Greed is comprehensively catered for in the non-stop gathering of money, mostly stolen. Envy also plays a major feature, when you see someone driving a car nicer than your own, you simply steal it. Lust is equally present in CJ’s life, with ladies of the night succumbing to your sordid wishes as and when you demand. And as with any self-respecting gangster, pride is an important character-defining trait: if someone cusses you out-of-hand, you pummel the crap out of them with a spade.
Gluttony is there too, even monitored by a fatty-o-meter so you can decide quite how gluttonous scoffing eight plates of fried chicken really was. Sloth is there in part, mostly at the points where CJ is stranded deep in the countryside mid-mission, and you’ll press pause, let out a little yawn and go and make a cup of tea. That brings us to the seventh and final deadly sin: not making tea, but being angry. Anger is definitely a central component of the San Andreas mindset: the more frustrating missions will make you angry and, in turn, you will express that anger by doing something nasty.
Like shooting an old lady in the face with a shotgun, or setting fire to a farmer with a flame-thrower. Either way, we’d hope that all owners of this game will learn to limit such behaviour to the confines of the console, or at least to restrict the real life enactment of such crimes to people who deserve them, like the US President . But despite those hopes, we’ve placed a bet with Ladbrokes that the first San Andreas based excuse for criminal activity will be made public within the next six weeks.
SPOnG isn’t going to take the moral high-ground on this one, we are as appreciative of inexcusable debauchery and social wrongness as anyone else in this game’s target market, but it’s important that people do appreciate the reasons behind that 18 certificate. First and foremost, there’s a fuck load of swearing and a shit load of violence. If this game was a movie, children would absolutely not be allowed to watch it, let alone interact with it. As we queued up to collect our copy last Friday, we couldn’t help but be a little frightened by the number of oblivious parents happily purchasing a copy on behalf of little 10 year old Johnny – who was stood in the shop doorway smoking a J and toying with a butterfly knife.
But although San Andreas may be of the most culturally malevolent video games ever conceived, and yet still doesn’t entirely satisfy our most far flung and capacious appetite for extremely gangsta activity, it is one of the most complete and well-produced video-games of all time. If you don’t own, or don’t intend to buy, a copy of SA, we can only assume that you do genuinely take issue with one of the aforementioned points. In which case, we praise you, on the grounds of originality, for objecting to the considered positive consensus at which the rest of the industry is arriving.
Phat ass
Busted!
SPOnG isn’t going to take the moral high-ground on this one, we are as appreciative of inexcusable debauchery and social wrongness as anyone else in this game’s target market, but it’s important that people do appreciate the reasons behind that 18 certificate. First and foremost, there’s a fuck load of swearing and a shit load of violence. If this game was a movie, children would absolutely not be allowed to watch it, let alone interact with it. As we queued up to collect our copy last Friday, we couldn’t help but be a little frightened by the number of oblivious parents happily purchasing a copy on behalf of little 10 year old Johnny – who was stood in the shop doorway smoking a J and toying with a butterfly knife.
But although San Andreas may be of the most culturally malevolent video games ever conceived, and yet still doesn’t entirely satisfy our most far flung and capacious appetite for extremely gangsta activity, it is one of the most complete and well-produced video-games of all time. If you don’t own, or don’t intend to buy, a copy of SA, we can only assume that you do genuinely take issue with one of the aforementioned points. In which case, we praise you, on the grounds of originality, for objecting to the considered positive consensus at which the rest of the industry is arriving.