It took a while, but the day has finally arrived: San Andreas has found its way to the Xbox and PC. As a result no one, except for the Gamecube fans, can come up with an excuse for not playing this marvellous game. The only question remaining is: is it as good, even better, or perhaps worse than the PS2 version?

The first thing you’ll notice while playing San Andreas for the first time are obviously the visuals. Don’t expect any mind blowing differences. The textures look a bit sharper, the resolution is turned up a notch and the draw distance has increased making for some more cars on screen at once. This however, brings up a small problem called slowdown. You might think with Xbox’ superior hardware you won’t have any frame drops but sadly you’re wrong. However these little partypoopers never really mess up the whole party, they hardly make the punch taste a little worse once in a while. The only thing that really caught my attentive eye was the odd loading text that appeared every time the Xbox had to load. Whereas the PS2 never showed signs of loading, the developers apparently had a hard time porting this to the Xbox making for an occasional “loading” such as when you visit the barbershop and you just selected a new haircut. Luckily for us this little text doesn’t disturb the great gameplay.

Or did you think that by porting the game a lot of memorable gameplay moments got lost in space? Heck no, Rockstar offers Xbox owners an equally impressive piece of gaming heaven complete with all the statistics that let you change CJ from a fit lad to a fat pig. The missions are also identical and although some think they are repetitive, I still love them. The approach changes with every mission so they never get boring.

The only advantage of the PS2 version is the controls. This is perhaps due to the fact that I’m a bit more used to a PS2 controller than I am to that big Xbox handler but it has also something to do with the awkward positioning of some buttons. For example looking left and right during drive by’s is achieved by pressing the white and black button and shooting by pressing the B button, which makes for some “twister like” positioning of your fingers. For the most part however the controls are good enough making this little minus easy to forget.


PS: click here for an extensive review of the PS2 version