Saints Row is the actual sequel to San Andreas.

GTA 4 is an unrelated Cousin-Entertaining simulator.

Xeno: Thought the same thing, so I submitted this to the hopper:

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=101310&what=VOTING

Saint's Row 1 was kind of lame, I thought. It was too obsessed with trying to be "the other GTA" and it felt too much like a GTA-style game trying to go out of it's way to one-up aspects of GTA.
SR2 let loose more and didn't seem to give a shit about trying to be GTA-version B, but rather just take the formula and run with it, making the world big and ridiculous and allowing people to just dick around. I think it was a better game for it and Volition wisely didn't really try to make much of a story or create a Saint's Row "universe"...they just sort of realized that as developers they needed to back off and not constantly nudge the player back on THEIR course. I'm not sure what made Rockstar think GTA fans wanted more direction and mothering from the game, but that's ultimately what GTA4 boiled down to.

My only problem with San Andreas is that have a stat that shows me how many hours I have played. They really need to show that number in days or weeks.

When I see this clip my first thought is that I am going to jump my motorcycle off that mountain.

You and baleen need to get together and make a movie.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=101298 (baleen's comment)

It sounds like we would work great together.

San Andreas was the good bits of every action movie set in California, strung together in a game that also let you fuck around to your heart's desire.

San Andreas was alright. It was a game that let you work out in the gym and get all muscled up, plus you could also eat fast food, get fat, and swim. You could dual weild uzis, you could do a drive by with other people in the car helping out, and the showdowns were a lot more brutal.

There were some huge stumbling blocks. Namely, they threw in a couple DDR type of missions. Look, I'm playing a G-funk era gangster, I don't want to fucking dance, I want to pop a cap in a whitey ass. Also there were some really difficult story missions if you weren't already fans of other genres, like racing games and flight simulators. You had to actually go to a flight school, and you had to get better or you just didn't advance the plot.

The last mission I gave up on altogether. It takes about an hour to complete, and I tried about 30 times and the stupid chase the firetruck scene kept killing me every time. Here's some spoilers: the whole town's rioting ala Rodney King, and the firetruck you're chasing is BULLETPROOF and can do 90 degree turns on a dime at full speed. Yeah, it's like that. Then you get this crazy ass chase sequence where the other dude drives and you have to shoot everything that comes your way. If the car blows up it's over, and that happens a lot since people on the street are throwing molotovs and the cop cars you blow up tend to blow up really freaking close to you. It's madness. You have to go through a ton of insane bullshit even before that.

So basically if you want to be any good at San Andreas you'll want to play Rockstar's Midnight Club games and get good at those, and then check out some flight sim games. And then, just hope you can beat the game without having a stroke.

For dicking around and just causing mayhem, though, it's right up there. You can steal fighter planes and have dog fights of a sort with the police helicopters. Also tanks are easier to steal, and you can have a giant airplane hanger as your "garage" in one place. It's kind of sweet. Plus you can pilot big ass 747's, use a jetpack, and even parachute. It's a lot of fun in that respect. The storyline is godawful, though.

Speaking personally, I hold SA in high regard just because of it's willingness to mix a huge game world (with that distinctive GTA3-era feel) with a totally ludicrous storyline and lots of over the top gameplay elements. The thing about SA was that it was very immersive without having to resort to a ridiculous degree of realism. I mean, for me personally I like game worlds where if you don't want to bother with the actual missions and stuff and would prefer to just sort of make the world ITSELF your game for a little while, than the game works just as well. SA perfected that aspect of those games I think.
I have fond memories of doing this joke thing with my LiveJournal account back when SA was new where I bought this device that let you transfer PS2 save files to your PC and, in doing so, it let you transfer the picture data from SA onto your computer. So, for a long time I did this fake "travelogue" all across San Andreas taking pictures and writing about my journey in this fakey travel channel style way just for me and my friends and that's one of those weird little things that SA's world let you do. You could go on a road trip and just sort of explore and see the sights and feel like you were in a real little place. I popped in the game a few days ago and I was literally taken back by all the little details, like people randomly fighting each other after bumping into each other and cars on the road that drive like total shit and make you yell at the screen instead everyone acting like ROBOT DRIVER OBEYING HIS COMMANDS and the bizarre random behavior of NPCs. It was so much more fun and alive than so many modern games in the same vein and certainly it felt more dynamic and fun than GTA4. It also felt like exploration and adventure because the world was based on real locations, but more of a funny, customized parody rather than trying to emulate the actual location in detail, which is what GTA4 did with New York, making it somewhat not as dynamic in my opinion.

Here's the only advantage SA has from Vice City: You can swim in SA. That's about it, nothing will ever beat going on a killing spree while blasting "Broken Wings" on the radio.

Yeah, I dug the shit out of some Vice City, but my main problem with it and somewhat with 3 was the glitches. In Vice you could easily crash a motorcycle and up stuck behind some inescapable wall. My friend and I were getting drunk and playing the "let's see how many people we could shoot from a motorcycle on the way down" - down from a ramp, a high place like a skyscraper, or whatever. I found this one good drag with a ramp that would take you over this little store, and I'd lean forward shooting people on the way down and crash into the place across the street. One such time, my dude went through the ground, and started freefalling. The entire world above became a 2-dimensional orange sky, while everything else was this odd brown background. The 2d sky world started shrinking and I thought the game was sure to crash at some point, but instead I fell back into the world again from up top, taking some damage but ultimately surviving. The bike was stuck in the wall.

San Andreas feels a lot like 4 for me because of that whole "we want you to only play in this small area and you have to unlock other places with missions or you get in big trouble" junk. You'd steal a plane, think "oh yeah, I'm off, baby" and then you're getting shot down. With 4 it's even worse. Just go exploring and find a bridge and it's like "holy shit I'm at 6 freaking stars, what did I do to deserve this?"

That makes the whole game seem silly as hell to me. How are the citizens going to go to work or lead regular lives if they can't use bridges? Why would the government throw up massive roadblocks for an unknown guy who just got off a boat? Every game has done it to some extent, but with Vice and 3 there were ways you could work around it and you didn't get in trouble. I think they just need to get rid of that whole notion and let people just truly sandbox it.

Vice City was good- no, Vice City was GREAT- but I always felt it was a bit weak compared to 3 and SA. The main problem, as I saw it, was the city design: Vice City was way too flat and uniform. In 3, there was always somewhere new to go, some cliff to fly off of or an overpass ramp to send you hurtling through the sky. Getting lost in Chinatown's maze of backalleys, weaving in and out of traffic in that Manhattan area, or just hanging out in the hills out near the airport; Vice City didn't really have any of that. It felt smaller, the roads were too straight, and you only had two major sections to unlock, instead of three. Sure, it had a lot of gameplay improvements, and the soundtrack was undeniably awesome, but every couple hours I spent playing VC, I'd start thinking about how much I missed 3. That never happened with SA. SA gave me more of everything; more world, more guns, more variety in locale and player customization. The random military smackdowns for straying out of the arbitrary lock-box was annoying, but only until you opened up the world a bit. Once you unlocked Las Venturas, it was all good!

Of course, then along came 4, and, well, we all know what happened.

If I had to rank 'em, I'd say it goes SA, 3, Vice City, those various minisodes they released for VC and 3, 4, 2, and 1. None of the games were bad, and they're all well worth the price, but SA is king.

(p.s. the glitches were the best part of VC. Bikeman!)

I loved the hell out of two. If only the gangs were as simple as "the rednecks","the Hari-krisnas", and "the Zaibatsu". But realism? cmon, invincibility and invisibility power ups? A bunch of Evlis personators walking in a line just waiting to be torched? An area of town called Dominatrix(suspect last spotted in Dominatrix. :) )? Although,the mission where you steal a bus and load it with random civilians to be turned into hotdogs was right on.

I miss the hellout of SA too though. Thank god for Saints Row 2(and 3)

http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/?id=3

Here's a link to download this wonderfull game free for the computer people out there. Cortousy of Rockstar games.

*camera following behind the character is third-person, not first-person