GTA San Andreas 22 år senere: OG Loc-oppdrag, kontrollene og GTA 6-sammenligningen

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas turns 22 this year, and a replay run on the Definitive Edition ahead of GTA 6 found Carl Johnson intact and the motorcycle handling close to unplayable.

The PS2 version is not something anyone can buy anymore, so the replay went through Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy Definitive Edition on Steam, on a keyboard rather than a controller. The OG Loc mission, mentioned by Polygon as the most frustrating in the game, carries both halves of that split at once: a story about a man performing an identity he has not earned, and a bike chase that ends in walls.

The mission starts with CJ, Big Smoke and Sweet collecting Jeffrey from the police station. Jeffrey has been committing small crimes under a new name, OG Loc, chasing the status his Grove Street friends already have, and a few seconds of him on screen is enough to see the performance. In prison, he was sexually assaulted by another inmate, who he claims stole his rhymes. His friends do not lecture him for any of it. Sweet calls him a fool more than once, and Big Smoke needles him about the option he had and skipped. The retrospective reads him as the game’s argument about fetishising the criminal life: the people around him arrived there by different routes, and all of them hold the same line: that anyone with a way out should take it.

“Hey Jeffrey, I thought you was going to, uh, college”

— Big Smoke

Freddy, the inmate, dismisses the assault as a prison thing and leaves on a motorcycle. Jeffrey climbs onto the back of another bike with CJ driving and goes after him, which is how a mission about dignity turns into a chase through alleys.

“I gotta protect my rep!”

— Jeffrey

Freddy takes the narrow routes, and the bike catches the walls there. Every clip throws both riders off, and standing the thing back up costs enough seconds for him to pull away again. U-turns need the speed and the angle worked out in advance, which is a strange requirement in a game that is mostly driving. The retrospective describes mashing buttons through restarts while the target disappeared down another street.

The handling complaint runs wider than one mission. The bike turns like a truck, and CJ changes direction on his own while you are trying to aim at anything. I went back to San Andreas myself this year and got a few comfortable hours out of it rather than a rediscovery, which is the usual result when you return to something instead of finding it.

The controls have been the same since 2004. The code underneath has not, because everything around it keeps moving. A hidden bug had been sitting in the vehicles.ide file since the 2005 PC release and surfaced only when Windows 11 24H2 changed how memory gets handled, at which point the Skimmer seaplane stopped existing in San Andreas and cheat codes could not bring it back. A developer called Adrian traced it to five parameters missing from line 460 and published a manual fix.

The Definitive Edition being the only route in is also why a modder’s build keeps getting held up as the better trilogy. Dryxio’s crazy portal modification runs GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas inside one process on a shared Direct3D device, with live portals you walk through to swap between CJ, Tommy Vercetti and Claude while the other two worlds keep running their own traffic and AI behind the frame. Shoot through a portal and the bullets land in the other game. That is the version I would put in front of someone who has never played any of them, and it is not the one on sale.

Studios are still prototyping San Andreas systems two decades on and still cutting them. A weight mechanic where Henry grows and shrinks depending on how much he eats, with clothing fitting or no longer fitting as a result, would be in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 if Warhorse had kept it. Executive producer Martin Klima said the team found it too bizarre and too much work for a clothing system that was complicated enough already.

What survived from 2004 is the writing and the systems other developers keep sketching out. What did not survive is the part you hold in your hands. GTA 6 arrives on 19 November for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and the open question in the retrospective is whether its realism leaves room for the thing Grove Street had. I want the neighbourhood feeling without the fight against the bike, and realism is not the obvious route to it.

Read also: the GTA 6 review embargo is reportedly lifting on 18 November at 6 am EST, a day before launch, with critics said to be getting copies in early November and Rockstar yet to confirm any of it.