Electronic Gaming Monthly: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Xbox

Publisher: Rockstar

Developer: Rockstar North

Release Date: June 2005

America’s Bloodiest Home Videos

Ride a bike up a wall and back flip it onto its wheels, pilot a plane beneath the Gant Bridge, slay a ganglord with your girl’s flower bouquet—it’ll happen, but nobody will believe it. That is unless you preserve your illicit highlights for posterity. San Andreas’ newfangled replay feature lets you record your greatest gangsta moments in 30-second snippets.

My Tunes

There’s no knocking San Andreas’ soundtrack, an it-came-from-the-’90s collection encompassing everything from Kiss to Heart, Slick Rick to Rick James, Willie Nelson to Ronnie Hudson, and Public Enemy to Humble Pie. Even the entire FM dial can’t please everybody all of the time, however, so this version creates custom stations from the songs you save to the hard drive and plays them randomly or sequentially, or in a radio format complete with commercial breaks.

No Loading Zone

Where GTA’s large-as-life geography seamlessly transitions from suburban sprawl to glittering gambling strips, cirrus-clouded skies to silo-studded meadows, walking into a pizzeria means taking a boring trip to the loading screen on Sony’s system. Here it happens lickety-split: Step up to the door, and in the blink of an eye, you’re inside eating. Whether you’re starting the game or going into a cut-scene, loading times are lean if not nonexistent.

Sightseeing

“There’s a movie theater in [San Francisco stand-in] San Fierro. On PS2, I couldn’t tell what was playing,” says Rockstar rep Devin Bennett, “but now when I went back, I saw that it was King of Ass. All of this stuff you couldn’t actually read before is crystal clear on Xbox.” And the detail doesn’t stop at farcical signs and shop fronts. “[Developer] Rockstar North creates characters, vehicles, everything in high resolution, but bumps it down to get it onto PS2. When it comes time to convert to Xbox and PC, they can go back to those high-res models, and thus everything looks crisper, cleaner, more colorful and vivid,” explains Bennetts.