People can be funny about cheats. Some take a hard line against them. They're only interested in the game as it was meant to be played, and they look down on those who would pervert that original vision. Others figure that, if they've bought a game, they should be able to do what they want with it. I broadly agree, except, for the most part, the thing that I want to do with a game is not cheat at it. Sure, I've typed "FUND" into SimCity 2000—I'm only human. But the 'cheat' playthrough is always separate from the original playthrough. It's a break; an alternate-reality of unhindered fun between the main business of doing what I'm told. The GTA series—specifically Grand Theft Autos III through San Andreas—occupies a similar space in my head. There was a main, unsullied playthrough that, at any moment, could be taken off-save with a couple of cheat codes. The difference is that GTA's best cheats have never been utilitarian or aspirational. You can get the best cars and the most money, but to do so is to miss the exceptional sandbox Rockstar has hidden away. GTA's best cheats are all about carnage. The game's most enjoyable cheat modes are focused around the game's pedestrians, and, more specifically, around making the pedestrians do things they aren't supposed to do. In GTA 3, this means weapons and anger: * WEAPONSFORALL: gave all pedestrians a random weapon. * NOBODYLIKESME: made all pedestrians attack you. * ITSALLGOINGMAAAD: made all pedestrians attack everything. The brilliant thing is these AI cheats can stack. Enter all three, and GTA stops being a game about random acts of violence and starts being a game about constant acts of violence. Pedestrians stop being brainless victims and form a crazed and unpredictable militia destined to tear itself apart. In a way, it turns GTA into a zombie survival game, but with the key difference that the zombies have guns. And sometimes molotov cocktails or a rocket launcher. More than that, they attack each other too. Driving through Liberty City in this state is strangely liberating, because everyone is acting like the protagonist of their own version of the game. It makes the game's actual protagonist an anonymous psychopath in a city full of psychopaths—at least for the five minutes before another explosion sent me to hospital. That feeling of blending in is a rare thing for an open-world game to achieve, and that's because our tools are ones that we'd never give to random NPCs in normal, unmodified play. For Vice City, Rockstar stepped things up a notch with the excellent "MIAMITRAFFIC"—a cheat that made the city's drivers ultra-aggressive. It fits perfectly with the parody. Vice City is a world where everybody is selfish and wealth is disposable. Of course it's a place where pe...GTA: San Andreas Steam update removes songs, resolution optionsNov 9, 2014 - PC Gamer Ten years after its release, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has been updated on Steam. Ordinarily this would be good news, suggesting that changes had been made to make accommodations for new operating systems or hardware, but this new version of San Andreas takes far more away from the game than it adds. While it now boasts native support for the 360 controller, 17 songs have been removed from Rockstar's open world crime-'em-up, along with a few of the bigger resolution options (1080p included). Saves from the old version will no longer work, so if you have San Andreas installed and you haven't accepted the update yet, don't. Why would a game be updated so long after release, and in a way that seems to intentionally make it worse? It's likely something to do with the recently released 'HD' version for the Xbox 360, which turned out to be a port of the mobile game. Xbox 360 owners were shafted there too, with the original Xbox version of San Andreas removed from Xbox Live to make room for the not exactly improved new one. Seemingly due to expired song licenses, Rockstar had to remove 17 tracks from the mobile version—and they've now updated the Steam game to bring it in line. Rockstar Nexus noted the update, which doesn't appear to be bring any positives other than native support for Xinput controllers. The missing songs are detailed in this NeoGAF post. This isn't the first time Rockstar has removed songs from the Steam version of one of their games. A couple of years ago, they did the same thing with GTA: Vice City, temporarily taking the game off Steam in order to take out several tracks. Licensing issues were the cause there too, but Rockstar went about it in a slightly different way. People who bought the game before its temporary removal were allowed to keep the offending songs, and that doesn't appear to be the case here. As this is a PC game we're talking about, an unofficial patch has already been released that appears to fix some of the nonsense introduced by the official one. The missing songs, meanwhile, can be added back in with San Andreas' custom music station. Reacquaint Yourself with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas—The IntroductionDec 16, 2012 - KotakuEight years and one month ago, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas released on the PlayStation 2. It begins rather abruptly—C.J. in an airport, saying that after five years on the east coast, it was time to return to San Andreas. The game's official soundtrack included a DVD of "The Introduction," a 20-minute in-game cinematic explaining all the reasons why Carl Johnson returned. Rockstar this week finally made it public via its Social Club and YouTube (where others had uploaded it before. This one went up on Aug. 27, 2005, four months after the first YouTube video was uploaded.) Here you may see it in full quality, and if you haven't already, take the 20 minutes to do so. For those who have, hey, Sunday afternoons are always good for reruns. Want to Turn San Andreas Into Your Own Private Gotham? There's a Mod For That.Jul 30, 2012 - Kotaku Wouldn't it be awesome to be Batman? I mean, without all of the angst, perhaps. And without the years of training. And the constant threat of bodily harm. And the... hmm. Okay, you know what? Forget being Batman. I just want the cool parts of being Batman. The Batmobile and the suit and the jumping and, most especially, the not getting caught. One Redditor felt the same way. And after an excursion to see The Dark Knight Rises, he came home feeling that Arkham City wasn't quite doing it for him. He needed something a little more... San Andreas. And lo, the newest Batman-themed mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was born. As the poster explains: I kinda got obsessed with it over the last week and collected heaps of different Batman mods from all over the internet. It was hard, because most of the projects are dead and the links were all down, but I ended up putting together a pretty fully featured pack, using a mod called "The Dark Knight Begins" as a base. There are way worse ways to be Batman. And should you happen to have grabbed San Andreas at any point, you can be Batman too. Or you can browse through the full gallery of Batman's annotated adventures in Gotham San Andreas. The only Batman simulator I'll ever need When Grand Theft Auto Let Iranian Teenagers Do Things They Could Only Dream OfJun 21, 2012 - Kotaku It's a proud part of American mythology that people from all over the world get to come here and pursue their dreams. Navid Khonsari has one of those stories. The Iranian-American used to work at Rockstar Games as cinematic director, where he helped steer the vision on games like The Warriors, Midnight Club II and Bully. However, for all the best-selling, critically acclaimed games Khonsari worked on, it wasn't until he went back to the Middle East that he really saw the surprising cultural impact of video games. Khonsari spoke at this week's Games for Change conference about 1979, the real-world political action game that he's making through his iNKstories development studio. That game's set in Iran during the infamous hostage crisis that followed a violent regime change in that country. Part of that game's inspration comes directly from his resume. During a visit to his homeland six months after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released, Khonsari found himself mobbed by teenagers in the small villager of Gombad after word spread that he'd worked on the PS2 hit. There's not much retail infrastructure in Iran but that wasn't really an obstacle with regard to getting games. "Iran has no copyright laws," Khonsari explains. "It's all black market. So you can buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto for $1. You can buy anything for $1. And Iranians are hardcore gamers. It's a huge gaming community. What's amazing is that it's not gender-specific. I was talking to girls like 16 years olds who were throwing lines back at me from San Andreas." It's a given that gamers in Gombad—a small community in Iran's northeast region near the Turkmenistan border—would seize on the opportunity to peer at American culture through the PC version of GTA: SA. But it was the things they enjoyed most that surprised Khonsari. "What was amazing was they weren't necessarily drawn to what the media and the critics always attacked about GTA games. The sex, nudity or the violence… none of that stuff was a big deal to them," he relates. Instead, it was the more mundane parts of San Andreas that resonated. "They said it was a great venue for them to just listen to music, which is harder for them to do. And they can't just hop into a car and go places, either," he continues. "So they were like, "I just drive around in my car and listen to music. And it's wonderful." They really got into the everyday kind of things you could do in the game, like being able to go and get your hair cut. We put these things in the game because we believe that these are part of our activities in our daily lives. We take for granted that these are part of our activities in our daily lives." When I mentioned that such a level of personal freedom must seem like a fantasy to players like the ones he met in Gombad, Khonsari agreed. "For them, it's a hyper version of kids who live in the suburbs and what they think the city's like. In this particular situation these guys are going, 'I get to make choice...
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