Man, this game sucked me in. San Andreas is the game that most people talk about in the same way you talk about a favorite lay. It is like your eyes just sparkle when you talk about this game. Why? Because San Andreas, pre-GTA IV (as I have said before) was easily the best and most fun Grand Theft Auto game around. You really felt like CJ by the end of the game, and depending on how you played, your CJ even looked differently than the CJs your friends were playing as. My CJ was ripped, had a giant afro, and wore the stupidest clothes I could find. But that was half the fun, feeling like it was YOUR game. But man, San Andreas had some killer twists, eh?
I know that by the time you killed Smoke he was a bad dude who made his real motives quite clear, but regardless of that, Smoke was your boy. You don’t need to know thug life to understand that being forced into a situation where you have to kill one of your friends is not an easy place to be, and even though you knew he was just coding and not an actual person, there was something oddly tragic about the moment you have that shootout with him in the final stage.
I don’t even think it was so much killing him as it was the conversation you two have right before he dies that got me. It felt honest, like you were prying in through a window, looking at a personal interaction you had no right to look in on. It felt intimate, and it was one of the few moments in a GTA game where you felt like the violence that you were up to your neck in had some ramifications.
