Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine: A to Z

AXL ROSE

Our favorite piece of San Andreas trivia is Axl’s presence in the game. He is the voice of K-DST DJ Tommy “The Nightmare” Smith and plays classic rock while bitching about his days as a rock star and lamenting the state of modern rock bands.

BASE JUMPING

Learn to parachute at the flight school (it’s like playing Pilotwings) and then grab a parachute pack and have some fun. Take a plane up over a city, land on top of a skyscraper, leap off the edge of it, and parachute down to the street.

CARL

One of the most fleshed-out characters you’ll ever see in a videogame. Sure, he’s a badass—but he’s likeable, and more important, you can shape his development by modifying his appearance, his behavior, his actions, and his abilities.

DANCING

Bet you didn’t expect DDR-style rhythm gameplay, huh? There are different types of dance gameplay, including car bouncing (timed analog stick twitches) and pure DDR-style button pressing. If this scares you a bit, you only have to do it twice.

EXERCISE

Physical activity affects CJ’s stamina, and if you head to the gym, you can lift weights to get so buff that you’ll want to run around with no shirt on. Workout gameplay is old-school Track & Field–style button tapping, and it affects both strength and stamina.

FLYING

Helicopters, planes, and RC planes are all part of the action this time, and flying allows you to travel great distances in a short space of time. For really quick travel, you can also buy a ticket for a relatively small price and take a commercial flight.

GAMBLING

In the casinos of Las Venturas, you can play video poker (some of them are $1,000 a hand), craps, blackjack, roulette, or wheel of fortune, or try your hand at the slots. Remember, what happens in Las Venturas stays in Las Venturas.

HITMAN

There are three basic rating levels with weapons: poor, gangster, and hitman. The more you use a weapon, the better you get with it, and at the top level, you can move around and shoot with pinpoint accuracy by simply locking on with R1.

IMPORT/EXPORT

Remember the car-smuggling business in Grand Theft Auto 2 on PS1? No? Go back and pick up a copy from the used bin in EB Games—you’ll probably find it for $5. You can relive the smuggling experience by purchasing a car dealership in San Fierro.

JACKSON

As in Samuel (Pulp Fiction, the Star Wars prequels, and a zillion other movies), who voices sinister cop-gone-bad Officer Tenpenny, one of the key bad guys in the game. He’s not a nice guy, and he spends most of the game messing with you.

KLEPTOMANIA

You’ll be stealing all kinds of stuff throughout the game, but new to the series is the burglary scenario. The first time you break into a house, you learn the new stealth moves in the game, which are useful in a wide variety of different missions.

LEARNING

There are four different schools in San Andreas: driving, boating, motorcycling, and flying. Working through them has multiple benefits. First, you get used to the controls. Second, you get to try cool vehicles. Third, you get benefits, like a pilot’s license.

MODS

Find a mod shop and you can trick out your ride with new bumpers, rims, exhausts, skirts, a cool paint job, and even a nitrous system. It’s like playing Midnight Club! Just remember to save your car in your garage when you’re done so you don’t lose it.

NOOKIE

Hooking up with the ladies is an important part of the game, and your sexiness will dictate how successful you are. The dates themselves are often very amusing, with romantically lit scenes of you wooing the ladies while cheesy music plays.

ORANGE GROVE FAMILIES

Once one of the most powerful gangs in Los Santos, the Orange Grove Families is the gang CJ rolls with. Its typical dress code is green. Based primarily in Ganton, the gang’s influence has slowly eroded over the years as a result of increasing violence.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Grab a camera in the game and you can snap pictures and save them to your memory card. Some missions require you to snap shots as the objective (like the heist in Las Venturas). Alternatively, hand the camera to your homies and they'll snap pictures of you.

QUALITY

You’ll be shocked by how much better things look in San Andreas than they do in Vice City. Gorgeous lighting effects, lots of ambient animations (like swaying grass, birds), and neat effects like motion blur all contribute to a high-quality look.

RESPECT

A vital part of San Andreas, your respect level is affected by your money, haircut, clothes, physique, and personal history. Who you’ve robbed, killed, or teamed up with affects the way others in the world see you, and they’ll react very differently.

STATS

Like any good RPG, San Andreas tracks everything—from the distance you’ve walked or ridden on a bicycle to the number of crimes you’ve committed or people you’ve shot. The more CJ does something, like run or swim, the better he becomes at it.

TRIATHLON

The game has running, swimming, and biking gameplay mechanics, so what better way to take advantage of them than to include a full-on triathlon for you to enter? You’ll need to hit the gym and crank up those stamina stats if you want to win.

UNPRECEDENTED

No other game has ever offered this much variety or a game environment that provides so much freedom. Sure, it’s possible to beat the story in about 50 or 60 hours, but to get 100 percent, you’re going to need to invest more than 100 hours.

VERDICT The game promises just about everything and somehow manages to deliver even more than you expected.

Pub. Rockstar Dev. Rockstar North ESRB M MSRP $49.99

VIDEOGAMES

You’ll find four different console/arcade games: Let’s Get Ready to Bumble, an ’80s-style gravity game; They Crawled From Uranus, a Gyruss-style tube shooter; space shooter Duality; and side-scroller Go Go Space Monkey. We love monkeys.

WAYPOINTS

One of the user-friendliest additions to the game, the waypoint system allows you to mark a tag on the enormous, sprawling game map. You’ll find it useful to place these reference points on special locations and road junctions on really long trips.

X Radio

X is the alternative rock station in San Andreas. Its playlist includes songs by Stone Temple Pilots, Faith No More, Helmet, Depeche Mode, Danzig, and, of course, Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” which you no doubt heard in the trailer.

YES

You’ll probably want to invest in the official strategy guide from Brady. This game is so big and there’s so much hidden stuff, there’s a good chance you’ll want help. We guarantee that you are not prepared for the enormity of the experience.

ZERO

Voiced by David Cross (Arrested Development), Zero is quite spectacularly geeky and quotes sci-fi and fantasy movies while providing the tech support CJ requires. He’s also the keeper of the RC vehicles, which are extremely difficult to control.