Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Review

San Andreas is the most ambitious thing Rockstar ever shipped relative to its hardware, and that is saying something. Three distinct cities plus countryside and desert, crammed into 4GB and a PS2's 32MB of RAM, with swimming, climbing, gym stats, girlfriend schedules, burglary shifts, and a jetpack. The difficulty-to-make grade is not sentimental; the streaming tech alone was a miracle.

The script matches the scope. CJ, Sweet, Big Smoke, and Officer Tenpenny (a peak Samuel L. Jackson) give the series its most textured story, an actual tragedy about family and betrayal underneath the chaos. Visuals take the honest hit: the draw distance fog and low-poly haze were the price of that scale, and they have aged harder than Vice City's tighter frame. But the systemic depth, the RPG hooks, and the sheer generosity of content make this the PS2-era GTA that still plays like a modern idea.