Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC)
The version of the game played in this review used community modifications for improved stability and performance.
What exactly is there to say about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? It’s the best selling PlayStation 2 game of all time, which is quite a hallmark considering everyone and their grandmothers had owned that console at some point. It’s a sandbox action game so unbelievably big for its time that, even to this day, no one can really agree on how specific gameplay mechanics work. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, and something I’m so familiar with I can even replicate speedrunning tricks. Writing a summarized retrospective of a video game like this is frankly a fruitless endeavor, especially since bias is playing a part against the other GTA games. It’s a little hard to talk about something that you deem to be ‘near perfect,’ and I can’t go the contrarian route with “It’s worse than YOU think!!” social engagement because I would just get a nasty vomit-flavored taste in my mouth.
So, we take option C: talking about one very specific aspect of GTA San Andreas no one in a healthy state of mind should care about: the graphics. Rockstar is now fairly (in)famous for their meticulous details in their titles. Like who could forget the horse balls thing in Red Dead Redemption 2? But if you go back to the early GTA games using that same magnifying glass you would very quickly come to the conclusion that, for early 2000’s standards with top-budget titles, they don’t look too great. Rockstar themselves apparently also did this at one point, which conditioned them to contract a mobile game studio to port the PS2 trilogy (or, more accurately, the mobile ports of the trilogy) to Unreal Engine 5 and call it a remastered ‘Definitive Edition.’ But that’s a story for never because fuck off.
Though you could probably figure out why they opted to use lower resolution texturing. Simply put, the games are massive in technical scale and use so much of the original hardware’s resources that other rendering techniques were used to mask over the game’s rough look. Known as “trails” back in those days, the PS2 version of GTA San Andreas uses a combination of PS2 texture modulation and Renderware technology as well as a color filter to clean up the game’s fidelity. The end result was something that, from a longer rendering distance, may give an impression of a pretty looking video game!
The PS2 rendering of GTA San Andreas, as well as previous GTA titles, has become quite iconic for that retro 2000’s aesthetic that’s been more-or-less abandoned because indie developers everywhere are pushing 40 and still prefer their warpy PSX textures instead. San Andreas in particular uses its color filters in a pretty interesting way, giving each region of the state as well as any weather cycles for that location a unique ambiance. Los Santos is always bathed in the orange glow of the west coast sun, not unlike the ‘90s gang dramas the entire game is inspired by. San Fierro uses a lot of coastal blues with a smoggy twist. Las Venturas is a relatively clear desert climate up until the sun goes down, as the world falls into a purplish-blue night that clashes with the lights of the city with its Vegas-inspired casinos. In my opinion, this is one of the most important aspects of GTA San Andreas: despite how big it is compared to its siblings, there’s still a push for style over substance. Games don’t need to look as close to real-life as technically feasible, even if you are Rockstar Games and been just ripping off crime movies for the past twenty years.
I do have an addendum to this worth mentioning: other versions of GTA San Andreas have notably left out a lot of the PS2 graphics as stuff continues to be lost or broken in the porting process. The legacy PC version is especially bad, as in addition to its myriad of other technical issues had pretty much all of its rendering skinned off of it which makes for a very ugly game when attempted to be played on modern resolutions. The header screenshot for this page used a third-party mod called SkyGFX which is attempting to emulate the original PS2 rendering, something I highly recommend installing (even if it is a fucking son-of-a-bitch to manually patch this thing nowadays) since it generally just makes the game look way better than its vanilla release. While I do prefer the PC version due to its keyboard + mouse control scheme and modding capabilities, I still think you owe at least one quick romp of the classic PS2 game so you can get an idea of what I’m talking about here.
But also good luck getting the legacy PC version anyway, because it’s been long delisted from major storefronts since the release of The Definitive Edition, and I don’t think spending $100+ on a Steam key from a shady online reseller is a very good investment in the hobby.