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Grand Theft Auto San Andreas: whatchutalkinbout?

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On one miserable, rainy evening, with a bit of a cold, and with an hour and a half spare before I had to go and collect Nicholas from Scouts, I wanted to do something substantial; cross something off my “to do” list. I could have put up the hooks in the utility room that have sat there for several months. I could have rearranged the loft to get the Christmas decorations properly put away. I could have hung up the artwork that has sat on top of our bookcase for the past four years, wrapped in bubble wrap in case of accidents. Instead I decided to do something that has been overdue for much longer – I decided to start GTA San Andreas.

San Andreas is often cited as the best of the PS2-era GTAs, and one of the best games of all time. I’ve mentioned before that two things put me off playing it.

  • The setting. The 2000s setting of GTA3, and the 1980s setting of GTAVC, felt much more relatable to me than the 1990s rap and gangster world of GTASA. I don’t like rap music, I don’t get the attraction of baggy trousers, I find the general griminess off-putting.
  • The complications. I remember reviews telling us how amazing it was that you could get your hair cut, that you could go to the gym, that you needed to eat to stay healthy, and so on. At the time that seemed unnecessarily complex – could I not just run around the world shooting at other people, stealing cars, and failing missions several times before getting lucky?

I’ve now played a few hours, and while the first is an issue, the second isn’t. Maybe expectations have moved on (while my prejudices have not), but the use of food to recover health is just a clever cover for health packs, and everything else seems to be entirely optional cosmetics. I have bought green trousers and a white shirt, and that’ll do me. There may be more to the mechanics in future (and the immediate view of stats with L1 implies they may be more important) but for now I’m not having to think about much at all.

Some of the lighting effects were very impressive on the PS2 but actually get in the way of gameplay.

The first point is more of an issue. I have very little affinity with any of the characters, even CJ, and everyone is just generally unpleasant to each other all the time. They live in grimy houses, shout at each other in barely comprehensible sentences, and just seem ready to jump into a fight at any moment. It’s not a life I really want to live.

As such, I’m concentrating on completing missions, rather than exploring the world at large. This will no doubt give me a disadvantage in future missions when I don’t know my way around, but for now it’s nice to streamline my objectives.

Virtua Fighter 2: no not that one

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Released late in the life of the Mega Drive, Virtua Fighter 2 is a very accomplished rework of Sega’s 3D fighting game. It’s been reimagined in 2D, using sprites, but it feels very similar to the fighting in the 3D game – or the Saturn version of it, at least. The controls map well, with a button for each of punch, kick, and block. Some of the combos also seemed to work (Jacky’s dash hammer kick in particular) but I’m not sure if this is universal, due to my general incompetence in pulling these off.

It’s a very pretty and colourful game, and runs really smoothly as well. Had I had this before the Saturn released (and before I got a PlayStation) I imagine I’d have put a lot of time into it. Nowadays, despite it being a really good approximation, I would probably just play VF3b on the Dreamcast instead.

Blue blue skies.

Tomb Raider: completed!

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The final levels, which I understand are set in Atlantis but in fact are set in some creepy pyramid on an island which appears to be constructed from living flesh, were a step up in difficulty from the previous ones. The biggest change came from the enemies, who were more aggressive, more in number, and required more bullets to dispatch. I moved away from using my standard pistols, to a combination of the Uzis and the Magnums – the shotgun seemed a bit useless, with long reload time and poor aiming – in order to prevent enemies getting too close. The tactics I’d used before (of finding a ledge to stand on) no longer worked, with enemies who could throw fireballs and shoot, and others who flew around the room. They were horrible things too, seemingly with no skin, just flesh and muscle.

Of the levels set in Atlantis, the first was relatively normal. At the end of the Egyptian levels Lara was captured and escaped by diving off a cliff, and it turns out that she’s lost all her guns (but for some reasons still had some ammunition). To find her weapons you had to explore some mines, finding three fuses which were needed to lower a suspended building containing pistols. With pistols equipped, the mines led (via lava rivers, concrete mazes, and underwater tunnels) to three human enemies: a cowboy, a skateboarder, and a bouncer, each using some of Lara’s guns. The skateboard fight was very tricky to start with, until I found a passage I could take to come out on a ledge above the level, where I could wait for him to skate past and get shot multiple times.

Armoury reclaimed, I set off for Natla, who was using the scion thingy in the pyramid. I caught up with her and she unleashed a big enemy which I initially thought was the game’s end boss, until I killed it first try (somersaulting from side to side put me out of reach, and I could just shoot it many times). I then had to continue through the pyramid, finding a route back to the scion for me to destroy it. The levels became increasingly icky, with pods growing on the walls which burst to release enemies as I approached them. I’m not entirely sure what the cutscenes showed, but eventually I found Natla in a room at the top of the pyramid, and I fought and killed her using my favourite tactic of running away and finding a ledge to shoot from. Being shot to death wasn’t enough; she woke up and I had to do it all over again.

After a while I was desperate to see anything green.

With her dead again, all that was left was for Lara to run away, through a pyramid which was shuddering and collapsing (but not actually collapsing; this wasn’t a timed run). A few nasty jumps nearly had me throwing the controller in frustration, but I got out in the end – Lara swam out to the boat and took off just as the island exploded.

As a game, it’s aged, but only in that other games have taken the same sort of formula and made it more fluid to play. The way that the platforming is almost puzzle-like at times remains very clever, and the game’s pacing is really well thought out. I don’t think I’ll be going back to find all the secret areas, nor find more efficient routes through the levels – but that’s mainly because I’ve got Tomb Raider II waiting for me.

It felt like I used a lot more than 32 medipacks.

Mr Driller 2: completed!

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Is it possible to complete a Mr Driller game? Well, there is a story, and a set of difficulty levels with a narrative connecting them, and once I completed the highest difficulty level I saw an ending scene and credits and a screen that said “The End” on it. So yes, it is possible. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to play it again, though; it probably means that I’ll stick to normal difficulty rather than hard.

I have a Mr Driller 2 cartridge for the GBA (which, I believe, I bought for a pittance in the US once), and I have played it a lot on the Game Boy Micro at various times over the last couple of decades. I’ve never completed the Egypt stage, though, but recently I noticed the game’s release on the Switch Online service and thought I’d give it a go.

Maybe the Game Boy Micro d-pad wasn’t up to the task, since on the fourth attempt on the Switch – using my 8bitdo controller – I got to the bottom of the well. It being a US translation, everything’s measured in feet instead of metres, and the target depth is 10,000ft. I understand in the original Japanese this was 2,000m, meaning that Mr Driller in the US is 52% taller than his Japanese counterpart. There are breaks every 500m, transitioning to new types of level – the number of colours, prevalence of X blocks, appearance of star blocks, formation of X blocks around the air capsules – and quite often I would finish a level with very limited air, hoping the next would be either a two-colour stage (where chain reactions clear half the level, allowing you to grab multiple air cannisters at once) or one with helpful X block obstacles. I was crushed once, and ran out of air twice, but having been awarded an extra life on the way down (for, I guess, score related reasons) I was able to complete the game with 10% air left.

I don’t think I physically breathed for the last 500m.

The resolution betrays this as a handheld game.

I may have completed the main game, but there was one more surprise. On starting again, there’s a new extra hard stage – the North (Pole). Once again it’s 10,000m, but the levels are much harder. The first two have virtually no air available, meaning the third level is a welcome break with capsules here there and everywhere. The pattern repeats a few times, with levels starved of oxygen, meaning that if you don’t start them with a full tank you’re going to die. There are other levels where the air is buried under many patterns of X blocks, necessitating an excavation to release the air. It’s not easy; my best is 9610ft which was agonisingly close, but the last level is one of those with virtually no air and I started it on my last life with 25% in reserve.

Tomb Raider: Greece and Egypt

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Having decried the lack of verticality in the Peruvian levels, St Francis’s Folly more than made amends. The main part of the level has you scaling up and down a central room, opening doors with levels and solving puzzles in rooms names after Greek mythology1.

The permanence of enemy deaths is very noticeable here, where the bats you shoot at the top of the room can sometimes be found lying on the ground at the bottom; when using original graphics there was more than one occasion when I thought there was a medikit in the corner and then was disappointed to find a bat carcass. Theoretically, there doesn’t need to be much backtracking, either, since you could pull the switches to open the doors as you descended the central column, and then entered the rooms when returning to the top. In fact, however, the necessary exploration to find the switches meant that I descended and ascended at least five times before unlocking the exit.

The game has continued to throw new ideas and puzzles at me, of which I only vaguely remember some from the previous time I played. I remembered the Midas statue, and Lara’s unfortunate death when jumping on it; I didn’t remember that it actually had a use in terms of turning lead bars into gold. I remembered climbing the sphinx; I didn’t remember the need to climb the front and the back to put two different ankhs in place. I certainly didn’t remember the nightmarish mummies jumping at me from dark corners of a pyramid.

I have continued to flick between modern and original graphics, so that I can actually see what I’m doing at times.

I’ve been progressing through rather slowly, trying to get the high ground to attack enemies (since, other than bats, they all seem incapable of jumping off the floor). The remaster’s addition of saving anywhere does rather diminish the peril that Lara might face – it’s all too tempting to save before flicking each switch – so I’ve tried to be conservative in my use of saving, only doing so after I’ve got past a section that has taken me a few attempts to clear, or saving when I have to get off the train, for example. I also discovered, accidentally, that the new photo mode can be used to explore with no danger, to an extent – you could theoretically go into photo mode before entering a room, fly the drone inside and see what awaits you, before entering properly. Again, I am resisting that temptation, even if it does mean I’m dying more often than I’d like.

It is interesting to compare this to modern, similar games – most recently, for me, Rise of the Tomb Raider. Beyond the obvious difference in controls and mechanics, there are many similarities – but the scale of what is expected is different. Rise is set over a much larger, contiguous world, but any puzzles or actions occur in smaller, defined areas. The separate levels of Tomb Raider (I, 1996) are at the same time smaller, but also more sparse and more involved. You frequently find yourself having to explore a previous section for the door that opened when you flicked a switch. Sometimes there’s a short cutscene to show the door opening, but you can’t always identify where that was.

Anyway, I have now slaughtered many more endangered animals, including many black panthers who seemed to be built from titanium given the number of bullets they could absorb, and have collected the scion pieces from all three locations. Chasing Pierre through multiple levels, with him running away each time, added a sense of purpose to progression. Some of the levels have been really cleverly designed, particularly the Cistern (altering water level is always fun) and the Coliseum (again, populist Greece is partially Roman), and others have felt like a never ending maze of corridors. Unfortunately, Natla’s turned up, stolen the artifacts, and Lara’s only just escaped by diving into a chasm, landing in the river below. We’re off to an island somewhere to stop her destroying the world.

  1. Well, almost. The four rooms are named after Atlas, Neptune, Damocles, and Thor. Neptune is a Roman god, and it would have been better to use Poseidon instead; I’m guessing they went for brand recognition. Thor is a Norse god, and while you could argue that Zeus is a close comparator (lightning, ruling the skies), the main reason they chose Thor is because they wanted the puzzle room to contain a giant hammer. ↩︎