Im going to go ahead and immediately assume a good portion of you are prepping your insults for the comments section, because I dont share an admittedly common opinion that this is the holy grail of sandbox games, so go ahead and put me on blast! I enjoy the characters of the game and the absurdly large map, but in contrast to GTA IV, San Andreas is far too ridiculous in terms of story and gameplay. Somewhere along the games unnecessarily long running time (theres over 100 mainline missions), you have to steal a jetpack for a stoned hippie with government conspiracy theories, and at that sequence I just lost total interest in everything going on, because I felt the series had jumped the shark. I also really didnt care for The Sims being smashed into GTA, forcing me to maintain CJs weight among other nonsensical statistics. Its still a remarkably fun game, though, with a great pivotal story. Samuel L. Jackson playing Officer Tenpenny easily makes for the best villain in the series.