mustawd. ever play vice city? How does the gameplay compare? I don’t care about achievements, fyi.
The gameplay is similar, but the missions have more flavor in San Andreas. People praise Vice City a lot over San Andreas, but I found it lacking tbh. It’s definitely an improvement over GTA3 in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t flesh out the world enough imo. Not enough of a Miami Vice feel. Lots of lost opportunities.
There are some improvements in San Andreas, depending on what you’re into.
A few examples:
-Ability to swim. A few missions depend on swimming ability.
-More control over cars flipping over
-Ability to increase your stamina, strength and fat level. You can get really fat if you just eat a lot. The cutscenes even acknowledge that and give the main char some funny lines.
-Opportunity to have multiple girlfriends. Some have cool abilities like picking you up from hospital
-Buy clothes from different stores. IIRC Vice City gave a few different outfits but not the ability to mix and match. There are like 3-4 stores that kind of replicate real life stores like The GAP for example. Or FUBU.
-You can fly planes or helicopters
-You can parachute from a plane or high altitudes
-You can play basketball
-Driving, boating and Flying school that actually walk you through how to do specific tricks with vehicles
-Ability to take over enemy gang territories (make sure you dont waste ur time when if first gets introduced cuz it’ll reset later in the game for in-game reasons)
-You can drive a bicycle and there is a skate park you can do tricks in
-Other cosmetic stuff like haircuts and tattoos
-You can customize a lowrider and even give it Nitrous or Hydraulics. There’s a lowrider hydraulic mini game, but I find it annoying. But it’s basically DDR/Guitar Hero mechanics, so all good if u like that.
-The world is much larger but also more vertical.
-Trucker missions to drive a 18 wheeler
The main drawbacks of SA are that the airplane missions are fucking annoying.
If you play it I recommend a few things:
-Add the grafix mod
-If a mod exists then add in the old music. Lots of good songs are missing
-Steam version has the ability to take fps cap off. Although this causes some screen tearing (which didnt bother me) but also prevents you from diving in water. So turn it off during water missions.
Also, the game has been made into a multiplayer game by modders. Last I checked the population was around 300 ppl on a Friday night. Not sure at all how it works, but 300 ppl seems like a very large population for the size of the game. Also, the mp version has a ton of mods from my understanding.
In terms of achievements I meant stuff like in GTA3 where ud get x/100 packages. It was just arbitrary and didnt fit in to the gameworld in any way. But San Andreas has a similar mechanic that they’ve integrated into the gameworld beautifull, so it doesnt feel like busy work. At least for me, it makes me want to get all 100, and I’m never the sort of person who does that.
There are a few missions with difficulty spikes here and there, but if I can finish it anyone can. I highly recommend it.
EDIT: San Andreas also has a better sense of humor than VC. It goes back to some of its goofier roots in GTA3, and the characters are more memorable because of it. The voice acting is also more even in terms of quality, altho like any GTA3-based game there are some small characters that seem to be voiced by the dev team.
EDIT2: Also, it has Samuel L Jackson and Mike Penn voicing a main character. AlthoughI found Penn’s voice acting weird in some instances. Like the editing was off. But overall it works.
for good old Knight, who was actually rather useful as a wingman. Now I'm off to the Secret Missions expansion.
