#gta san andreas for pc

[hellwa1ker]

It’s likely the GTA Trilogy mobile release and GTA 5 E&E for PC have been canceled. This is just my speculation, but it’s been well over a year for both and Rockstar hasn’t said anything.

Maybe we’ll hear about the GTA Trilogy at the Take-Two call, but I highly doubt it.

[jan-berk]

[lotusyiyen]

[blazelb]

I forgot the motorcycle.

[forgamers]

[lydiaalin]

I'd actually asked my older brother brother to get me Mirror's Edge back in 2008 which he pirated but then he wouldn't let me play because apparently the death grunt when you fell off a building was too scary/ jarring, so I'd just watched playthroughs of it on youtube on repeat and just have a littel folder full of promo pictures I'd saved

[rageagainstthesink]

W-A-S-D

Dear reader,

It's been a while since I last posted anything, hasn't it? My bad.

I have been juggling between Don't Starve Together (now that we have the Scrappy Scavengers expansion), Stardew Valley (now that the 1.6 update is finally out), Game Dev Tycoon, - all financed by my boyfriend - and greedy good ol’ Time Princess.

I'm starting to understand why my mom doesn't want my baby brother to play video games at a young age considering my… uh, outstanding dedication to them.

Like I said before in my now 404-ed Blogger page, this isn't even close to being my first time gaming around, so I’m well acquainted with the myths that can surround this infamous activity.

I'm no Sam Brenner (Adam Sandler’s character in the 2015 movie Pixels), but according to a few online dictionaries I found, I am a gamer, a.k.a. a person who enjoys video games. As a hobby, not as a profession.

If you never cared to Google it like me, you might ask yourself, what’s a video game? Where do they even come from?

Did aliens bring them to Earth, maybe?

Well, not quite.

I hope not to disappoint the world's most beloved gamer, Henry Cavill, with my poor research skills...

But yeah, taking Wikipedia as my source, video games can be defined as a form of entertainment that involves interacting with an input device, such as your keyboard if you're a PC gamer, to generate visual feedback on a display device, e.g. a monitor. It's similar to how Newton's Third Law of Motion states that for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.

During their earlier history, video games were mostly related to research projects at universities and large corporations as academic and promotional devices, rather than to the general public's entertainment.

One of the first examples of a modern video game that we know of was patented in January 1947 by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann, and it's a thing called a "cathode-ray tube amusement device”.

It basically consisted of an analog device that lets you move a dot on the screen to simulate a missile being parabolically fired at paper drawings fixed to the screen, inspired by radar display technology. And, yes, the first video game ever was essentially an Angry Birds prototype.

Over the following years, other game patents were created with different means of display and whatever, but none of them were able to achieve the commercial success of Atari's inaugural arcade game, Pong, in 1972.

The release of this timeless video game played a pivotal role in establishing the industry as we know it today, not to mention that one of the first consoles ever was also released a couple months before in that same year; I'm talking about Magnavox' Odyssey home console.

Speaking of the Xbox’s great great great grandmother, it's well-known that video games tend to be classified by platform because of the differences there can be when comparing one piece of hardware to the other, so we have:

Arcade games

You can play these in the coin-operated machines of the same name, as seen in the beginning of Adam Sandler's Pixels movie. The classic single-game cabinet only allows you to play the one game it was designed for, yet this concept has been popular in the US since the 1970s, until it began dying down by the late 1990s when people started to bring the arcade experience home with consoles’ growing popularity and ever-developing technology.

Console games

These can be enjoyed in specialized electronic devices that consist of a main unit - the “console” - that has the hardware that you're supposed to connect with your display device of choice and a game controller like this one: 🎮.

Let's take a moment to reminisce here because, back in my days, you needed to buy a game's cartridge to be able to play it, which meant offline and immediate access at the cost of lower storage capacity and physical bulkiness. But, even before the world wide web, Control Video Corporation (CVC) was an early pioneer in downloadable games and cloud saving for consoles... before it went bankrupt during the 1983 video game crash and was merged with AOL.

CVC introduced the GameLine, a dial-up game distribution system designed for the Atari 2600 console and introduced in 1986. Despite its innovative concept, it was ahead of its time, lacked licensing from most video game companies, and ultimately failed, like most good things in life. Had they waited for the modern Internet and the Cloud to be created, they could have seen the same success as Xbox Live and PlayStation Network years later!

Due to coding and/or hardware incompatibilities, you can only play games in a console if they are designed for it, meaning you can't directly transfer a PlayStation 2 game into a PlayStation 4 despite them being brand models developed by the same company. Sony not sorry.

PC games

You can always download them to your desktop computer or laptop from their official website, if there's any, or from a trusty storefront like Steam… as long as the software requirements match. Since computers are not gaming-exclusive devices, there may and most likely will be differences when running the same game on another computer!

Mobile games

You can download these from a trustworthy website as an APK file to be installed on your cellphone or tablet, or just go ahead and use a digital distribution service like Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store, like the system might recommend. Though, much like PC games, these tend to have specifications that your phone must meet for them to run properly.

Smartphones and tablets are probably the only case of being both the input and the display device simultaneously without having traditional buttons as an input option, unlike the Nintendo Switch or the PlayStation Vita, and that must be exactly why so many people dislike mobile gaming.

Admittedly, some games can become more challenging with the whole “inaccurate touchscreen controls” part, notably in PUBG Mobile and Don't Starve Pocket Edition. Except the latter has shittier controls, per its Google Play reviews.

I haven’t played arcade games in a LONG time because my favorite arcade got super expensive in its last few years before closing down, leaving me with nothing but fond long-term memories of grabbing digital eggs using a basket, playing Coldplay's Yellow in a plastic guitar EVERY time, table-hockey-ing, etc.

However, I have been consistently trying out PC and mobile games across my lifespan. Especially the free-to-play ones, since my family didn't allow me to spend a single penny on video games when I was younger.

And, oh boy, isn't the list of games I've tried criminally long.

Blaming my unending passion for video games on my predisposition is only fair. I mean, I remember my mom was able to defeat Mario Bros.’ Bowser in a single day when I was a child, and hearing similar stories about her older sister's gaming prowess.

Come to think of it, we must've had a NES console back when all that happened, considering my faint memories of being thrilled to play Duck Hunt. That couldn't have happened irl otherwise.

Also, my cousins had a living room computer BRIMMING with, uh, ✨ free copies ✨ of various popular games that we often played together when we were in elementary school.

I did have a couple of consoles of my own, including some sort of green, translucent knock-off GameBoy I was gifted at a school event and what I think was a PlayStation, but quickly lost both.

My cousins were gifted a PlayStation 2 of their own later on, when it was a thing, until it got damaged because they were using pirate cartridges. Or so we were told back in the day; it could’ve been a dirty reading laser in reality, but, you know, my cousins lived in a very small town, so it was a miracle that they had that console in the first place.

I didn't get to bond with console games much because I found the controllers too difficult to use with my poor hand coordination, and couldn't practice much, so I was stuck with mobile Tetris and Bounce Tales, both of which I found in my grandpa's phones.

It wasn't until some time after my middle cousin passed me down her old Facebook account that I found what would be my main source of entertainment for the next year or so: social network games.

They were THE SHIT when I was middle school aged and Facebook kept spreading across all corners of Spanish-speaking countries.

Ever heard of FarmVille or Dragon City? These ancient Facebook games, and other titles, are a type of online game that is played through social media. They tend to have multiplayer gameplay mechanics and use real-time analytics to sort of motivate you to spend real money on in-game resources and/or consistently log in for rewards.

All social network games used to be browser games at first, meaning you could play them exclusively on Facebook desktop for instance, but as mobile gaming took off, many of the games were re-released for mobile as well.

But Facebook is not the only one who ventured into browser games. This category includes anything you can play using a web browser like Ecosia. They're mostly free-to-play and can be single-player or multiplayer, and are also grouped by their software platform, for example, Flash games.

A couple of famous examples include Club Penguin and the McDonald's Video Game, but personally I was more into Moshi Monsters and whatever “girly” games you could find on the in-browser hubs JuegosJuegos.com, friv.com and DressUpGames.com, in particular.

Even TV channels like Disney and Discovery Kids had TONS of Flash games available on their official websites when I was a kid, and so I spent a lot of my free time visiting those.

Then, tragedy struck: Adobe Flash stopped being supported between December 2020 and January 2021, mainly due to security concerns, dealing a debilitating blow to browser gaming. This sort of forced me to dive a lot more into what the Google Play Store and Steam had to offer.

While I’m pretty flexible in terms of the platforms I’ve tried, I remain selective when it comes to the genres. Although, that doesn't exactly mean I dislike any, just that I may prefer to watch the gameplay videos on YouTube most of the time.

For instance, I'm a big fan of the first 5 Five Nights at Freddy's (survival horror) installments and everything that came out after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (action-adventure), yet I have no intent of playing any of them myself. I'll stick with simulation and strategy games, which I excel at and relax with.

About video game genres, they're not really related to the setting or story of the game as literary genres are, but by the way the player interacts with the game.

I’m not diving into specifics here because games often incorporate key features from all genres all the time or blend them together into hybrids, making it useless to try to differentiate them. Plus, there are countless sub-genres to consider. Even the Dark Souls saga is considered to have its own genre!

Now, it's no secret that females and minority groups tend to get harassed in shooter and MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) games’ communities, so that can obviously make me feel hesitant about joining those spaces.

Highly competitive environments often amplify the toxicity of the yappiest players, especially in multiplayer games, and that can lead to the misconception that, for instance, all League of Legends players are disgusting, when in reality it might only be a small percentage of ill-mannered people that's deterring potential new players. Then again, it is League of Legends that we're talking about here…

Circling back to Dark Souls, much like what SORRYLAG narrates in this video, I'd add that there's this weird pressure in the video game world about who can beat the games with the most challenging gameplays with no health penalties, or who can speedrun the fastest, or who discovers the most convoluted easter egg, that I just can't relate to as someone who's obsessed with Stardew Valley’s more peaceful essence.

It's hypocritical to bash or segregate others for enjoying the exact same thing you're doing just because they have less experience or different preferences.

I'm always up for a challenge, sure, but stressing over completing a difficult and super precise video game mission isn't my idea of fun.

And I refuse to think I'm less of a gamer just because I like mobile gaming, don't want to beat Sekiro and won't even pick up Duty's Call. I'm not doing this as a profession for a reason, you know? I am barely able to face one of Don't Starve Together’s bosses solo with the help of frog ponds.

Setting aside the standard fandom issues around them, I wouldn't say video games are a problem on their own. It's not Donkey Kong's fault that we've created so many stereotypes around a lifeless entertainment format.

Do they cause aggression and violence? No. A kid will not grow up to be violent because of a video game, unless their parents, teachers or community fail to teach them that it's not okay to act like that. Take it from someone who grew up playing Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (not knowing it wasn't about driving around and stealing hookers' money), and thus had all the potential in the world to become a samurai gangster, apparently.

Are they addictive? Look, those sneaky strategies to make us play more frequently like real-time statistics don't help, but truth is anything that makes you produce dopamine and other happy hormones will become addictive if you struggle with discipline and self control in general. Even food. We're just too scared of taking accountability as humans.

Do they cause loneliness or social isolation? It can be the case for some, but that doesn't mean all gamers are lonely. I mean, my boyfriend and I found each other, didn't we? Not to mention you'll fail at most multiplayer games with no teamwork or proper communication, and there are tons of online communities out there that welcome anonymous users, so how do you even get lonely if it's not by perspective?

Are they for kids, teens or men only? We're in 2024, come on. There's plenty of options for everybody.

Such a shame that some people will never get to experience the joys of playing video games because they're too stubborn to believe anything other than what one news article of dubious origin said.

We can't really force a person who dislikes video games for any reason to love them, of course, but it's always nice to see them understand that respecting others' likes and choices will not cause the end of the world, isn't it?

Personally, I tend to choose playing whatever video game I'm trying to (slowly) complete at the moment over asking people to hang out whenever I'm free, because going out is expensive anyway. This isn't affecting my quality of life any more than pollution does because I still do my chores and work despite the suffocating heat of a tropical summer, so there's that.

In conclusion, as long as video games don't get in the way of your self-care, daily habits, finances and overall health, you should feel free to play them as much as you can, and want.

Unlike the mistaken belief that video games will ruin your brain or contribute to obesity per se, you can get benefits from most of them, actually. As of today, we have the VR goggles + omnidirectional treadmill + exploring Skyrim by foot combo for fitness purposes, puzzle games for cognitive skills development, strategy games for planning and problem-solving, action games for reaction time improvement, and so on.

But, once again, gaming shouldn't negatively impact your life. I couldn't believe my eyes when I read about that one Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament where a female participant had to step out due to the odor. Even sports athletes shower before competing, so my hobby is not their excuse for being dirty!

What do you think about video games, though? Yay, or nay?

Until next time!

- N

[adriheavymetal]

almost there 💯😮😂👌💻🎮💯

[devileaterjaek]

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC)

[saltywatermelonart]

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[kingl2022]

[lotusyiyen]

[nobody2324]