VIDEO GAMES: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Now, here's a category I don't address very often: video games. I just assume that most of you fall into two categories: those who don't care, and those who do care, but are so far advanced beyond my meager gaming experience that my little anecdotes will seem as quaint and hopelessly outdated as an Amish village. And yet, here we are. And it's a long one, too.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I wasn't going to buy it until the cheaper "Greatest Hits" version came out at some point down the road, but a friend bought it for me as a belated Christmas present (thanks, Lew!), so that settled that. And wow, is it an impressive game. It's gorgeously rendered, it's got a wide variety of challenging and interesting missions, it's got a fantastic voice cast (Samuel L. Jackson, baby!), and it's insanely gigantic. I've been playing for a couple weeks, and so far I haven't explored much beyond the city limits of Los Santos, which represents about one twelfth of the game map. In fact, I've hardly even scratched the surface of Los Santos. There is so much to do and explore.

Which is where I have a problem. When does so much become too much? Unfortunately, in San Andreas, almost immediately.

I'm not against a richer gaming experience. I'm not looking only to steal cars and shoot things, although that's the main selling point, let's face it. But at some point, the designers needed to step back and say, maybe enough's enough. Take all the things you need to do to maintain your character. You need to take him to restaurants and feed him to increase his health, and you need to select between various meal combos, with varying prices and fat content. If you get too fat, you have to go to the gym, where you can work off the fat, add muscles and stamina, and train to learn new fight moves. You need to show your gang affiliation by going to a clothing store and buying the proper color clothes; you can choose attire from shoes, pants, shirts, jackets, and head scarves all the way down to watches, heart-printed briefs (!), and Groucho Marx-style joke glasses (???). Then you have to go to the tattoo parlor, and pick the ink you want for your lower right arm, upper right arm, lower left arm, upper left arm, left chest, right chest, stomach, etc. Then you need to go to the barber shop, and choose from a variety of hairstyles and facial hair combinations. I've got the cornrows right now -- that cost five hundred bucks! But that helps increase your sex appeal (yes, there's a separate stat for sex appeal), as does your physique, your tattoos, even the last car your drove. You also have to be concerned with your respect level. You earn respect by completing missions, or by killing enemy gang members, or by doing I don't know what else, because the game is so vague on it, and then, the more respect you have, the more gang members you can recruit to go with you on missions. Plus, there are statistics you have to work to improve for swimming underwater, driving each different type of vehicle (car, motorcycle, bicycle, plane, boat, helicopter, and who knows what else), and firing each different type of weapon.

Whew! That's a boatload of things to worry about. And that's just the things you can do to customize your character. That doesn't even scratch the surface of the things you have to do with him in the game. And, like I said, the game is so goddam vague about what you need to do to accomplish your tasks, that it gets mightily frustrating. Take dating, for instance. At a certain point, you begin dating a girl from your neighborhood. You have to stop by her house at different times of the day to try to find her when she's actually home. Then you pick her up, take her to a fast food joint, diner, restaurant, or bar that she might enjoy, or indulge her in the other things she likes doing (like drive-bys!). Then, when you work up enough credit in the dating meter (yes, there's a separate stat for that, too), you get to have sex with her. No, I'm not kidding. (You don't get to see it; the camera remains outside the house. But you can hear the participants. My favorite line is when the girlfriend says, "Damn, I hope I don't get pregnant again!" She must've missed that Smallville episode.)

Those are things I was able to deduce from gameplay. But here's some things I was only able to learn by going online and looking up a walkthrough guide (specifically because I suspected I was missing something in the dating portion of the game). If you max out the dating meter, you are rewarded with a pimp suit. Sweet. I imagined there would have to be some kind of reward for that, but the game sure doesn't tell you. Also, you can go around the city and find flowers that you can pick for her for when you show up on your date. What? How the hell was I supposed to know something like that? And when you drop her off, you can get out of the car, walk her to the door, and attempt to kiss her. Really? Dang, I've been staying in the car and letting her walk her own sorry ass to the door. I'm a bad date. But I didn't know! How can you conceivably know something like that, if you don't read the cheat guide first? (You can't. Which is why they make the cheat guides.)

I don't want to cheat. I like finishing a game on my own merits, and then going back through and using all the hints and cheat codes and finding all the secrets that I didn't the first time through. But this game will take me literally weeks to finish for the first time. Will I really want to wait that long to find out what I'm missing? If I do, will I really want to jump right back in the game and play again? For example, I discovered glimpsing through this online guide that there are various spots at high altitudes (skyscrapers, mountain peaks) where you can find a parachute, which you can actually use. That sounds great! But would I ever have found out about it, if I hadn't accidentally run across it online?

It comes down to, which way of playing robs me of the most fun? Getting the satisfaction of doing it on my own, but missing out on all the cool hidden stuff? Or using the walkthrough to find the hidden stuff, but having the game spoiled for me?

There are other problems I have with the game. The targeting system drives me absolutely insane. You can have a guy standing five feet away from you, shooting you point blank, but when you try to target him and return fire, often you can't get a lock, and wind up targeting an innocent bystander across the street, or you don't target anything, and wind up firing straight into the air. Grr!! Also, what's up with my damn garage door? It's supposed to open when you approach it, but every damn time I go up to it, I just stand there, and nothing happens, and I have to run around a little bit and try to trigger the door. Every time!

What really drives me insane is that there's such a great game buried under all of this. The missions are so cool, and use so many different skills. In one, you have to sneak through a house at night and steal some items without waking up the owner (after you complete that mission, you can then go burglarize almost any house, and then fence the items for cash). In one mission, you have to race through a burning building armed with a fire extinguisher (that's how you meet your girlfriend). In another, you have to invade a mansion in the hills to steal a notebook, and perform stealth kills on the armed guards from behind. Another mission, you have to raid an army base and use a forklift to steal weapons. Then in another, you have to take out all the gang members in a neighborhood, which claims that area for you, and opens up a whole new part of the game, territory acquisition (and defense).

There's so much worthwhile in the basic gameplay that all this extraneous stuff really detracts from the experience for me. I don't want to have to worry about whether my clothes make me more attractive or not. But I have to worry about that and more, if I want my character to be developed enough to make it through future segments of the game.

It's still very early in the game for me, so maybe I'll get more into it all as I go along. But right now, despite being ten times bigger, San Andreas has yet to match the fun and excitement of the previous game in the series, Vice City.