Suddenly there were choppers above me, two tanks rolling down the Los Santos boulevards, and a crew of infantrymen trying to take invincible C.J.
Grand theft auto san andreas stories code#
Buff yourself up enough so you can survive anything, and you can feel free to raise your Wanted level to maximum - also conveniently done with a cheat code - and let the cops come after you.ĭid I say the cops? Sorry: When your Wanted level is that high, it's the army that comes after you. Each GTA game has a whole list of cheat codes that you can input when the game is running, from the bizarre (all pedestrians carry rocket launchers) to the helpful (invincibility, infinite ammunition). How do you cause mayhem when the cops are so adept at taking you down? But in my experience with GTA III two weeks prior, you really couldn't get your criminal notoriety even halfway up the scale without it pretty much being a given that you were going to get busted, fast. I'd heard about the joys of just driving around, raising your Wanted level and causing havoc. My brother's friend, who was visiting San Francisco last week, told me that in his experience, GTA was all about turning on the cheat codes and running wild. I pointed out that most people don't even bother trying. He told me that the only person he knows who "even came close" to beating Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was a friend of his who was bedridden for three weeks and did nothing but play San Andreas.Įven then, Clive emphasized: He only came close to finishing the game. Last week, over lunch with columnist Clive Thompson, I told him about "Confessions" when he pointed out that the sheer length of videogames, nowadays, is keeping critics from becoming conversant in all but a few of them. I do seem to remember there being a good deal of hand-wringing about it prior to San Andreas' release - would it be a controversial choice? As it turns out, however risky it was for Rockstar Games to switch up the setting, it didn't matter at all to players.Īnd perhaps all of this would have stirred up some media controversy - were it not for the Hot Coffee sex minigame scandal, which dominated discussion of San Andreas. While it's true that no eyes were batted over C.J.'s ethnicity, I don't think it was a given. It wasn't a topic of conversation, it just was."
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Ellis called San Andreas "the first time that a AAA series chose a black protagonist and nobody batted an eye. Last year, we got into an interesting back-and-forth with blogger Jason Ellis, who penned a list of notable black main characters in videogames. Tommy Vercetti from Vice City is really kind of a jerk, he said, but C.J., avenging his mother's death, is driven by something more than criminal ambition.Īlso, I don't know if you noticed this, but he's black. When I mentioned this to 1up's Jeremy Parish as we were recording an upcoming Retronauts podcast about the series, he pointed out that one reason why San Andreas' story is stickier is that the main character, C.J., is more sympathetic. The opening cinematics, especially a high-tension early scene in which several of the main characters argued in a cemetery, were absolutely riveting. But San Andreas kicked things into high gear. *Vice City *looked much more like a movie, if only an alright one. GTA III was firmly in the embryonic stage. As I played through each successive installment of Grand Theft Auto, I'd been paying close attention to the development of the cinematic scenes.