In Anticipation of GTA: San Andreas
In anticipation of the upcoming GTA: San Andreas game, I've been replaying my old GTA III and GTA: Vice City. With all the new games coming up this season, you'd think that a person wouldn't have time to play these old games, but I have to admit I have tunnel vision with regards to GTA. In the past few years, these games have been the ones that most stood out to me, that seemed the most fun.

So I started wondering what made these games so good. It isn't really the engine, because they just used RenderWare on top of a very basic low-poly graphics system (it had to be a simple engine to run on PS2). It wasn't the brand name, because when GTA first came out, it didn't even have a brand name. Their physics is passable, but only just. So what made it one of the best selling video games in the past five years?

In a word, Character. Every person in the game has a distinct, individual, sharply defined character. Their character is evidenced in everything from their voice acting to their animation. Most of the characters are cliche's (like Phil, the redneck ex-Army ammo dealer, or Sunny, the mob amalgam of the Simpsons Fat Tony, Vito Corleone, and Tony Soprano).

More than the main characters, every person on the street reacts like a real person. They talk smack to each other, jump out of the way of cars, and glare at you as you brush past them. There are people on every street, giving the whole level a sense of life.

The radio has character, from their commercials for Ammu-Nation ("You're in the ten minute waiting period! Come in today and get our 'Try before you buy' special!") to their talk radio, with a shootout between a religious nut and a nudist.

The missions have character. No two missions are exactly alike, and every one of them has a story behind it. The story always makes sense for the situation, and the missions are finely crafted to be just a little bit more difficult than you would expect. The missions are not heavily scripted, there are no walls shunting you from one room to the next, like a rat in a maze.

Most of all, the map has character. I played True Crime: Streets of LA, and it was a pretty good, hollow rendition of GTA. One of the major problems I had with True Crime, though was that I never had any idea where I was, and I never cared. All the streets were at right angles from each other, and they were all the same. In GTA, you feel like the entire map was made for playing around with. There are minigames all over the place (look for the RC car racing, or the insane "unique stunts"). The map has conveniently-placed ramps for jumping your vehicle over, there are turns and straightaways that you know were made for speeding through. There are shortcuts, underground passages, and just a host of things that make the games great.

You can say that GTA is dangerous, or that it's teaching our children bad values, but you'll still be wrong. Games have had evil baked into them since they first started, and players still know enough about games to see it as fantasy, rather than learning to be like them. . . . You know what, I'll save that for another post.

Let me just leave you with this. There's a reason GTA games have always outsold their competitors. That's because they have more character than any other game out there. That may change in this next iteration, but I'd bet it won't.

- posted by BrandG @ 11:38 AM