GTA San Andreas Gets Release Date, Screenshots

An anonymous reader writes "Rockstar Games has been deliberately coy about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - it 'was announced as a Playstation 2 exclusive title' in today's Sony press conference, but 'that was the extent to which the game was discussed.' However, Rockstar just put up an official GTA: San Andreas webpage, confirming a release date of October 2004, and featuring the first three screenshots of the game, leading GameSpot to conclude that the game 'will be set in modern times (not the 1970s-set game some had said) and will have a heavy West-Coast gangsta flava' - they also say the site's splash screen 'changes each time the site is loaded'."

Comments

"West coast gangstas"

[MachDelta]

I hope its not ALL "west coast gangstas" style. One of the things I loved about San Andreas in the original game was working with the Triads. Now THOSE were some mean fuckers. I'd love to be out "bringing honour to my family" with RC bombs again! Muahahaha!!

(Next week on Slashdot: Young teen male in California builds bomb out of remote control toy: Take Two Entertainment sued over deaths. Again.)

Re:"West coast gangstas"

[iMMersE]

That's exactly right. I mean, if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, eating magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music ...

What should they improve on?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got some issues with gta3/gta:vc. Here are a few features I hope they have implemented in gta:sa.

1. Better traffic generation algorithms. Sometimes when a car leaves your field of vision only for a few fractions of a second it disappears. This might have something to do with the limited amount of RAM the PS2 has, but it can still be quite annoying. The amount of vehicles on the streets seems to be quite constant. It would be cool if there were some really bad traffic jams from time to time.
2. Better weapon selection. It can be frustrating to scroll through ten weapons before you get the one you want, especially if you're in combat.
3. Multiplayer. I don't think they're going to implement it, but mta-vc on the PC can be very entertaining, even though it's buggy as hell and rather pointless.

Of course a game like this can never be "perfect", but it would be nice if some of these issues were fixed.

Re:What should they improve on?

[fr0dicus]

1) The Xbox version improves the traffic situation somewhat, but I think it's all about relevance. The random cars you see are exactly that, just a bit of flotsam to spice up the gameplay with chases and races. Probably not worth wasting effort and CPU tracking every individual one.

2) GTA is still preferable on a joypad, it has too many instantly required moves at fingertips to make keyboard/mouse play fully worthwhile. The time taken to find the correct key outweighs any advantage in having unique keys. I find even on PC games I usually just scroll through weapons using the mouse wheel, as it's quicker.

3) Only because it hasn't been relevant. Console games are still very much single player or group oriented, cheap and cheerful throwaway fun that requires no significant investment on behalf of the consumer, so it naturally follows that console owners would be less likely to have broadband, which is an absolute requirement for proper multiplayer.

Console game manufacturers are in the business of providing good medium term fun for the single or group together, whereas PC game production is more focused on creating communities to maintain long-term interest in the titles of the company. Internet access is a given for the average PC gamer, but not so for the console player. Given the general dearth of exclusive quality titles on PC's, and the long long timespans between releases, this ability to maintain interest through expansion and online capabilities is far more important than providing decent single player action. This can easily be seen in id software titles for example.

Because of the royalties involved console games are written to tighter margins and it's unlikely that producers would allow time and money to be spent on an online multiplayer option that is not required to sell that game. This is of course now changing as Sony and Microsoft have determined that it's a promotable feature now that broadband penetration is high enough. The fact that Nintendo are sitting on the fence only proves the point.

I'm personally apalled at the graphics. This is the third iteration of the GTA3 engine. Because of the console generation, game developers don't have any room to create the almost photorealistic environments you can see in a game like Far Cry.

In my opinion, GTA is not even a particularly good example of a console being pushed to its limits graphically, so the relevance of comparing it to Far Cry (nice example of the only decent PC exclusive for months), Doom 3 and Half Life 2 is questionable. The latter two look impressive enough on the Xbox for me anyway. GTA is more about the quality of the environment, and the gameplay. Sure nicer graphics would top it off, but if they had to cut out any of the content to accomodate it (in terms of development time and deadlines) then I'll pass, thanks.