You scored – welcome to the maiden installment of our new video game review column.

Choppers, chores, and antisocial behavior
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games)

I SPEND A good portion of my time playing video games. Basically, when I am not at work or in the kitchen of my apartment, I am in my room interfacing with my PlayStation 2 unit and peeing out the window. That's right – I have no life and, on top of it, have become ... twisted.

There was a period this past year where I actually played Grand Theft Auto: Vice City until the disc became a thinned, useless wafer. It was like the urban legend about the college kid whose parents bought him a Real Doll to avoid disastrous sexual situations, and the kid, God bless him, fucked the thing in half. What can I say? Staring into the void of loneliness, boredom, and certain, eventual, and humiliating death is made easier by stealing cop cars and shooting cops and cutting them up with a chain saw and stealing tanks when the Army comes to get me. What game is better than the game in which you can steal a tank?

I loved Vice City. I took over the airport once and from its roof used a rocket launcher to blow away countless Army vehicles. I also took over a military complex, riddling soldier after soldier with bullets from a huge machine gun. Sometimes I walked leisurely beside the ocean and cut people's heads off with a samurai sword. I am not one of these sick bastards who had sex with hookers and then killed them. OK, maybe I did do that a few times, but everybody does.

The new version, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, is larger in scope than any game ever, as far as I can tell. There are three major cities, a mountain range, miles of backwoods and coastal roads, and an ocean. I never got far enough into the game to open up the Death Valley-type desert area. The attention to detail is insane. Each house is fully rendered, and there are thousands of them. The traffic on the highway behaves like real traffic, and planes flying overhead occasionally crash. It really is amazing.

But the game gets boring after awhile: setting up a replay of the mission you just fucked up takes a really long time, and there are all these missions where you have to manipulate remote-control vehicles to drop leaflets or something stupid like that.

Unfortunately GTA: San Andreas is more about gimmicky crap like changing clothes and eating burgers. I mean, shit, people like me – and there are a lot – are gonna play this game for a pathetic amount of hours, and you would think the creators would know enough to make it pleasant to do so, instead of giving you a bunch of chores. You have to go to the gym all the time and work out to keep your strength up, and they give you girlfriends you have to take out on dates or they start hating you. This would be fine if the dates were not repetitive as well.

In this game, when you get bored with a mission and decide to go do something to some cops or random people, the cops immediately show up in force and blow you away. There are ways to get them off your tail, but it's just not the thrill it was with Vice City. Their heads don't explode, and they get a lot of shots off and into you before dying – it's just not worth it to engage them for no reason.

The best things I've done with the new GTA are:

. Swim across the ocean to the game's version of Las Vegas;

. Grenade an entire fast-food restaurant;

. Strip my guy down to his underwear, give him an Afro, and put Humpty glasses and a fake nose on his face, then set him loose in traffic with a chain saw and a shotgun;

. Punch my girlfriend repeatedly.

At some point you learn to fly airplanes, and there's a part where you can unlock a two-player option that's supposed to be really fun. But I haven't gotten there. I hit a wall and started playing WWII games instead. There were too many annoyingly difficult missions, and as much as I played, I didn't really get any better at them. Also, the OCD tendencies I have don't help when there's a goal like "There are 50 oysters hidden at the bottom of the ocean. Swim around and find each of them."

Ten days later I'm crying, people are protesting the removal of my feeding tube, and I've found 3 fucking stupid oysters. What if when I find all 50 it turns out to mean nothing? No special gun or power comes of it? It would be too much.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who whiz through the tougher missions, but I lose interest after a while if it's the kind of mission you can't do in two or three tries. And sometimes I just want to have a quiet night knifing random people. This behavior is not as easy to get away with in GTA: San Andreas, and so even that loses its thrill after a while. The point seems to be that the creators actually want you to play the game, rather than use it to work out whatever sick fantasies you have about mayhem. Booo-ring.

Don't get me wrong: GTA: San Andreas seems to be the most extensively packed game ever made, there appear to be thousands of missions, and I played it for months before losing interest or even coming close to finishing it, so it was well worth the money. But in some ways, Vice City was better. Maybe I just need to play it more.

Epilogue (a month later)

I take it back. I got through this one really annoying mission that was holding me back, and I have opened up Las Venturas, which is the game version of Las Vegas. Now that Las Venturas is open, the shit rules. The other night I won $2 million playing blackjack, and then I began flying a WWII-era fighter plane all over the place, strafing cars and pedestrians. I love this game again. Forget everything I said.