Ooh, you want to be very careful about declaring any release of anything to be the “definitive” version. Partly because I think that’s a subjective thing. There will be people out there for whom their “definitive” experience of watching The Crying Game was at three in the morning blitzed out on mescalin with both feet immersed in buckets of wallpaper paste. And as for removing previous versions of the thing from sale, well, let me tell you a cautionary fable about a proud little man named George Lucas who decided that no one had any need for any version of the original Star Wars trilogy that didn’t have added Loony Toons sound effects and CG as dated as Sean Connery’s relationship advice, and now George Lucas has to sit there and plaster on a smile as the Disney corporation peels the skin off his life’s work and stretches it so thin it would disappoint a Marmite enthusiast. And now Rockstar have brought out quote “definitive” versions of what we might as well think of as the first three GTA games, GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas, and for this all previous versions have now vanished from availability, hope you weren’t invested in any of them or wanted to use that one San Andreas mod that Hillary Clinton burst all her capillaries over.
“Remaster” is becoming rather a foreboding word in my glossary. Not a “rerelease”, same game with stability tweaks and maybe a nice resolution upgrade to pad out the shelflife. Nor a “remake”, a complete ground-up reinterpretation through the lens of modern sensibilities, polishing up the mechanics and filtering out the gay jokes. Remastering is a cold and unpleasant No Man’s Land between the two, wanting the nostalgia cash-in of the latter while only putting in the level of effort required for the former. Except for the QA department, which in this case was putting in the level of effort required for a permanent vegetative state. All they’ve really done is put the textures through an HD filter and updated the lighting engine. And when you do that with boxy turn of the millennium era 3D environments you end up with a look that I like to call “Little Timmy got loose on the custom level editor.” The retro textures were a match for the janky retro 3D physics and unrefined gameplay design. The characters’ faces were indistinct enough your brain was willing to give their intended expression the benefit of the doubt. Now you’ve got the uncanny valley effect that comes from everyone emoting like Thomas the Tank Engine characters.
It’s like, I can’t appreciate the effort you put into applying lipstick to this pig, Rockstar, because now I’m going to feel weird about eating it. And also the lipstick has somehow given the pig dysentery because even this easy mode remastering has made it explode with crash bugs and graphical glitches like those masks from Halloween 3. I was playing the PS5 version ‘cos you may remember the PC release got yanked back off stores on day one like a disobedient dog off an unguarded picnic. And even that was crashing to home more often than a thirty year old liberal arts major. And after all this they still didn’t fix some of the things about the old GTAs that could have used a remaster. Like the way half the voice lines in San Andreas were compressed right the fuck down to fit on a CD and now they all sound like you’re listening to them while pouring Captain Crunch down your earholes. So on that note, let’s transition this into retro review land and talk about how San Andreas holds up. I had to pick one of the three to focus on ‘cos they made games to last you back in the crispy papercraft 3D era and I wasn’t knocking them all out in a week. GTA3’s a pretty bland dish and as for Vice City, if I wanted to have the 1980s smashed in my face I’d go and watch literally any recent Hollywood movie. So that left San Andreas.
Which I’d never played very far into before. Started a couple of times, did nineteen missions centred around driving through two blocks of a poverty stricken neighbourhood being miserable, before finally getting into a shootout and dying in three seconds because the early GTAs pioneered gun combat that depends on using a cover system without actually having a cover system, somehow. Everyone just stands in the open popping at each other like LARPers yelling Lightning Bolt and with about as much physical reaction. So it’d never really grabbed me before, either because of all that or because I’m unflinchingly racist. But this time I stuck with it and found that the game eventually gets away from its very sluggish beginning. As in it literally, physically gets away from it. It’s very odd. You start off playing a rather confrontational game about the brutality of African-American gang culture in 90’s not-Los Angeles with a vein of the idiosyncratic GTA facetiousness sitting uncomfortably alongside it like a rocket ship ice lolly in the middle of a very depressing kebab. It even introduces a gameplay mechanic based around retaking districts for your gang which was ground zero for the district liberating mechanic that for a while was haunting the open world genre like an STD in a first year nursing college.
But then there’s a plot twist, we get run out of town and all of that just goes away and we become a completely different game, more akin to the traditional GTA experience, where you’re a cynical merc showing up in a new city to do favours for various criminal factions with quirky spokespersons that gradually escalate until you’re fighting off entire platoons with an attack helicopter on the end of each limb. You see, San Andreas represented a transitional period when the open world was still young and naive and experimenting with illicit substances. We didn’t yet know what people truly wanted from open world gameplay. Did they want an Oblivion-style stat system where they could grind away primitive weightlifting minigames to raise their Muscle stat for no easily discernible benefit except that your torso will look slightly more chiseled if you wear non-baggy clothes which you never will? No, it turns out we didn’t want that, San Andreas, but someone had to conduct the experiment, so thanks anyway. People thought GTA4 was full of unnecessary bollocks. At least taking your fat cousin bowling was always optional. At least it never locked you out of a mission on the critical path because your swimming stat wasn’t high enough.
So you could only continue in the fucking plot after you’d sat in a fucking pond and wiggled about for half an hour. San Andreas’ waistband is slung real fucking low from all the random garbage in its pockets. It was the last gasp of an old era that wanted to shove as much in as it could before the rising cost of HD graphics pulled the ambitions back down. It at least had the original spirit of the sandbox game, i.e. let the player indulge their whims and do anything they want. Do you wanna strafe the high street in an attack helicopter or work a job as a valet for six hours? You do you! These days sandboxes are more often like “do you want to do the copy pasted combat mission now or uselessly trek through a meadow first?” San Andreas is a piece of gaming history that doesn’t hold up outside its cultural context. As such it should be preserved for posterity, but not fucking “remursturd”. Not slapped into a sparkly dress like an aging recent divorcee in a cocktail bar to attract a new audience that doesn’t want it because it keeps drawing bits of the dress in the wrong order and didn’t even bother to fix that one fucking remote control plane mission that plays like trying to walk the dog with a hippo nailed to the side of your head. Analogy broke down a bit there, didn’t it.
