You can fit San Andreas into Grand Theft Auto 5 several times over, yet the former still feels bigger. That’s the most surprising takeaway from my time revisiting Rockstar’s ’90s crime epic, which has sold a staggering 21 million copies in its lifetime. Released on PC in 2005, a year after the PlayStation 2 version, it’s a massive step up from the previous game, Vice City, in pretty much every respect. 

In the early-to-mid 2000s you couldn’t move for GTA clones: True Crime, The Getaway, Scarface: The World is Yours, Saints Row. But while these games were largely, or entirely, set in a single city, Rockstar used its unmatched financial might (and, some might say, hubris) to take things to the next level, presenting an entire state to cause mayhem in. California analogue San Andreas contains acres of country, a desert, and three cities: Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas. 

The first 15 hours of San Andreas take place in Los Santos, Rockstar’s satirical recreation of 1990s Los Angeles. This is not LA as it really was, but an exaggerated version of the city viewed through the lens of movies such as Boyz N The Hood and Menace II Society, and through the music of Snoop Dogg and NWA. It’s all lowriders, orange sunsets, police helicopters scanning the streets with searchlights, and gangbangers swigging forties on the corner. 

Protagonist Carl 'CJ' Johnson, an ex-gangster, returns home to Los Santos from Liberty City to bury his mother, but soon finds himself tangled up in the life of petty gang violence he tried to leave behind. 

To prevent you from immediately just leaving Los Santos and heading out to explore the rest of the state, corrupt cop Frank Tenpenny (played brilliantly by Samuel L Jackson) warns CJ that if he tries to skip town, the full weight of the law will come crashing down on him. 

Of course, you’re still going to try. The first time I played San Andreas I made a beeline straight for San Fierro, the game’s version of San Francisco. But the moment you leave the boundaries of Los Santos you get a maximum wanted level, surviving which is pretty much impossible. Today, open worlds rarely keep you contained in one part of the map—and certainly not for as long as San Andreas does. But for a game this size I think it’s a good idea.

Country life

When you finally finish the first act, you almost feel like you’ve been in Los Santos for the length of an entire GTA game. Which makes the moment when CJ is dumped in the countryside by Tenpenny even more exciting. Gone are the traffic-clogged streets and the endless sea of buildings. You’re surrounded by trees, mountains, and rivers. Even the cars and pedestrians change to reflect your new surroundings, with the lowriders and gangsters replaced by hillbillies and trucks. 

Rockstar pulls the same trick here, containing you in the countryside as you complete a series of missions for crazed bank robber Catalina and paranoid hippy The Truth. What I love about this section of the game is how, occasionally, you catch tantalising glimpses of San Fierro in the distance—most notably the Gant Bridge (Rockstar’s take on the Golden Gate Bridge) and the Big Pointy Building, a parody of the Transamerica Pyramid. The game seems impossibly big at times.

Short order

Playing San Andreas today, there’s a sense Rockstar bit off more than it could chew. The game’s draw distance is incredibly short, with a huge amount of pop-in, which was presumably the only way they could get the thing running on the hardware of the time. 

There’s also a noticeable drop in fidelity once you leave Los Santos, with San Fierro, and especially Las Venturas, feeling a little sparse and lifeless compared to the smaller cities from the previous 3D-era games. 

But it feels massive, which I think is a combination of that draw distance obscuring the view ahead, and also the sheer amount of relatively empty space on the map. The countryside and desert in San Andreas seem genuinely barren and remote, while the rural areas in Grand Theft Auto 5 never feel totally isolated from the busier parts of the map. When you’re riding through the desert west of Las Venturas, or the rugged rural expanse of Red County, you feel totally disconnected from civilisation, which adds to its sense of scale. 

San Andreas is a highly moddable game, and it’s possible to massively expand the draw distance in the PC version. But this removes that illusion of size, especially when you can see all three cities from one high vantage point. If you want to explore the map with a little more visual fidelity, a mod that transplants the entirety of San Andreas into GTA IV is available, although the clash of modern lighting and old school geometry is a little jarring to look at. 

When CJ eventually reaches San Fierro, the look, feel, and tone of the game changes dramatically. The warm haze of Los Santos is replaced by a cold, blue-tinged colour palette, rain, and fog, and CJ gets involved with the Triads, street racing, and buying property. This variety is one of San Andreas’ strong points, although the story does lose some steam here. Rockstar is generally very good at telling long, compelling stories that take place across vast maps, but in San Andreas there are several points where the narrative sags and interest wanes.

But by the time CJ hits the Las Venturas strip, things gear up to the point where San Andreas feels more like a James Bond game. From that first bicycle ride through downtown Los Santos to jumping out of planes and robbing casinos, the classic GTA rags-to-riches story is at its most heightened and absurd here. When GTA 4 opted for a more subdued, grounded story, fans often cried out for a return to the over-the-top action of San Andreas—a request fulfilled by its excellent Ballad of Gay Tony DLC, which restored some of that frivolity.

The story comes full circle as CJ returns to Los Santos to settle the score with his treacherous former allies, now packing a massive arsenal of weapons and huge amounts of cash. It’s fun to see CJ grow from the broke, skinny kid in a tank-top to the tattooed, muscular, jewellery-laden crime boss he ultimately becomes.

Of course, his appearance is completely up to you. I know someone who finished San Andreas and never changed his clothes, hair, or body at all, apart from when a mission required it. While I must have spent at least ten hours of my total playtime getting my CJ looking as cool as possible.

Mission control

San Andreas is difficult to play nowadays. The world is still fun to explore, but the missions themselves haven’t aged well at all. The shooting is clunky, the driving feels twitchy and weightless, and it’s punishingly difficult—especially in the final act. And the less said about those tedious RC missions given by San Fierro nerd Zero (voiced by David ‘Tobias Fünke’ Cross) the better. Honestly, if you feel the need to return to the state of San Andreas, just download a completed save file and enjoy exploring the world without any hassle.

I don’t think even Rockstar could make anything with this level of scope today. With the fidelity expected of a modern game, an open world with three distinct cities would be a tall order. Its most recent, Red Dead Redemption 2, is its biggest yet, but benefits from being set in a time when much of the United States was countryside. This makes San Andreas something of a one off. A snapshot of Rockstar at its most brash, bold, and ambitious, showing the pretenders that they were still the king of the open-world crime epic. 

Vice City is arguably a better, tighter game, but this was a fine final chapter for GTA’s all-conquering PlayStation era. It was also one of the first worlds that was so big it generated its own mythology, inside and outside of the game. Whether it was bigfoot, UFOs, ghost cars, or chainsaw killers, an entire community emerged dedicated to documenting and discovering the weird stuff Rockstar hid in its world. I myself saw a UFO in San Andreas. It was hovering over a bridge in the countryside. Then it zipped off when I approached. It could’ve been a glitch, but I want to believe.

The discovery of a new GTA: San Andreas speedrun trick that skips you forward to the game's final mission has slashed the world record from nearly four hours to just 26 minutes. 

The new record holder is Powdinet, and you can see their run in the video above. The process, which only works in the Windows Store version of the game, lets the player warp to a later mission after performing a series of complex steps, and is based on a similar technique used in GTA: Vice City speedruns. The actual moment of the skip happens around the 16 minute mark in the video.

Powdinet detailed the full technique in this Reddit post: it has more than 40 steps, the first being to start the game and find a police bike. In the final step, starting an in-vehicle vigilante mission during a specific part of the mission Ryder makes the game jump forward, with the landing point linked to the amount of time since the run started. "With the ability to execute any line of script code, we can warp to any mission we want," Powdinet explains.

They've been searching for this type of glitch for three years on and off in San Andreas and found a version of the warp "months ago", but couldn't get it to stick. Now, they've finally managed to make it work, and they expect other speedrunners to shave even more time off the record by using the glitch.

Powdinet completed the game in 25m 52s—the previous record, set by Ielreset, was 3h 52m 07s, according to speedrun.com.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Swinging through New York as a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man is just about the most satisfying thing you can do in a videogame. When it's done well, like in Spider-Man 2 or the recent PS4 exclusive, it's a hypnotic acrobatic display that's graceful but still lets you go at buttock-clenching speeds. While the latest Spidey outing won't be gracing PCs, modder J16D has rather skilfully incorporated some of its best bits into a GTA: San Andreas mod. 

J16D has been working on their Spider-Man mod since 2015, but the latest video shows that the new game has become a source of inspiration, with J16D mimicking some of the animations from Insomniac's game, along with costumes and even the UI. 

It looks fantastic. San Andreas isn't quite as vertical as Liberty City, which is based on Spider-Man's stomping grounds of New York, but Spidey still very much looks like he belongs. It's impressive how much of a resemblance there is to Insomniac's version, with movement being almost as fluid, given that we're talking about a pretty old game. 

Spider-Man 2, arguably the best Spider-Man game adaptation prior to the latest, came out in the same year as San Andreas, though you couldn't tell from the video. While I still have plenty of fond memories zipping through Manhattan in the early 2000s, J16D's mod looks like quite a step up when it comes to the swinging animations. 

There's no word on a release date for the mod, but expect more videos soon. J16D's To Do list includes interacting with objects while in the air, more swing animations, evade animations, combat, wall running and a HUD. 

Cheers, Kotaku. 

Here's the thing: I don't gamble in real life. Glasgow, where I live, is full of bookmakers and casinos, and while I don't take issue with anyone who does throw money at roulette or horses or sport—so long as it's lawful—it's just something that's never interested me. I've worked in pubs where Racing UK was as much a regular as old Jimmy who drank a pint of Guinness and a half measure of whisky, and I've had a season ticket at my favourite football/soccer team for almost 20 years; yet parting with my cash against someone else's odds has never struck my fancy. In videogames, though, it's a different story. 

Perhaps it's the notion of spending someone else's money—albeit a videogame avatar controlled by me—that I find so alluring, or the fact that I know there's no real risk in bankrupting my virtual earnings besides the chore of regenerating my money pot in whichever way the game in question allows. 

My first in-game casino visit occurred in 1992's Mercenary 3: The Dion Crisis for the Atari ST. A game well ahead of its time, Novagen's Software's open-world exploration adventure offered multiple endings as the eponymous mercenary set about bringing down the game's corrupt antagonist PC BIL. One such way of toppling the unscrupulous politician's regime involved bankrupting his debt-laden empire—a feat which could be achieved by winning large sums of cash at Uncle's Casino and Bosher's Bar. 

A well-positioned magnet could swing the odds in your favour, however hitting the jackpot by virtue of one-armed bandits and Wheel of Fortune machines was an absolute joy—particularly when it meant usurping BIL. 

Years later, I fell in love with Fallout 2's mining town Redding, as it offered a wealth of gambling opportunities in arcade machines, roulette, and the rather unsavoury Molerat Mambo. Bioshock's infamous Fort Frolic zone housed Pharaoh's Fortune, wherein slot machines cost an asynchronous ten dollars a pop; and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas' Las Venturas mirrored real life Vegas as a desert city brimming with casinos such as The Camel's Toe and Caligula's Palace. 

Away from these games' central narratives, I thrived in bankrolling frivolous expeditions to in-game casinos and bars where I'd spend hours on end frittering away my in-game budget or delighting in the occasions where I won big. But why? Why did I care whether or not I won or lost or broke even—especially when I didn't give a toss about gambling in real life. Why do I find betting fake money in virtual casinos so darn enjoyable?

Psychology professor Graham Scott of the University of the West of Scotland suggests anonymity and a lack of empathy could be what drives my weird misplaced passion. 

"When you consider theft," says Scott, "there's a higher number of people who commit fraud and identity theft online than offline. One of the reasons behind this pertains to the fact the online world offers a degree of isolation. In turn, the consequences of your actions are less obvious and don't seem as important. 

"In videogames you're far less likely to care about how your actions directly affect others—which can in this case relate to gambling with money that isn't real. Whereas in the real world gambling has consequences—it can often land you in debt, which in turn can affect the individual and his or her family and friends—doing so within a virtual environment is the equivalent of having a digitised 'get out of jail free' card, I suppose.

"I often refer to Grand Theft Auto which is a good example of a game that lets you do things you could do in real life, but, because most of us are well-natured law-abiding people, choose not to. Stealing cars, fighting your neighbours, and, as you say, gambling are all possible in Grand Theft Auto but are often acts which help players to complete missions. In essence, you control a character with a personality who is following a pre-set script. 

"It's worth noting that while most adults can distinguish between reality and fantasy that repeated exposure to these behaviours could desensitise and normalise them. That's always worth watching out for."

Now, I'm fairly certain I won't allow my in-game habits to spill into my real life, however it's nevertheless nice to know there's some scientific grounding in my gamified behaviour. Which is of course totally justifies my in-game ludomania. 

If you need me, I'll be at Mercenary 3's Boshers Bar which, incidentally, isn't nearly as glamorous as it may sound:

People can be funny about cheats. Some take a hard line against them. They're only interested in the game as it was meant to be played, and they look down on those who would pervert that original vision. Others figure that, if they've bought a game, they should be able to do what they want with it. I broadly agree, except, for the most part, the thing that I want to do with a game is not cheat at it.

Sure, I've typed "FUND" into SimCity 2000—I'm only human. But the 'cheat' playthrough is always separate from the original playthrough. It's a break; an alternate-reality of unhindered fun between the main business of doing what I'm told.

The GTA series—specifically Grand Theft Autos III through San Andreas—occupies a similar space in my head. There was a main, unsullied playthrough that, at any moment, could be taken off-save with a couple of cheat codes. The difference is that GTA's best cheats have never been utilitarian or aspirational. You can get the best cars and the most money, but to do so is to miss the exceptional sandbox Rockstar has hidden away. GTA's best cheats are all about carnage.

The game's most enjoyable cheat modes are focused around the game's pedestrians, and, more specifically, around making the pedestrians do things they aren't supposed to do. In GTA 3, this means weapons and anger:

• WEAPONSFORALL: gave all pedestrians a random weapon.
• NOBODYLIKESME: made all pedestrians attack you.
• ITSALLGOINGMAAAD: made all pedestrians attack everything.

The brilliant thing is these AI cheats can stack. Enter all three, and GTA stops being a game about random acts of violence and starts being a game about constant acts of violence. Pedestrians stop being brainless victims and form a crazed and unpredictable militia destined to tear itself apart. In a way, it turns GTA into a zombie survival game, but with the key difference that the zombies have guns. And sometimes molotov cocktails or a rocket launcher.

More than that, they attack each other too. Driving through Liberty City in this state is strangely liberating, because everyone is acting like the protagonist of their own version of the game. It makes the game's actual protagonist an anonymous psychopath in a city full of psychopaths—at least for the five minutes before another explosion sent me to hospital. That feeling of blending in is a rare thing for an open-world game to achieve, and that's because our tools are ones that we'd never give to random NPCs in normal, unmodified play.

For Vice City, Rockstar stepped things up a notch with the excellent "MIAMITRAFFIC"—a cheat that made the city's drivers ultra-aggressive. It fits perfectly with the parody. Vice City is a world where everybody is selfish and wealth is disposable. Of course it's a place where people should be violently territorial on the road. And once again, it makes for a fun impromptu survival mode, especially when combined with the returning armed pedestrian cheats.

The size of San Andreas made it perfect for long-range survival sprints. It's probably the most flexible set of cheats every built into a Grand Theft Auto game. There are at least five cheats dedicated just to making civilians angry:

• BAGOWPG: pedestrians attack you.
• FOOOXFT: everyone is armed.
• BGLUAWML: pedestrians attack you and everyone is armed.
• AJLOJYQY: pedestrians attack each other.
• STATEOFEMERGENCY: riot mode.

Again, the cheats stack. You'll also notice that some essentially perform the same function. I could never be bothered to work out the technical differences between each specific cheat. Instead, I'd turn them all on, and attempt to drive to a specific location on the map.

Alternatively: jetpack. That's right, San Andreas had a jetpack. It was a good game.

Such carnage would be wonderful in a modern GTA. Unfortunately, neither GTA 4 nor 5 have the same range of options. GTA4's cheats are basic and utilitarian, which sort of makes sense given the move from cartoon to social parody. Essentially, each GTA's cheats do—to an extent—reflect the type of game it is. But why? Surely it makes more sense for the cheats to reflect the type of game it isn't. For 4, it would have been the perfect place to put a pedestrian riot mode; to turn that new engine into a chaotic battle amid well-realised streets of inescapable violence.

At least we've got mods.

Ten years after its release, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has been updated on Steam. Ordinarily this would be good news, suggesting that changes had been made to make accommodations for new operating systems or hardware, but this new version of San Andreas takes far more away from the game than it adds. While it now boasts native support for the 360 controller, 17 songs have been removed from Rockstar's open world crime-'em-up, along with a few of the bigger resolution options (1080p included). Saves from the old version will no longer work, so if you have San Andreas installed and you haven't accepted the update yet, don't.

Why would a game be updated so long after release, and in a way that seems to intentionally make it worse? It's likely something to do with the recently released 'HD' version for the Xbox 360, which turned out to be a port of the mobile game. Xbox 360 owners were shafted there too, with the original Xbox version of San Andreas removed from Xbox Live to make room for the not exactly improved new one. Seemingly due to expired song licenses, Rockstar had to remove 17 tracks from the mobile version—and they've now updated the Steam game to bring it in line.

Rockstar Nexus noted the update, which doesn't appear to be bring any positives other than native support for Xinput controllers. The missing songs are detailed in this NeoGAF post.

This isn't the first time Rockstar has removed songs from the Steam version of one of their games. A couple of years ago, they did the same thing with GTA: Vice City, temporarily taking the game off Steam in order to take out several tracks. Licensing issues were the cause there too, but Rockstar went about it in a slightly different way. People who bought the game before its temporary removal were allowed to keep the offending songs, and that doesn't appear to be the case here.

As this is a PC game we're talking about, an unofficial patch has already been released that appears to fix some of the nonsense introduced by the official one. The missing songs, meanwhile, can be added back in with San Andreas' custom music station.