Boyz n the Hood
Graphically, GTA:SA is far more detailed than it’s predecessors and does the job very nicely. Rockstar have taken the time and trouble to add little graphical touches such as heat shimmers near air vents or on hot roads and we’ve got the usual real time shadowing et al, all in place as they should be. Be warned though, unless you want to play with some horrible pop ups or a nasty bit of fog, you’ll need a meaty system to get the best out of the game. There’s a third party patch available already which increases the draw distance, and I thoroughly recommend those with X850s or an SLI setup to go and get to make the most of their GPU grunt.
A minor niggle on the graphics is that in some places there are some atrocious clipping issues, so much so that if you’re clever you can safely shelter behind thin walls, position yourself so that your gun model is in the wall and fire through it. Given that this a big game with a lot happening on the screen the character models are a tad blocky with the polygon count being dropped in favour of smoothness but the textures are nicely detailed and the characters are well animated. Overall, I’d have to say that this is the best looking GTA game yet, but not as big an improvement as you’d have expected over the now three year old GTA:VC.
