mee Ronn

Dude, talk about jumping to conclusions. After Naughty Dog finished up their Crash trilogy they created Crash Team Racing, a kart racing game that totally rocked. Any fan of Super Mario Kart can agree with the merits of CTR and I would go as far to say that it is what Mario Kart 64 should have been. ND has finished up with their planned trilogy and it seems like they want to have some fun with the characters and world they've enjoyed making. On top of that, there was lots of in-vehicle action in Jak 2 and 3, so its even less of a tangent than CTR was. And on top of that the game isn't even just the typical kart game due to it's inclusion of a psuedo story line and it's mission/quest game play mechanics (sounds similar to Smuggler's Run). I'm not saying that the game is going to be the best thing ever, but don't turn on ND because of the stale nature of the rest of the kart crowd (I would be the first to say the genre as a whole is utter crap -- when Woody Woodpecker jumps in on the action you've got a problem). Naugty Dog proved that they don't simply pop out crap with their popular characters when they made CTR, I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt. They give the rights to Universal and let them churn out the licensed crap.

I won a grenade from some pirannas. Where exactly does a fish keep something like a grenade? I can also only assume that they were acting as some sort of fish FedEx as they never used it themselves. I don't expect realism when I play a game like FFX, but I do think that grenade-toting killer fish is just a tad ridiculous.

The only reason I'm worried about the size of San Andreas is that it, in theory, it could get in the way of the enjoyment. Say, and this is totally an example to explain myself and not at all factual, that you are forced to run into a gym every 30 mins to keep "buff". That is going to hamper gameplay. I have faith in Rockstar that that won't be the case with San Andreas, but it certainly has happened to games in the past. Like I mentioned before, I would also not be disappointed by a huge sized GTA game -- as long as it isn't plagued by feature creep.

They are called R3 missions because you push down the Right analog stick, which is called "R3" (since R1 and R2 are already shoulder buttons), to start them up. That should explain it... unless I'm too tired and missing some sarcasm and that question wasn't real

Ditto. I also fear for feature creep. I don't really mind having the game be frikken huge, I'll just keep playing it. I played GTA:VC with my friends for weeks, hours and hours of gaming after I had already beat the main story. Getting 100% in San Andreas will certainly be a larger chunk of my game time though As long as the 100+ (or so I read) hours of game play are fulfilling and continue to stay fresh I'll love it. I also worry a little about bugs. VC had a lot of bugs, no "show stoppers" but some annoying ones non-the-less. When you deal with a game like GTA:VC, that has so much game engine and content, it gets incredibly hard to be able to keep the bug count low. San Andreas is SO much bigger in both regards that I wonder how buggy it will be. I would love to hear the line count of code for the game! Also, according to Insider Gamer Online the game went gold on 14th. I haven't seen an official word from RockStar to back up the claim but with less than a week to go I certainly hope it's gold now.

I rolled all the contents of the Earth into a big ball. Every last human, house, car, fish, building, piece of land. EVERYTHING. Even happiness. The King was proud of me though.

XBox uses DirectX so porting to the PC is not so bad. PS2 is more difficult, but development on the PS2 is more difficult. I still predict a simultaneous release. For sure XBox/PC, but I think that the PS2 version will ship same time too.