5 years is ridiculous. Do we have to constantly replay our favourite games long past the point of fatigue to get to call them our favourites? Cmon dude.
5 years is half a fucking decade. If you play over 10 games each year, which I imagine most do here, it is a trifle to fit your favourite in there somewhere.
Second, correct me if I'm wrong but in your original post you were basically implying that some new titles simply better than similiar older ones.
No, I didn't, and fucking what? All I said in my original post is that San Andreas is better than Vice City, which is truly is.
b) San Andreas has nuisance features like eating and having to grind swimming to continue the critical path plus the difficulty spike of mandatory flight school and the subsequent flying missions
Eating wasn't actually required after the Ryder mission and when replenishing health you usually had hot dog stands which were no different to using health pickups in VC, and usually more widespread for that matter. You technically could starve in the game, but it was so improbable if you saved somewhat regularly.
Swimming, I suppose. It took like 5 minutes and I really don't consider it enough to drag the game down when SA is 30 hours long.
I never found flying difficult, even when I played the game as a kid on both PC and PS2. Maybe people need to get better at games. For that matter, you can make the same argument for the RC missions in Vice City which in my opinion were worse. You could skip the Zero missions in San Andreas entirely.
All faults you can point to San Andreas are completely negligible when you consider the better writing, mission design, map, customisation, gameplay, physics and vehicles. Effectively everything in San Andreas was better in every single way.
