Massively Multiplayer: Gaming In The New Millennium
- Thread starter RySenkari
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Why? I hope not. I don't mind some darker themes but if went full dark, there's really no fun.
Thompson's lawsuit against the game companies is eventually thrown out, though he tries every trick in the book to keep it going. As for the three states that would ban the sales of Mature rated games, that case is settled in summer 2004 when the Supreme Court rules 6-3 in favor of the game industry, with Rehnquist, Thomas, and Breyer siding with the ban and Scalia, O'Connor, Ginsburg, Souter, Kennedy, and Stevens siding with the game industry.
He may have been an sour old man, but he was quite Liberal when it came to the 1st Amendment.
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Yeah, his broad interpretation of Free Speech got him in quite a lot of trouble, with both ends of the political spectrum, at one point or another. For instance, his originalist philosophy also led him to make the Citizens United decision, arguing the freedom of speech includes groups such as corporations, since The Constitution provides no specific exception for them.
Some darker theme is enough. If it went full dark, than i'd rather play final fantasy.
I'd love to see movies or TV series based on Libba Bray's Gemma Doyle Trilogy (fantasy + 1890s London) and The Diviners Series (fantasy + 1920s New York City); sure, they're YA novels, but they're actually good, and the movies/TV series could become a hit among grown ass adults just like MLP:FiM.
Fall 2004 (Part 3) - Katanas Of The Apple And Sword Variety
Gunstar Heroes: Rerisen
Gunstar Heroes: Rerisen is a run and gun sidescrolling title developed by Treasure and released exclusively for the Sega Katana. It features stylised 3-D graphics in a 2-D playstyle that feels just like the original games, where players run through a level filled with enemies and hazards, killing everything they see along the way before encountering large and powerful boss monsters. The game features the return of the original heroes, Red and Blue, along with their siblings, Yellow and Green, all of whom are playable and who employ different fighting styles even utilizing the same weapons. The game features fourteen different weapons in all, with all of them able to be combined with one other weapon, making for 182 possible combinations, each of which has a different effect. Combined with each sibling having a different fighting style, and there are 728 different possible combinations for players to use. Before beginning one of the game's 40 levels, players can allocate a stock of life points, which starts at 200 and can be built up throughout the game by collecting life increased items. These life points can be distributed amongst the four characters, so someone can choose to give all their points to one character, split them evenly amongst the four, or anywhere inbetween, with players able to switch between anyone who has life points at any time. As is par for the course for Treasure, the boss fights (of which there are 68 in all, most levels having multiple bosses) are spectacular, with the big end of chapter bosses being the most powerful and difficult. The game features full voice acting and anime cutscenes at certain stages of gameplay.
The plot sees the four Gunstar Heroes returning to action after the Empire returns under new leadership, that of Madame Blanc, who has constructed for herself a massively powerful attack robot and seeks to conquer the world. She sends her armies to invade, and only the Gunstar Heroes stand between Blanc and total world domination. It's a fairly simple plot, with little in the way of twists and turns (but a lot of spectacular action set pieces). Essentially, people are playing this game for the action, and the game largely succeeds at delivering. It recieves mostly positive reviews, though the short levels get some criticism (most levels, including boss fights, can be beaten in about five minutes, making certain segments of the game seem like more of a boss rush than a legitimate run and gun), and the bare bones plot is also criticized when weighed against some of the other games released at the time. Rerisen also has the unfortunate distinction of being released on the exact same day as The Legend Of Zelda: Hero Eternal, causing it to be completely overshadowed by that game in both advertising and coverage. Still, it's a really good game. Sales in the West are decent, though nothing near what the game receives in Japan, and it's ultimately considered a successful revival of the series.
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The Seven Samurai
The Seven Samurai is a hack and slash title exclusive to the Sega Katana, based on Akira Kurosawa's classic film. The game sticks fairly tightly to the film's plot when it can, though it understandably adds a number of fights to the game in order to give the player more action. The game plays more like Dynasty Warriors than a typical hack and slash, with large numbers of enemies on the screen at certain times, and the ability for the player to control all seven samurai at once during certain battles by giving orders to the other samurai while controlling one of them. Each of the seven samurai has their own distinct fighting specialties that again borrow from the film, and the game itself depicts classic film scenes between battles. The game intersperses scenes of the farming village in the present day with flashback scenes about the samurai and how they all ended up becoming ronin. Because the game follows the film's story so closely, samurai are killed during the course of the game, and once that happens, the player no longer controls them in battle, so the final battle itself is fought with five samurai, just like in the movie.
The Seven Samurai is released on October 19, 2004. It's a high quality game that gets a lot of critical praise, but is somewhat damaged from comparisons to the earlier Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, another hack and slash game based on a samurai film, but a game that plays quite differently from The Seven Samurai and to which the comparisons are largely unwarranted. The Seven Samurai plays out somewhat more slowly, with more deliberate combat and more tactical layers (the samurai are often trying to protect certain objectives in the village, while Kill Bill has no such missions and is a simple solo sword game). The combat in Seven Samurai is a bit more stiff, though it's arguably more satisfying because of this (ultimately though, it depends on someone's preferred playstyle). The biggest praise is for how closely the game follows the movie and replicates a lot of the film's emotions, with the voice acting being especially heavily praised (despite the use of mostly unknown voice actors for the lead roles). It's a very, very good game, and many believe it to be one of the Katana's best of the year. Sales are a bit underwhelming and the game comes to be known as a mostly underappreciated classic in the following years.
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Despite Stagnant Sales, Apple Vows To Continue To Support The Katana
In a recent interview with the British game magazine Edge, Apple's Director of Interactive Entertainment, Reggie Fils-Aime, discussed a number of things, including the upcoming release of the iPod Play. But he also spent a lot of time discussing the Katana, which has been a distant third behind the Nintendo Wave and the Microsoft Xbox in recent months. Though the system's sales decline has slowed, it's still a far cry from what it was just a year ago in terms of unit sales, and many are wondering if the Katana is on its way out. Fils-Aime, however, says that's far from the case.
"We're going to continue to support the Katana. That's just the bottom line," said Fils-Aime, when asked if the release of the iPod Play meant that Apple would be focusing on its new game handheld and not Sega's legacy console. "We're still seeing very strong software sales, and hardware sales remain steady. We feel it's still a great system, competitively priced and supported by the best online gaming community in the world, and it's not going anywhere."
Fils-Aime is referring to SegaNet 2.0, which continues to be a bright spot for the company. The service continues to gain subscribers month to month, though the pace of new subscribers has substantially slowed since the service was introduced last October. Apple continues to add new features to the service, including in-game voice chat with a headset accessory, and the ability to connect to new users via a favorite games list that will pair players with potentially compatible new friends based on their top games, with players able to list up to 100 ranked favorites. The service has more subscribers than Microsoft's Xbox Live, though that gap is narrowing.
Fils-Aime did reveal that once the iPod Play was released that the company would begin to focus on a successor device to the Katana, but this has been an open secret for some time, and Apple officials have publicly discussed a "post Katana future" at various trade shows, including this year's Game Developers Conference. Fils-Aime reassured Katana owners by stating that the iPod Play would "enhance" the functionality of the Katana, as the two devices would be linked in a number of ways through the existence of SegaNet 2.0 and numerous cross-platform games that could be played between Katana owners and iPod Play owners.
"So you'll have a team shooter for example, where one team is comprised of Katana players and the other is comprised of iPod players, sort of a friendly competition type thing. We'd love to incorporate lots of that over the next few years."
The Katana is expected to drop in price to $129 for the upcoming holiday season, when the system will be offered with a number of game and accessory bundles, including the new Sonic Rover and a built in hard drive.
-from an article posted on Gamespot.com, October 10, 2004
Gunstar Heroes: Rerisen is a run and gun sidescrolling title developed by Treasure and released exclusively for the Sega Katana. It features stylised 3-D graphics in a 2-D playstyle that feels just like the original games, where players run through a level filled with enemies and hazards, killing everything they see along the way before encountering large and powerful boss monsters. The game features the return of the original heroes, Red and Blue, along with their siblings, Yellow and Green, all of whom are playable and who employ different fighting styles even utilizing the same weapons. The game features fourteen different weapons in all, with all of them able to be combined with one other weapon, making for 182 possible combinations, each of which has a different effect. Combined with each sibling having a different fighting style, and there are 728 different possible combinations for players to use. Before beginning one of the game's 40 levels, players can allocate a stock of life points, which starts at 200 and can be built up throughout the game by collecting life increased items. These life points can be distributed amongst the four characters, so someone can choose to give all their points to one character, split them evenly amongst the four, or anywhere inbetween, with players able to switch between anyone who has life points at any time. As is par for the course for Treasure, the boss fights (of which there are 68 in all, most levels having multiple bosses) are spectacular, with the big end of chapter bosses being the most powerful and difficult. The game features full voice acting and anime cutscenes at certain stages of gameplay.
The plot sees the four Gunstar Heroes returning to action after the Empire returns under new leadership, that of Madame Blanc, who has constructed for herself a massively powerful attack robot and seeks to conquer the world. She sends her armies to invade, and only the Gunstar Heroes stand between Blanc and total world domination. It's a fairly simple plot, with little in the way of twists and turns (but a lot of spectacular action set pieces). Essentially, people are playing this game for the action, and the game largely succeeds at delivering. It recieves mostly positive reviews, though the short levels get some criticism (most levels, including boss fights, can be beaten in about five minutes, making certain segments of the game seem like more of a boss rush than a legitimate run and gun), and the bare bones plot is also criticized when weighed against some of the other games released at the time. Rerisen also has the unfortunate distinction of being released on the exact same day as The Legend Of Zelda: Hero Eternal, causing it to be completely overshadowed by that game in both advertising and coverage. Still, it's a really good game. Sales in the West are decent, though nothing near what the game receives in Japan, and it's ultimately considered a successful revival of the series.
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The Seven Samurai
The Seven Samurai is a hack and slash title exclusive to the Sega Katana, based on Akira Kurosawa's classic film. The game sticks fairly tightly to the film's plot when it can, though it understandably adds a number of fights to the game in order to give the player more action. The game plays more like Dynasty Warriors than a typical hack and slash, with large numbers of enemies on the screen at certain times, and the ability for the player to control all seven samurai at once during certain battles by giving orders to the other samurai while controlling one of them. Each of the seven samurai has their own distinct fighting specialties that again borrow from the film, and the game itself depicts classic film scenes between battles. The game intersperses scenes of the farming village in the present day with flashback scenes about the samurai and how they all ended up becoming ronin. Because the game follows the film's story so closely, samurai are killed during the course of the game, and once that happens, the player no longer controls them in battle, so the final battle itself is fought with five samurai, just like in the movie.
The Seven Samurai is released on October 19, 2004. It's a high quality game that gets a lot of critical praise, but is somewhat damaged from comparisons to the earlier Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, another hack and slash game based on a samurai film, but a game that plays quite differently from The Seven Samurai and to which the comparisons are largely unwarranted. The Seven Samurai plays out somewhat more slowly, with more deliberate combat and more tactical layers (the samurai are often trying to protect certain objectives in the village, while Kill Bill has no such missions and is a simple solo sword game). The combat in Seven Samurai is a bit more stiff, though it's arguably more satisfying because of this (ultimately though, it depends on someone's preferred playstyle). The biggest praise is for how closely the game follows the movie and replicates a lot of the film's emotions, with the voice acting being especially heavily praised (despite the use of mostly unknown voice actors for the lead roles). It's a very, very good game, and many believe it to be one of the Katana's best of the year. Sales are a bit underwhelming and the game comes to be known as a mostly underappreciated classic in the following years.
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Despite Stagnant Sales, Apple Vows To Continue To Support The Katana
In a recent interview with the British game magazine Edge, Apple's Director of Interactive Entertainment, Reggie Fils-Aime, discussed a number of things, including the upcoming release of the iPod Play. But he also spent a lot of time discussing the Katana, which has been a distant third behind the Nintendo Wave and the Microsoft Xbox in recent months. Though the system's sales decline has slowed, it's still a far cry from what it was just a year ago in terms of unit sales, and many are wondering if the Katana is on its way out. Fils-Aime, however, says that's far from the case.
"We're going to continue to support the Katana. That's just the bottom line," said Fils-Aime, when asked if the release of the iPod Play meant that Apple would be focusing on its new game handheld and not Sega's legacy console. "We're still seeing very strong software sales, and hardware sales remain steady. We feel it's still a great system, competitively priced and supported by the best online gaming community in the world, and it's not going anywhere."
Fils-Aime is referring to SegaNet 2.0, which continues to be a bright spot for the company. The service continues to gain subscribers month to month, though the pace of new subscribers has substantially slowed since the service was introduced last October. Apple continues to add new features to the service, including in-game voice chat with a headset accessory, and the ability to connect to new users via a favorite games list that will pair players with potentially compatible new friends based on their top games, with players able to list up to 100 ranked favorites. The service has more subscribers than Microsoft's Xbox Live, though that gap is narrowing.
Fils-Aime did reveal that once the iPod Play was released that the company would begin to focus on a successor device to the Katana, but this has been an open secret for some time, and Apple officials have publicly discussed a "post Katana future" at various trade shows, including this year's Game Developers Conference. Fils-Aime reassured Katana owners by stating that the iPod Play would "enhance" the functionality of the Katana, as the two devices would be linked in a number of ways through the existence of SegaNet 2.0 and numerous cross-platform games that could be played between Katana owners and iPod Play owners.
"So you'll have a team shooter for example, where one team is comprised of Katana players and the other is comprised of iPod players, sort of a friendly competition type thing. We'd love to incorporate lots of that over the next few years."
The Katana is expected to drop in price to $129 for the upcoming holiday season, when the system will be offered with a number of game and accessory bundles, including the new Sonic Rover and a built in hard drive.
-from an article posted on Gamespot.com, October 10, 2004
I bet Steve cant wait to kill that thing and wash his hands of the Sega brand (at least in hardware).
Given the earlier politics discussion, how did Rick Perry do ITTL? Did he become Lieutenant Governor still? If so, given that Bush remained as Governor ITTL, what did he do? Remain Lieutenant Governor, and possibly become Governor himself if Kasich/Bush wins the 2004 Election? Run for Senate, maybe?
Hero Eternal is an excellent game and somewhat influential, but it's not a transcendentally different Zelda game in the way that Temple Of Time was. The most influential games of 2004 I would imagine are Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half-Life 2, Thrillseekers, World Of Warcraft, Metal Gear Solid II, and perhaps one of the iPod Play launch titles. I can't see it influencing all that much in culture at large, at least until the 2010s. Within the game design world, perhaps as soon as 2006, but it wouldn't be as influential as its review scores and sales would lead you to believe.
Rick Perry is still Lieutenant Governor, but may well run for Senate in 2006.
...Assuming Kasich/Bush doesn't win the election, in which case, he'd just be Governor.
Butterflied, Cetuximab got FDA approval in 2001 and ImClone stock soared on the news. Martha Stewart would make about $21 million on her investments in the company.
Fall 2004 (Part 4) - Welcome To The Jungle
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is an open world crime-based game developed by Rockstar Games. It's the third game in the Grand Theft Auto series, and the first to be released as a multiplatformer at launch, for both the Microsoft Xbox and the Nintendo Wave. Like IOTL's game, San Andreas greatly expands on the first two games by including three cities and a massive amount of open space between them. It also diverts from Grand Theft Auto: Miami in that it returns to giving fictional names to cities, with Los Santos standing in for Los Angeles, San Fierro standing in for San Francisco, and Las Venturas standing in for Las Vegas. San Andreas also introduces a fourth "city", which is about a third of the size of the other cities and is presented as a suburb. It's called Palisade, and it's about halfway between San Fierro and Los Santos. OTL San Andreas had suburbs as well, but none as large as Palisade, which is about as big as one of the three sections of Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto, and where several required missions take place. San Andreas introduces a more detailed character customization system as well, in which more skills can be built up than IOTL's game, and the dating system is also revamped to make that a bit more interesting as well (with up to 16 girlfriends and unique dating missions for each one). The game introduces a "morality" system, in which it's legitimately possible for the protagonist to become a "noble" thief if the player takes a very large number of pacifistic actions, which include going out of one's way to kill as few people as possible, performing many ambulance/firefighting/police missions, AND dating a saintly girlfriend (3 of the 16 girlfriends in the game qualify). If the protagonist meets all these criteria, he will start to actively avoid killing civilians even if the player tries to force them to, and will even have different dialogue options during missions. Conversely, the player can also go out of his way to make the protagonist an extremely vicious and ruthless criminal who kills people for fun and who expresses much harsher sentiments during missions. Again, this takes a LOT of effort (frequently getting into multi star warning levels, gunning down hundreds of civilians, etc.). 95 percent of the time, the protagonist will be in "default" mode where he's as good or as bad as the player makes him to be, with the normal dialogue and mission actions. For the most part, San Andreas introduces many of the elements that were introduced to the series IOTL, while elements like swimming, which debuted earlier in the series, also return. The graphics are quite a bit improved from the previous two games, though they're obviously not up to OTL Grand Theft Auto IV standards. They're about on par with what would be considered a "good" looking game ITTL, still not one of the best looking games but also not nearly as bad as the graphics in the OTL PS2 games. The game features more than 15 different radio stations, with three talk radio stations and 14 music stations with a total of 131 songs, spanning from the 60s to the early 90s (like IOTL, the game takes place in 1992). There's a station with mostly grunge music this time around, and also a music heavily featuring female artists with Kathleen Hanna voicing the DJ (the DJ is also one of the girls the protagonist can date, and depending on how the protagonist treats her, she'll talk about him on her radio show...let's just say you really want to treat her well). The game features an all-star voice over cast. Like IOTL's game, it's probably the most star studded cast featured in any video game to date. OTL voice actors like James Woods, Samuel L. Jackson, and Chris Penn appear in the game ITTL, while new voice actors original TTL include Christopher Lloyd, Harvey Keitel, Holly Hunter, Lucy Liu, Harry Lennix, Jason Isaacs, and Anna Gunn. The protagonist himself is named Tre (an homage to Boyz n the Hood's protagonist) and is voiced by Aggro, an original TTL music artist who is still one of the most famous hip hop acts in the country at the time of the game's release (Aggro's voice is somewhat like the voice of the actor who voiced CJ in the OTL game, though it's a bit deeper). The "Hot Coffee" controversy from OTL never arises, as Rockstar decides to include a somewhat milder (still raunchy and pushing the tippy top of the M rating, but not quite enough for an AO rating) sex scene in the game. The game itself is DEFINITELY a hard Mature, generating enormous amounts of controversy, which only serves to push its sales higher and higher.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas starts much like OTL's game, with Tre returning to his old neighborhood on Grove Street in Los Santos to mourn someone he cares about. This time, however, it's not his mother (his mother abandoned him when he was less than a year old). Instead, it's Tre's best friend (in another homage to the character Ricky from Boys n the Hood). Tre reunites with his old friends and decides to get his old gang back together, kicking off the game's events. He begins in Los Santos, and like IOTL, is unable to leave the city and its immediate environs (if he tries, he'll generate an unriddable five star wanted level) until enough storyline missions are complete. Players are able to conduct gang wars and a variety of other activities and side missions in Los Santos and its suburbs, which comprise a really large area. Tre eventually comes up against a group of corrupt police officers led by Officer Tenpenny, once again voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. Instead of forcing Tre to work for them like OTL's game, they're forcing one of Tre's friends to work for them instead (they have another inside man in the gang, Jay, who's working for them willingly and serves a role similar to Big Smoke IOTL). Eventually, Tre is forced to leave Los Santos in order to conduct business elsewhere, and after a brief stopover in Palisade and running a few missions out in the woods (where he meets The Truth, another returning character from OTL, who is somewhat different IOTL's game, he's a disgraced federal agent somewhat similar to Mulder from The X-Files, and is trying to find his partner, a female agent somewhat similar to Scully, she's antagonistic to him at first but if Tre performs the right missions she'll eventually reconcile with The Truth and become an ally, if not then Tre will eventually be forced to kill her in a storyline mission toward the end of the game), Tre heads to San Fierro, where he teams up with some of the local gangs to battle the Triads. The Russian Mafia plays a much bigger role in this game, somewhat serving as tertiary main antagonists along with Jay and Tenpenny (they're eventually defeated toward the end of the game in the final Las Venturas mission), and Tre comes across them for the first time in San Fierro. Eventually, after finishing his business in San Fierro, Tre heads out to the desert, where he works with Mike Toreno like OTL (there's no frustrating flight school missions in TTL's game, but they're replaced with a series of equally frustrating stealth missions that must all be completed before heading to Las Venturas). Tre makes it to Las Venturas, where he starts out antagonistic with the Triads but eventually teams up with them to take down the Russian Mafia and their casino business. All the while, Tre continues to be harassed by Tenpenny, who feels legal pressure squeezing in on him. Tre eventually returns to Los Santos, where he helps his friend finally escape Tenpenny's influence and wins back a massive amount of territory for his old Grove Street Gang. Just as OTL's game, there's a citywide riot after Tre helps out his friend, and he uses the chaos of the riot to confront Jay and Tenpenny once and for all. The final mission can differ somehwat depending on Tre's morality: if the player has turned him into a "hero", Tenpenny will take Tre's girlfriend hostage and she must be rescued during the final mission. If the player has turned Tre into a "villain", there's a brief diversion during the mission where Tre kills a whole bunch of cops. If Tre is of the default morality for the final mission, the diversion is that Tre has to fend off another Ballers attack before he can continue pursuing Tenpenny. Each of these three little "bonus" segments have about the same level of difficulty, so there's no real in-game advantage to giving Tre a specific alignment. Either way, the final mission ends similarly to OTL: Tenpenny is killed after a spectacular car chase, and Tre returns to Grove Street to a celebration with his friends.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is one of the most critically acclaimed games of the year. Its graphical and gameplay improvements over the first two games are lauded highly, and it gets a review score about on par with the previous two games. The pacing of the storyline missions is considered to be a bit worse than OTL's games (with the Palisades missions and the Toreno stealth missions being particularly criticized), so San Andreas doesn't get QUITE the golden reception it got IOTL, but it's still considered to be one of the year's best and is massively popular with gamers the world over. It's released on October 26, 2004, the exact same day it was released IOTL, and sales are outstanding on both the Wave and the Xbox, with the Wave version selling a few thousand more copies in its first month of release as The Legend Of Zelda: Hero Eternal, and the Xbox version selling even more than that. The game gets plenty of controversy from the usual suspects, and the "cop killer" segment during the final mission gets news coverage for encouraging violence against police officers (though the game's creators and the fanbase point out that in order to get that segment to show up, Tre has to already be an awful person even by GTA protagonist standards), but as the old adage goes, controversy creates cash and every news segment just gets more people eager to try the game. It's considered to be the most feminist-friendly Grand Theft Auto game to date due to the multiple well developed love interests for Tre (and the voice acting of Kathleen Hanna in the game definitely helps) and excellent female supporting characters like Agent Sarah (The Truth's Scully-like former partner, voiced by Holly Hunter) and Karen Tan (Tre's Triad ally in Las Venturas, voiced by Lucy Liu). San Andreas is the most successful Grand Theft Auto game to date, and Rockstar immediately begins work on a true next-generation sequel to the original game.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is an open world crime-based game developed by Rockstar Games. It's the third game in the Grand Theft Auto series, and the first to be released as a multiplatformer at launch, for both the Microsoft Xbox and the Nintendo Wave. Like IOTL's game, San Andreas greatly expands on the first two games by including three cities and a massive amount of open space between them. It also diverts from Grand Theft Auto: Miami in that it returns to giving fictional names to cities, with Los Santos standing in for Los Angeles, San Fierro standing in for San Francisco, and Las Venturas standing in for Las Vegas. San Andreas also introduces a fourth "city", which is about a third of the size of the other cities and is presented as a suburb. It's called Palisade, and it's about halfway between San Fierro and Los Santos. OTL San Andreas had suburbs as well, but none as large as Palisade, which is about as big as one of the three sections of Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto, and where several required missions take place. San Andreas introduces a more detailed character customization system as well, in which more skills can be built up than IOTL's game, and the dating system is also revamped to make that a bit more interesting as well (with up to 16 girlfriends and unique dating missions for each one). The game introduces a "morality" system, in which it's legitimately possible for the protagonist to become a "noble" thief if the player takes a very large number of pacifistic actions, which include going out of one's way to kill as few people as possible, performing many ambulance/firefighting/police missions, AND dating a saintly girlfriend (3 of the 16 girlfriends in the game qualify). If the protagonist meets all these criteria, he will start to actively avoid killing civilians even if the player tries to force them to, and will even have different dialogue options during missions. Conversely, the player can also go out of his way to make the protagonist an extremely vicious and ruthless criminal who kills people for fun and who expresses much harsher sentiments during missions. Again, this takes a LOT of effort (frequently getting into multi star warning levels, gunning down hundreds of civilians, etc.). 95 percent of the time, the protagonist will be in "default" mode where he's as good or as bad as the player makes him to be, with the normal dialogue and mission actions. For the most part, San Andreas introduces many of the elements that were introduced to the series IOTL, while elements like swimming, which debuted earlier in the series, also return. The graphics are quite a bit improved from the previous two games, though they're obviously not up to OTL Grand Theft Auto IV standards. They're about on par with what would be considered a "good" looking game ITTL, still not one of the best looking games but also not nearly as bad as the graphics in the OTL PS2 games. The game features more than 15 different radio stations, with three talk radio stations and 14 music stations with a total of 131 songs, spanning from the 60s to the early 90s (like IOTL, the game takes place in 1992). There's a station with mostly grunge music this time around, and also a music heavily featuring female artists with Kathleen Hanna voicing the DJ (the DJ is also one of the girls the protagonist can date, and depending on how the protagonist treats her, she'll talk about him on her radio show...let's just say you really want to treat her well). The game features an all-star voice over cast. Like IOTL's game, it's probably the most star studded cast featured in any video game to date. OTL voice actors like James Woods, Samuel L. Jackson, and Chris Penn appear in the game ITTL, while new voice actors original TTL include Christopher Lloyd, Harvey Keitel, Holly Hunter, Lucy Liu, Harry Lennix, Jason Isaacs, and Anna Gunn. The protagonist himself is named Tre (an homage to Boyz n the Hood's protagonist) and is voiced by Aggro, an original TTL music artist who is still one of the most famous hip hop acts in the country at the time of the game's release (Aggro's voice is somewhat like the voice of the actor who voiced CJ in the OTL game, though it's a bit deeper). The "Hot Coffee" controversy from OTL never arises, as Rockstar decides to include a somewhat milder (still raunchy and pushing the tippy top of the M rating, but not quite enough for an AO rating) sex scene in the game. The game itself is DEFINITELY a hard Mature, generating enormous amounts of controversy, which only serves to push its sales higher and higher.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas starts much like OTL's game, with Tre returning to his old neighborhood on Grove Street in Los Santos to mourn someone he cares about. This time, however, it's not his mother (his mother abandoned him when he was less than a year old). Instead, it's Tre's best friend (in another homage to the character Ricky from Boys n the Hood). Tre reunites with his old friends and decides to get his old gang back together, kicking off the game's events. He begins in Los Santos, and like IOTL, is unable to leave the city and its immediate environs (if he tries, he'll generate an unriddable five star wanted level) until enough storyline missions are complete. Players are able to conduct gang wars and a variety of other activities and side missions in Los Santos and its suburbs, which comprise a really large area. Tre eventually comes up against a group of corrupt police officers led by Officer Tenpenny, once again voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. Instead of forcing Tre to work for them like OTL's game, they're forcing one of Tre's friends to work for them instead (they have another inside man in the gang, Jay, who's working for them willingly and serves a role similar to Big Smoke IOTL). Eventually, Tre is forced to leave Los Santos in order to conduct business elsewhere, and after a brief stopover in Palisade and running a few missions out in the woods (where he meets The Truth, another returning character from OTL, who is somewhat different IOTL's game, he's a disgraced federal agent somewhat similar to Mulder from The X-Files, and is trying to find his partner, a female agent somewhat similar to Scully, she's antagonistic to him at first but if Tre performs the right missions she'll eventually reconcile with The Truth and become an ally, if not then Tre will eventually be forced to kill her in a storyline mission toward the end of the game), Tre heads to San Fierro, where he teams up with some of the local gangs to battle the Triads. The Russian Mafia plays a much bigger role in this game, somewhat serving as tertiary main antagonists along with Jay and Tenpenny (they're eventually defeated toward the end of the game in the final Las Venturas mission), and Tre comes across them for the first time in San Fierro. Eventually, after finishing his business in San Fierro, Tre heads out to the desert, where he works with Mike Toreno like OTL (there's no frustrating flight school missions in TTL's game, but they're replaced with a series of equally frustrating stealth missions that must all be completed before heading to Las Venturas). Tre makes it to Las Venturas, where he starts out antagonistic with the Triads but eventually teams up with them to take down the Russian Mafia and their casino business. All the while, Tre continues to be harassed by Tenpenny, who feels legal pressure squeezing in on him. Tre eventually returns to Los Santos, where he helps his friend finally escape Tenpenny's influence and wins back a massive amount of territory for his old Grove Street Gang. Just as OTL's game, there's a citywide riot after Tre helps out his friend, and he uses the chaos of the riot to confront Jay and Tenpenny once and for all. The final mission can differ somehwat depending on Tre's morality: if the player has turned him into a "hero", Tenpenny will take Tre's girlfriend hostage and she must be rescued during the final mission. If the player has turned Tre into a "villain", there's a brief diversion during the mission where Tre kills a whole bunch of cops. If Tre is of the default morality for the final mission, the diversion is that Tre has to fend off another Ballers attack before he can continue pursuing Tenpenny. Each of these three little "bonus" segments have about the same level of difficulty, so there's no real in-game advantage to giving Tre a specific alignment. Either way, the final mission ends similarly to OTL: Tenpenny is killed after a spectacular car chase, and Tre returns to Grove Street to a celebration with his friends.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is one of the most critically acclaimed games of the year. Its graphical and gameplay improvements over the first two games are lauded highly, and it gets a review score about on par with the previous two games. The pacing of the storyline missions is considered to be a bit worse than OTL's games (with the Palisades missions and the Toreno stealth missions being particularly criticized), so San Andreas doesn't get QUITE the golden reception it got IOTL, but it's still considered to be one of the year's best and is massively popular with gamers the world over. It's released on October 26, 2004, the exact same day it was released IOTL, and sales are outstanding on both the Wave and the Xbox, with the Wave version selling a few thousand more copies in its first month of release as The Legend Of Zelda: Hero Eternal, and the Xbox version selling even more than that. The game gets plenty of controversy from the usual suspects, and the "cop killer" segment during the final mission gets news coverage for encouraging violence against police officers (though the game's creators and the fanbase point out that in order to get that segment to show up, Tre has to already be an awful person even by GTA protagonist standards), but as the old adage goes, controversy creates cash and every news segment just gets more people eager to try the game. It's considered to be the most feminist-friendly Grand Theft Auto game to date due to the multiple well developed love interests for Tre (and the voice acting of Kathleen Hanna in the game definitely helps) and excellent female supporting characters like Agent Sarah (The Truth's Scully-like former partner, voiced by Holly Hunter) and Karen Tan (Tre's Triad ally in Las Venturas, voiced by Lucy Liu). San Andreas is the most successful Grand Theft Auto game to date, and Rockstar immediately begins work on a true next-generation sequel to the original game.
@RySenkari In regards to jay, is there an equivalent to the Big Smoke's Order and OOOOOOOOOOOH!!!! memes ITTL?
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