IN THE AGE of the dollar download and the general marginalization of plastic 'n' vinyl singles, you gotta wonder how little kids are supposed to find out about, and get their tiny chicken/trigger fingers on, music apart from Now That's What I Call Music installments and current only-on-TV comps. Movie soundtracks like the Garden State album still do the trick, and so it follows that video game counterparts inspire even more passion (and art too, in the form of Cory Arcangel's Super Mario Bros.-jacked dreamscapes and the Advantage's old-school video game-music and outsider-art appreciation course) – riding on the many, many lost hours clocked playing the games and listening to the accompanying music.

Yet leave it to the Grand Theft Auto series to steal its own thunder and release an eight-CD set the very week I finally get around to reviewing the original two-CD, one-DVD Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – Official Soundtrack. As with the similarly hefty Vice City box set, the new San Andreas box set comes somewhat fully loaded with heavy-rotation oldies and generally badass musak. The producers and DJs break it down by genre or radio station, circa the late '80s and early '90s (hence the inclusion of so much New Jack Swing), covering everything from Rick James's "Cold Blooded" and Slick Rick's "Children's Story" to Augustus Pablo's "King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown" to En Vogue's "My Lovin' (Never Gonna Get It)" to Merle Haggard's "Always Wanting You" to the J.B.'s "Grunt" to Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" to KISS's "Strutter."

Message boards are already lighting up with grousing about the selections on the new set-on-steroids: most players will probably be recycling the country disc as a coaster once they get over their disappointment about the noninclusion of numbers by Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, and assorted Death Row and Ruthless artists, which were featured in the game but were supposedly too pricey for the soundtrack (inevitable when the promotional materials hype how "indispensable" this collection is for GTA obsessives). But I'll echo 2 Pac in one of the better demonstrations of GTA's overall outlaw attitude: "I don't give a fuck." In spite of the staler stoppers, like Faith No More's "Midlife Crisis," the original San Andreas soundtrack pretty much embodies the phrase guilty pleasure for me. When it clicks, it sounds like the dream score for your kustomized urban nightmare, mixing the taboo thrill of committing crimes with, say, those of slick rides like Bell Biv Devoe's "Poison" and Ronnie Hudson's "West Coast Poplock" and all-purpose fuck-all spew such as the aforementioned 2 Pac track (you must get some joy from Pac's Bay Area-based dis list and brief tour of local gangstas' paradises like [!] Mill Valley) and Rage Against the Machine's appropriately miffed "Killing in the Name." Pass that Big Gulp of haterade.

And though I'm not fan of the game, I find it hard to hate the playas, drawn by sequencing that couples Eddie Money's speedy, spreadable cheese epic – "Two Tickets to Paradise," the brain freeze treat equal to A Flock of Seagulls' signature "I Ran (So Far Away)" on the Vice City soundtrack – with Cypress Hill's droopy-lidded, menacing bounce ("How I Could Just Kill a Man") and the Maytals' relief-giving pitch into cool water ("Pressure Drop"). Official Soundtrack may not be the definitive comp of its era, but at least it doesn't have to justify the glaring, embarrassing omissions of the box set, and crooked cops, drive-bys, and general associated game mayhem aside, any album that introduces a new generation of listeners to Eric B. & Rakim's "I Know You Got Soul" can't be all bad. (Kimberly Chun)