Grand Theft Auto San Andreas / Tropes 0 to F

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• 555: Played straight at one point, when Carl is asked to plant some evidence and then give 555-WE-TIP a call.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Guns N' Roses vocalist Axl Rose is the DJ of the classic rock station K-DST. He mocks the modern/grunge rock station Radio X, despite their rotation including "Welcome to the Jungle".
  • Chris Penn, known for playing Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs, plays Eddie Pulaski.
• Adaptation Distillation: The third-generation games are prequels of the original game and each other, and San Andreas combines the best elements of all the games that came before (large sandbox, gang respect, plethora of vehicles, contrast of gritty working-class environments/glossy upper class estates, not to mention a protagonist that actually knows how to swim) to make a thoroughly satisfying game.
• Adaptational Badass: In the Japanese version, the Ballas are a larger and more powerful organization, as they're involved with legitimate businesses and random civilians CJ's occasionally tasked with killing are now affiliated with the gang.
• An Aesop:
  • Street gang brotherhood sentimentalism doesn't count for much. People you think are your friends will happily sell you out or abandon you if you get in the way of something they want. You'll only find out who your real friends are when you're down.
  • No one is above the law; this applies to those who swore to protect it. Tenpenny, being the corrupt cop that he is, abuse his power as a police officer to commit crimes in broad daylight and the lengths he will go to cover his tracks to escape accountability.
• Affably Evil:
  • Mike Toreno is a fairly nice and friendly guy, who also turns out to be a government agent shoulder-deep in eldritch information and one of the scariest people you'll ever meet.
    Toreno: I wanted to see what you were made of.
    C.J.: (Angrily) What it look like I'm made of? Pudding?
    Toreno: (Calmly) No. Anger, and hate. That's why I like you.
  • CJ himself, who will have no problem shooting or running over unarmed civilians, assassinating people who never did a bad thing to him and generally steal, maim and kill. However, most of it is because he is given no other alternative in order to keep his family — by blood or otherwise — from being harmed, and is genuinely nice and polite (outside of whatever the player makes him do) to the people around him. Compare this to Tommy Vercetti, who alienates and belittles his inner circle, and Claude, who repays the women who save his life by killing the brother of one and then (possibly) shooting and killing the other for talking too much.
  • And also Woozie, the leader of the San Fierro Triad, who despite being a crime boss is depicted as very sympathetic and likable. So much so one expects Woozie to perform a Face–Heel Turn on C.J. like Big Smoke, but he never does.
• Affectionate Nickname: The Triad clan led by Wu Zi Mu refer to their leader as their "lucky mole" due to his uncanny ability to participate in gunfights, car races, and video games despite being blind. All his friends refer to him as "Woozie."
• The Ahnold: Jack Howitzer in the radio stations. He started out making the Destroyer films, a parody of the Rambo series, around the time of Vice City, and by San Andreas he had branched out into family comedies with Special Needs Cop, a parody of Kindergarten Cop. Unfortunately, his career was derailed when he accidentally shot the host of a radio show while promoting Special Needs Cop; the page quote comes from that incident.
• A.I. Breaker: When taking over gang territory, the defending gangsters will stick to the sidewalks as much as possible, walking entirely in single file at their default jogging speed. If they're on the wrong side of the sidewalk, they'll often double back ridiculous distances just to find a crosswalk. The only time they ever jaywalk is when they're close enough to shoot you. For a player with an assault rifle or sniper rifle, simply having a significant lead on the gangsters and going for headshots can turn the situation into a turkey shoot, which is good because the gangsters are ridiculously well armed.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • In the finale, C.J. feels nothing but remorse over having to kill Big Smoke.
    Big Smoke: When I'm gone, everyone's gonna remember my name... BIG SMOKE!
    C.J.: Oh, damn, man... What a waste...
  • Also with Ryder, although this is only brief after Cesar tells C.J. that Ryder tried to bang Kendl.
    C.J.: Fucking Ryder man! That was my homie... and I killed him.
    Cesar: Fucking midget deserved it, eh. Little asshole tried to bang your sister.
  • Officer Hernandez, although he wasn’t that much of a villain to begin with, also counts especially given how The Introduction shows he was one of the few good and well meaning cops in the GTA series.
• The Alleged Car:
  • Beater cars such as the Tampa were introduced to the series here, with the sole intention of being customized by the player (also a new addition to the series). These cars specifically were designed to allow for the maximum number of modifications and thus became the best cars in the game.
  • There's also beater Glendales and Sadlers found in San Andreas in the woods that can't be fixed due to them actually being separate, pre-damaged models internally named GLENSHIT and SADLSHIT respectively.
  • The Mothership, The Truth's psychedelic van.
    The Truth: Man, we got 3 tons of grass on board, the engine block is held together with a macramé hammock, and it's running on 15-year-old cooking oil.
• All for Nothing: The first Los Santos arc can be summed up as this; most if not all of the missions for Grove Street is about rebuilding their power-base including taking out dealers and acquiring guns for the gang. After CJ's exile, Sweet's incarceration, and Ryder & Big Smoke's betrayal, all the territory they gained is lost and many Grove Street members are dead or in hiding.
• All There in the Manual: Many of the characters, particularly the Grove Street members, are Only Known by Their Nickname in the game itself. The manual and other sources reveal their real names.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • The Ballas attempt to do this in "Drive-Thru", but are stopped by the Grove Street OGs (save for Smoke). Later, the Ballas actually manage to assault Grove Street during "House Party", with Ryder leaving to gather up Smoke and some homies as backup, but Sweet, C.J. and the remaining homies manage to drive the Ballas back. Both missions foreshadow the fact that Smoke and Ryder are not as loyal as they seem to be.
  • "The Green Sabre". Smoke and Ryder are soon revealed to have sold the Families out to Tenpenny and the Ballas. Before long, Sweet and the homies are ambushed at the Mulholland Intersection. C.J. arrives just as Sweet gets hit. Once the police arrive, the Johnson brothers are arrested, and all of the territory Grove Street has at this point is lost.
  • After returning to Grove Street following your adventures in the other two sections of San Andreas, your first task is to liberate it from the Ballas, and later you have to retake a significant amount of territory to unlock the final mission.
• Almighty Janitor: Frank Tenpenny, the Big Bad, is officially a patrolman with the LSPD. Unofficially, he's the gangland kingpin of Southern San Andreas.
• Always Close: C.J.'s escape from Big Smoke's crack palace during the final mission. He barely manages to Outrun the Fireball.
• Ambition Is Evil:
  • Inverted. Kendl identifies a lack of ambition as being C.J.'s major character flaw and most of the game is spent curing him of it. On the other hand, most of the endeavors C.J.'s newfound ambition leads him into are criminal, so...
  • Played straight with Big Smoke and Ryder, whose greed and ambition is what drove them to betray Grove Street and start setting up a major drug-dealing operation in Los Santos.
• Anachronism Stew: Not overtly, but noticeable in some of the sights and sounds around San Andreas.
  • Some of the songs playing on the radio, like "It Was A Good Day" by Ice Cube were released after 1992, which is when the game takes place.^note Although the "good day" in said song was in January 1992.
  • Certain cars, especially high-end ones, were based on real-life cars produced long after 1992, such as the Bullet, which is based on the 2005 Ford GT. That in turn was an almost exact copy design-wise of the Ford GT40 which came out in the 60s, but the one in the game was undoubtedly chosen with the new car's release in mind.
  • Less obviously, Sweet's attitude towards drugs and the purpose of gangs would be much more fitting a decade sooner than the game is set, when the crack epidemic was just starting. For all the negatives that the game shows as a result of crack hitting the streets, it also brought massive income for those willing to deal, which led to more plentiful and powerful firearms on the streets. The gangs that refuse to touch crack, such as the Families, the Aztecas and the Mountain Cloud Triads, would probably not have survived The '80s in reality. It's possible that the crack epidemic started a few years later in this universe, however, as by the time the game starts, the Grove Street Families have gone from a powerful gang to a shadow of its former self and are barely hanging on, being picked apart by internal conflicts causing the various families to split off, while the better-armed Ballas, who have embraced the drug trade, pick them off, partly by convincing two of the most prominent Grove Street members to turn on them.
  • A store named "Juguetes Regalos" features characters from Pokémon on its sign; Pokémon wouldn't exist until 1996 and wouldn't hit America for another two years after that. The store sign is distorted enough though for the casual players to identify. Fixed in the Definitive Edition by replacing the characters with in-universe characters introduced in Grand Theft Auto V.
  • Menus seen outside Burger Shots claim that they sell "Freedom Fries", a term that was created in 2003.
  • The "M4" (actually a Model 733) makes another appearance after Vice City. While the M4 Carbine was in production in 1992, it would not be adopted by the US Army for another two years. Additionally, the term used for M16-derived carbines at that time was "Commando".
  • Some buildings in Los Santos are based on buildings in Los Angeles that were opened after 1992, like the House of Blues and the Standard.
  • In Definitive Edition, there is a period appropriate looking computer in the Las Venturas suburbs (the north-eastern most) safehouse... with a Windows XP (launched in 2001) logo on its keyboard.
  • Also in Definitive Edition, one random portrait near the end of the final mission has a woman holding a 2010s looking smartphone.
• Anal Probing: There is an UFO-themed bar called Lil' Probe'Inn that is based on Lil' A'Le'Inn in Rachel, Nevada.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Completing some of the storyline and asset missions gets you some special outfits, which you may need to wear in order to progress through another mission. Also, achieving 100% progress with most of the girlfriends gets you an outfit related to their profession.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Some missions, after you've failed them once, will allow you to skip the trip to the destination and just get there once you get in a designated vehicle.
  • In "Ryder", if you have no money when you enter the pizza place (which is a completely plausible scenario, as you start the game with $350 and that happens to be the exact price of one of the haircuts you are required to get just before this scene) the game will sneakily give you $2 so you can buy a pizza and continue the level.
  • After you kill Big Smoke in "End of the Line" and escape the fortress, failing the mission automatically puts you at the start of the firetruck chase. You're also given an indestructible vehicle so that the rioters can't make it explode.
  • If you're on a vehicle mission (Vigilante, Paramedic, etc.), enemy gang members won't shoot at your vehicle or try to pull CJ out of it. Since most of the vehicle missions end immediately if you exit your vehicle or it gets destroyed, at least it leaves the player one less thing to worry about.
• Anti-Hero: You, the rest of Grove Street (well, Sweet at least), Cesar and Woozie. Unlike prior GTA protagonists, Carl's main motivation is the protection of his family, avenging his murdered mother, and getting rid of the drug dealers infesting Los Santos.
• Anti-Villain: Of the Big Bad Triumvirate, Hernandez is the least malevolent (it also helps that he had to endure much of Tenpenny and Pulaski's bullying just because he's Mexican). His only major interaction with CJ is a call early in the game, warning him not to leave Los Santos. He eventually gives in to his conscience and tries to turn his partners in, even taking a bullet for CJ near the end of the game.
• Anyone Remember Pogs?: The radio host of K-DST, Tommy "The Nightmare" Smith, mentions "Whatever happened to Love Fist?" at one point of his show. Love Fist was a fictional band from Vice City that was banned in many countries. In 1992 (when San Andreas takes place), however, they're all but forgotten (which may also be a reference to how hair metal fell out of fashion in the early 1990s). C.J. meets the band's former manager late in the game; after taking some drugs with The Truth, he wakes up stranded in the desert and needs C.J. to drive him back to civilization.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: In any given mission, assuming you have to drive there, you're limited to yourself and three other people for backup. You can actually recruit up to eight gang members for help, but only three are going to fit in the car and the NPC gangbangers don't know how to drive.
• Arc Words:
  "Big Smoke — Remember the name!"
• Area 51: Parodied with Area 69, which C.J. breaks into to acquire a jetpack. Trying to enter the area will earn you an instant five-star wanted level, and if you fly over, you will be brought down by SAM sites and Hydra fighter jets.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions: Ambulances will speed to the scene of a casualty. And we do mean "speed" — they're liable to plough straight into/through any pedestrians standing near the body (with a seemingly greater-than-chance likelihood of hitting the PC, but that might be an attempt at Laser-Guided Karma...)
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The game features pretty solid AI in most cases, but it breaks down in some areas. On the freeway, the AI can't seem to handle the speed at which it drives, resulting in a lot of accidents, even with no player intervention. If the player stays put long enough, massive pileups and riots inevitably occur and don't end until the player leaves the area... or promptly blows up the pileup with a rocket launcher.
  • Should the player be chased by any AI characters, notably police, the AI will simply run or drive to the exact position of the player. Cue players hovering along high cliffs in aircraft, watching as the AI throw themselves off of the cliff in an attempt to reach the player.
  • Civilian drivers are actually dumb cars-on-rails until nudged, shot, or otherwise "awakened", at which point they become truly AI controlled and subject to proper physics (almost certainly for performance). In some places, the map's "rails" seem to be set up wrong, and vehicles either accelerate or turn well beyond their actual capabilities, or outright spawn facing the wrong way then tween into place. Freeway pileups are usually a result of "rail" and "true" vehicles trying to interact and failing badly at it. Planes are also tied to 'rails'. This frequently makes them disregard tall buildings, trees, particularly steep hills or other particularly tall objects. Supposedly, the devs found this bug in development and chose not to fix it because it's funny (though not as much when those rails end up with them trying to land a plane on your forehead or a rare car you want to put in your garage). Also, pretty much every car that needs to make a right turn, is going to do so from the left lane, and vice versa for left turns. And that seems to be the most basic rule for the game's driving AI, but apparently it wasn't. It seems like the only realistic thing the other drivers do in the game is to high-tail it out of there when if they hear gunshots.
  • If you engage in a gang war, sometimes the enemy gang members will run down to the end of the block just to do a U-turn and run on the other side of the sidewalk. Sometimes this ranges to being miles away from the actual war zone but if the game is savvy enough, you're rewarded with the next wave or getting the area. Most of the time though you're stuck waiting around for them to come back because if you try to leave, the game pressures you to stay there.
  • Unless they're firing out of a car, any NPC assistance you have is often more of a liability. They're generally only competent when they're scripted to be busy while you're doing some other objective.
  • Cops who in no way can get to their original car, will usually run out onto the street and jack a civilian's car and drive off in that. Or more hilariously, a fellow officer's car.
  • There's the "suicidal photographer" near an inlet in Flint County, so-named because a random model of civilian, every time you show up there, will stand at the edge of a cliff, take pictures of Los Santos, then stand up and just walk in a straight line into the water and drown.
  • Emergency vehicles make no effort to avoid civilians and will usually run a lot of pedestrians over in their attempts to save one. Aggravating when it runs over a mission-important NPC.
  • Unlike the previous games, San Andreas averts Super Drowning Skills, and C.J. can swim. However, this isn't extended to most NPCs, and if you have a Wanted level, there's no end to the line of cops that will jump in to get you and immediately drown.
  • Pedestrians will jump to avoid a nearby moving car, presumably to avoid getting run over. However, their jump doesn't take into account where the car they're trying to avoid is. A common scenario is for the player to drive a car, close to pedestrians but not enough to actually run over them, only for a pedestrian to jump in front of the car, and actually getting run over.
• Artistic License – Military: When you go to the LHD-069 amphibious assault ship during "Vertical Bird", the "sailors" you run into are merely the game's stock military troops, wearing green (not even a color palette swap to blue). Even then it would still be incorrect for the time period, as the sailors would be wearing the classic dungarees. On a more minor note, there is no LHD-069 either — only eight Wasp-class ships with the LHD designation were ever built, the USS Wasp (LHD-1) being the only one in service at the time the game is set in — but the series as a whole loves to reference the number 69, so what other hull designator would it be?
• Artistic License – Physics: This moment from the mission "Breaking The Bank At Caligula's". And it's actually the only way to reach the helicopter. Open the parachute immediately after jumping, and you won't be able to land on the roof where that helicopter is.
• Ascended Meme: Three notable ones were included in The Definitive Edition:
  • One achievement is titled "They Can't Stop All of Us"^note A Facebook Event - really a sardonic shitpost - that took place in 2019 which involved raiding Area 51... except not really., which requires CJ to successfully sneak inside the military base during the mission "Black Project" without setting off any alarms.
  • The other two are a pair of achievements named after lines from Big Smoke's memetic ridiculously-large order in "Drive-Thru", "I'll Have Two Number 9s" for getting CJ as fat as the game will allow and "With Extra Dip" for eating eight Cluckin' Bell meals in a row without leaving.
• As the Good Book Says...: Big Smoke often quotes the Bible ("'Man cannot live on bread alone'. I know, I tried that shit.") but he's not exactly a saint.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: This conversation here:
  Ryder: I know this cat. He a punk who used to run with a Front Yard Balla OG from Idlewood. I know his place! It's just across the tracks there! Let's check it out.
  CJ: Eh, ain't that Front Yard turf?
  Ryder: Man are you a busta?
• The Atoner: C.J.'s relationship with Madd Dogg. C.J. murders Madd Dogg's manager and steals his rhyme book for OG Loc. As a result, Dogg attempts suicide only to be saved by C.J., who then retrieves his rhyme book and resurrects his music career by being his manager.
• Ate It All: The Grove Street Posse go out for a Drive-Thru meal at Cluckin' Bell. Big Smoke not only orders a ridiculously large portion for himself, but when the Ballas attempt a drive-by shooting, he manages to eat not only his own food, but the food ordered by his homies, while the rest of the gang are retaliating.
• Athens and Sparta: Los Santos is the Sparta to San Fierro's Athens. Los Santos is a gang-ridden city filled with urban segregation, with limited social opportunities and advancement, while San Fierro has less of a gang presence, is much more developed and sophisticated, and is the city where the hero achieves some kind of social mobility (legal and illegal), while also interacting with a real melting pot and weird bunch of misfits.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Hydra's hover mode. Trying to strafe ground targets is extremely difficult because the Hydra uses the camera controls for its additional functions, preventing you from righting the camera. The trio of sluggish response, split attention and proximity to ground clutter ends many joyrides with a boom. In the PC version, this can be slightly mitigated by turning off the option to use the mouse to fly planes.
  • In Las Venturas, you can steal a passenger jet. More impressive will be landing this unwieldy beast intact. You also can't save it in any garage because the thing is so big that it needs its own dedicated hangar in Las Venturas.
  • Any form of melee combat. Sure, you get some cool karate kicks and a move that can OHKO any NPC, but the actual chances you're going to use them will be almost non-existent due to pretty much all major combat encounter after the gym is unlocked are gunfights. About the OHKO move, it takes about 6 seconds of a nicely pulled off kickboxing combo, but if you wanted to kill something, you may as well have used a weapon in the first place. The same combo input by default (before you learn any set of gym moves) actually lets you knock an NPC down in just two hits, allowing you to beat them down on the ground right after.
  • The Katana. Like the other example used above, the katana is pretty damn cool as it is the only melee weapon that lets you behead an NPC and has nice overall strength. However, the only time you're going to use it on a mission will be the fight against the Da Nang leader, AKA Snake Head, and he'll never put up a decent fight and you might even kill him accidentally (and you have the option to just go for your gun anyway).
  • Lowriders, but especially the Savanna (a classic Chevrolet Impala with an open top). They look cool and handle fine in most circumstances, but they have a fatal flaw that is revealed when you flip one over. Unlike most cars where 9 times out of 10 it will manage to roll over safely, lowriders are far more likely to stay flipped due to having a flat top. This is especially notable in the mission "Photo Opportunity", where the challenge of the mission comes from driving Cesar's Savanna through the hilly countryside without flipping it.
  • The rocket launcher. It's powerful, sure, but has a terrible box crosshair that makes it hard to aim accurately, you have to lead your shots against moving targets, and getting caught in the blast is all too easy. By comparison, the minigun has far greater DPS, an accurate crosshair, and the only risk of hurting yourself is if you blow something up right next to you. It's also far more viable against human targets.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: As much shit as Sweet gives C.J., he still shows that he loves his brother dearly.
• Ax-Crazy: Cesar describes his cousin Catalina as "really intense". As C.J. finds out, this is a massive understatement.

B

• Back Stab: 'Stealth kills' are introduced to the series. Of course, civilians (and cops) don't really pay attention if CJ is running around with a minigun, so him having a knife works fine. Move up behind victim, target, attack, giggle maniacally. Oddly, though, this tends to increase the wanted meter more than when you just go up and hack them up with a katana, but hey.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Sweet and C.J. get to do this in a mission near the end of the game, which is essentially a two-man army against a horde of Ballas.
• Badass Driver: The homies mercilessly mock CJ's driving. It wasn't until slightly later in the countryside that Cesar entrusts CJ to make money by street racing, with Cesar and Woozie complimenting CJ's driving and Catalina accusing CJ's winning the second countryside race for cheating. Later, CJ is invited to an advanced driving school, and those classes teach CJ how to be an even more badass driver (even in-game, as every 100% earned on a test increases your driving skill by an amount that would take about half an hour of nonstop driving).
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Carl Johnson can dress up pretty dapper, once the last store opens up.
• The Bad Guys Are Cops: The CRASH unit, especially Officer Tenpenny, are corrupt to the core and essentially extort the player character while turning a blind eye to the gang violence they're supposed to be fighting against, preferring to just let the gangbangers take each other out rather than do any work themselves.
• Bad Guys Play Pool: The Pool minigame. You can place bets and if you lose, simply mug the winner and take your stuff back.
• Bad Job, Worse Uniform: The Burger Shot uniform, which includes a gigantic hamburger hat, and the Cluckin' Bell, a full-body chicken suit (the latter's employees coming off as more disgruntled.)
• Bag of Spilling: Two specific missions will irreversibly and permanently deprive CJ of all his weapons, never to be found again. "The Green Sabre" ends with the police confiscating all of CJ's weapons upon arresting him. Meanwhile, "The Da Nang Thing" also incinerates CJ's weapons due to a mid-mission helicopter crash.
• Bald of Authority: Frank Tenpenny is bald and the leader of an evil band of Dirty Cops, making this overlap with Bald of Evil.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: There's a scene where you can fight a Vietnamese gang boss sword vs sword (he tosses one to you to duel). Of course, if by then you've picked up a shotgun, you're still more than free to use it.
• Beautiful Condemned Building: C.J. is dismayed to discover that the autoshop he won in a race is actually a condemned gas station. His sister and their friends eventually convince him of the building's worth, and he soon manages to renovate it into a successful business.
• Bed Trick: C.J. pulls a kinkier-than-normal version of this preparation for the casino heist. They need a keycard from one of the casino staff, so he decides to get one by seducing a female croupier who works there, Millie. Of course, she doesn't know him yet, so his plan to remedy this is to shadow her after she leaves work and look for an opportunity. Said opportunity comes when she visits a sex shop and buys some fetish wear. By eavesdropping on her making a phone call, C.J. learns that she's buying the clothes for a BDSM play session with a guy. C.J. buys a gimp suit that covers his entire body and face, and then trails Millie home, where he waits for the guy to show up. When the guy arrives, C.J. ambushes him and enters the house in his place, wearing the gimp suit. Millie thinks that C.J. is her boyfriend and is eager to be punished by him (this is peculiar, since gimp suits are normally worn by submissives rather than dominants, but never mind). He obliges. Afterwards, she finds out that the guy she did all that stuff with was C.J. and not her usual partner. Astonishingly, she has no problem with any of what C.J. did, and becomes his regular girlfriend. She's also willing to lend him her keycard after going out for a little while, in exchange for a share of the stolen money.
• Beef Gate: Initially, C.J. is restricted to Los Santos and Red County; since he is the only GTAIII-era protagonist of the series who can actually swim, there is nothing preventing the player from entering the other regions before they are unlocked, but there is a penalty of a four-star wanted level if you do. Specifically, San Fierro, Whetstone and Flint County are inaccessible prior to completing "The Green Sabre"; and Tierra Robada, Bone County and Las Venturas cannot be entered before completing "Yay-Ka-Boom-Boom".
• Berserk Button: C.J. dislikes being called a "busta" as much as Woozie dislikes being made fun of for his blindness. He also seems to really hate reckless driving, ironically. But above all, do not mess with Kendl. So much as catcalling at her can trigger homicidal rage.
• Beta Outfit: It has a nod in-game to Big Smoke's outfit from earlier in the game's development. On the statue of Smoke in the drug manufacturing factory in East Los Santos you see he's wearing a white jersey and black trousers.
• Betting Mini-Game: The game features a number of ways to bet money, including horse racing, low-rider bouncing and casinos with games such as poker and roulette.
• Beware the Nice Ones
  • Wu Zi Mu, or "Woozie", is a laid-back, friendly, unassuming Chinese businessman who enjoys playing video games, racing cars, and golf despite being blind. He's also the boss of the Mountain Cloud Triads. When he found his men wiped out by the the Vietnamese Da Nang Boys, he rushes into the fray with a machine pistol and guns down everyone he can find, all the while threatening to to make their blood "flow like wine". CJ remains on his good side throughout the game, averting a potential Face–Heel Turn.
  • C.J. himself is usually a pretty nice guy — for a gangbanger, though this may have something to do with having worked a legitimate job for the Leones in Liberty City for five years. But do not talk bad about his family, especially his sister Kendl. Or their late mother. Just ask Pulaski.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Frank Tenpenny and Big Smoke.
• Big Dam Plot: There's a mission where you must plant bombs in a dam, which is an expy of the Hoover Dam.
• Big Eater: Zig-zagged in the Drive Thru mission, when Big Smoke makes an infamously large order at Cluckin' Bell. While he does get a lot of food for himself, a fraction of the food he ordered was actually meant for Carl, Sweet, and Ryder. But then he ends up eating all of it anyway while the others are busy shooting at the Ballas.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: A longstanding legend in the game is that a Bigfoot can be found roaming the immense backwoods. More than a decade after the game's release, the legend persists.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Some NPCs will shout "Oh Shut Up!" to C.J. if he rejects one of their compliments. C.J. himself often shouts "Shut UP!" to NPCs when returning their insults, or rejecting their compliments or even killing them.
• Bizarrchitecture: Some of the abandoned desert tourist traps are restaurants shaped like the animals they serve, in a representation of a real trend in now-dated '50s-'60s architecture toward giant objects.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: The protagonists of Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City can only be said to be heroes in the sense that they fight against people who are even worse than they are. C.J., on the other hand, has a few genuinely heroic motivations (getting the drug dealers out of his neighborhood, avenging his mother's death, keeping his family and friends safe from harm), but he's still a murdering, thieving gangbanger who by the end of the game blows up the Sherman Dam and steals technology from both a top-secret military base and a Navy carrier.
  • C.J. murders the entire staff of a construction site and buries the foreman alive because someone whistled at his sister. And in an earlier mission, he breaks into a rapper's mansion and murder a lot of the innocent security staff, kidnapped the rapper's manager and trapped him in a car and ran it into the sea, all so his friend (who he doesn't even like) can steal his music or something. In a bizarrely ironic twist, much later in the game, he saves the rapper from committing suicide, and then hunts down his former friend to reclaim the rhymebook he himself stole in the first place. Conveniently for C.J., his former friend never brings this up during the confrontation.
• Black Comedy:
  • In "Ice Cold Killa", C.J. needs a silenced pistol, but cannot find one. So Cesar takes out his silenced pistol out of nowhere and gives it to C.J., whom asks where he got that. Cesar's answer? '"Same place I buy my pants, holmes. This is America!"
  • The cutscene with Smoke's order in "Drive Thru" may also qualify if Smoke setting up CJ and Sweet's assassination during that moment is anything to believe.
• Black Comedy Rape: One of the pre-mission cutscenes involves Carl being chained to a rack and raped by his hostile tsundere partner, Catalina. Thankfully, this is off-screen. Un-thankfully, there is audio.
• Black Helicopter: Several black helicopters are used by The Men in Black in "Interdiction" to destroy the helicopter that transports Toreno's package.
• Blatant Lies: At one point, you're told to go buy an abandoned air strip. You're also told to offer the owner a dollar, and if he doesn't accept, shoot him. There's no actual way to do that in the game — you need $80,000 to buy it, period. The scene comes off as a remnant of an intended mission.
• Blind Driving: Woozie has a version - he's really good at racing around designed tracks (like the race where C.J. first meets him), but regular driving tends to eat up a lot of time (his right-hand man, after C.J. asked where Woozie was, said that he insisted on driving himself. "Could be anywhere.")
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Interestingly, both this game and Grand Theft Auto Advance, which was released on the same day, took steps to be the first GTA games to avert this. In the case of San Andreas, bullets, melee, and fire still have to chip through your armor before they can damage your health, but long falls will now hurt you directly regardless of your armor (''Advance'', being a top-down game with no falling damage, goes for melee bypassing your armor instead).
• Bondage Is Bad:
  • Catalina is technically on the protagonist's side, but she's also one of the craziest characters in the game. When she drags him into her cabin for a good time (involving a whip and a rack — we don't see what goes on inside the cabin), he winds up screaming for her to stop (with no success). This is Played for Laughs, and he probably had it coming after all the stuff you've been having him do.
  • Subverted with Millie, the cashier in Las Venturas. The inside of her apartment is actually a BDSM dungeon, but she seems nice enough and never says anything worrying to C.J. on their dates. Compare that to Helena, who will occasionally talk about being able to murder C.J. and get away with it. Or to Katie, who says things like "Car crashes are so erotic" and "Self-mutilation fascinates me".
• Bonus Dungeon: After trudging through Zero's first two missions, which involve shooting down/fighting with toys on a very tight timer, you are treated to... an RTS mission. However, it is probably the most fun mission in the game since it's virtually impossible to screw up, and hearing David Cross cheer you on when you do well at it creates quite the fuzzy feeling. Oh, and one of the previous scrappy levels becomes infinitely replayable after you beat it, although there is now no longer a penalty for failing it.
• Border Patrol: Players who try to skip ahead to the other cities before the plot grants them access (indicated by literal Border Patrols — the bridges to these cities will be closed off and some cops will be standing behind the boundary) will find themselves suddenly slapped with a four-star wanted level, and usually be gunned down by police and/or helicopters shortly thereafter (I was just going for a swim, officer, honest!) They'll continue to chase you even if you go back into an open zone, but at least there you can access unlocked Pay 'n' Sprays and safehouses to help you lose your wanted level.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Bike and the BMX. They're not the fastest vehicles in the game by far (when riding up a hill, you can go faster on foot unless you tap 'accelerate' to go faster), give zero protection against bullets and you can't listen to your radio on one, but they're very easy to level up (which makes it harder for you to fall from it), they can still reach decent speeds with maxed out stamina or the unlimited sprint, and they're totally indestructible. Where they truly shine is agility: it's far easier to lose a pursuer on a bike by going where he can't follow rather than trying to outrun him. The ability to bunny hop is also quite useful as well, and the higher your skill level, the higher you can jump.
  • Motorcycles retain the agility factor, but lose only the ability to bunny hop in return for eliminating all the disadvantages except that they still offer no protection against bullets. The only downside motorbikes have that bikes don't is that you can much more easily reach sufficient speed to hurt yourself in a collision, which is far less likely in a bike unless you're specifically being chased.
  • Immunity to fire has very little practical application, but it makes certain levels of the game a lot more tolerable since you can charge through fire instead of wasting a weapon slot on an extinguisher. If you're fond of molotovs, it also completely removes the risk of hitting yourself. And if you're feeling a little sadistic, you can set yourself on fire and try to spread it to cars and blow them up just by standing near them!
• Born Lucky: Woozie is blind, but he's so incredibly lucky that he can often pass as sighted anyways. He can even race a car along a narrow, winding ledge!
• Bottomless Bladder:
  • This game, more than any GTA before or since, pays great attention to personal matters — keeping fit and requiring CJ to eat occasionally, with penalties associated with eating too much or too little (or being not fit enough). But bathroom breaks are never factored in (which is probably a good thing).
  • Inverted for one mission, you have the choice to pull over your vehicle so Maccer can get out and relieve himself.
• Bragging Rights Reward: The rewards for achieving 100% Completion are a Rhino tank and Hydra jet that continually spawn at your hideout, as well as infinite ammunition for all weapons... and no more missions to take advantage of them in. Of course, since this is a sandbox game, it's still a lot of fun simply wreaking havoc with these things, so they're only "useless" in the sense that there are no more missions to complete.
• Bringing Back Proof: In one mission, Dirty Cops Frank Tenpenny and Eddie Pulaski order CJ to gun down one of the witnesses in the corruption case against them, and take a photo of his corpse.
  Pulaski: We need evidence he ain't gonna talk.
• British Rockstar: You meet up with two characters associated with a band who are largely parodies of this trope (though their style leans more towards pre-Britpop, like The Stone Roses, Suede and Happy Mondays). The lead singer's name is Maccer (he even wears a Reni hat), and is voiced by Happy Mondays vocalist Shaun Ryder.
• Broken Bridge: At the beginning of the game, the bridges had been damaged by an earthquake. Downplayed in that, although you can swim, boat, or fly across, you will get a four star wanted level for even trying, and you can't do too much at those points anyway.
• Brooklyn Rage: C.J. spent five years living in Liberty City before the events of the game, and returns for one mission.
• Burger Fool: OG Loc's parole officer lined him up for a job at Burger Shot as a "Hygiene Technician" (fancy talk for janitor). His uniform, and that of everyone else who works there, includes an oversized burger hat, which, needless to say, looks ridiculous. Not to mention the chicken hat that is part of the uniform at Cluckin' Bell.
• Buried Alive: The mission "Deconstruction", a conga line of Disproportionate Retribution, ends with pushing the foreman, who is hiding in a porta-potty, into a hole - and then filling the hole with cement.
• But Thou Must!:
  • The first mission requires you to use a bike. If you "acquire" something else, the game ceases to show the people you are meant to follow on your minimap and the Ballas car continues to chase and shoot you no matter where you go.
  • Many missions force you to use a specific, mission-critical vehicle, often for no good reason. It gets to the point that some NPCs will sit in an overturned, burning car while yelling at you to get back in until they die a fiery death and you fail.
  • There are also many, many occasions in the game where the vehicle you arrive in for a mission will disappear and be replaced by one provided for the mission. A fact worth noting before you take your expensive, tripped out car to meet Woozie or Toreno for their next mission. This can be avoided (to a point) by parking your car further away.
  • There are also missions where C.J. is forced to use a specific weapon, despite owning better weapons in his inventory (often replacing them). For example, in "Freefall" it doesn't matter if he has a minigun, C.J. is forced to make do with a dinky M1911 pistol in the shootout. It happens inside a plane though, so keeping the caliber down is somewhat justified if the game runs on Vinewood Physics. "Reuniting the Families" is particularly bad about this, because it will give you an infinite-ammo AK-47, and then take your AK away once it's over.
  • One point of criticism leveled at the game is that a number of missions require C.J. to commit outright murder (including that of at least one innocent bystander, in this case a woman who happens to be unlucky enough to be the date of a man C.J. is assigned to assassinate), without the ability to Take a Third Option, which make it hard to sympathize with the character. While "following the script" is hardly unusual in a linear game, it does to a degree go against the sandbox philosophy of GTA.
  • Despite the above, the game does subvert the trope as, once the game reaches a certain point, the player is free to abandon the storyline and take part in any number of purely optional activities.

C

• Call-Forward: Players of Grand Theft Auto III know how Claude and Catalina's relationship will turn out.
• Camera Fiend: Carl "C.J." Johnson has a camera in his Ganton home's bedroom, which he can pick up and even use in some missions.
  • Any photos you take when playing appear in the Gallery. They're basically a different sort of screenshot. This feature is actually quite helpful if you're trying to collect the 50 snapshots in San Fierro, as the screenshot will include the in-game text showing your progress in the sidequest.
  • A nice bit of Developer's Foresight is that you can take the camera on a date and take a picture of your girlfriend, she'll pose and wave for you.
• Cane Fu: This occupies the "miscellaneous item" slot, on the same category as flowers and the dildo. It works exactly as a blunt katana, without the One-Hit Kill chance of decapitating the enemy you attack it with. It's all-around deadly all the same, however, moreso if you use the martial arts style learned in San Fierro for a mixed pattern of kicks and whacks. It also happens to be the most common melee weapon in the game, provided the player knows where to look for it.
• Canned Orders over Loudspeaker: This is the way Mike Toreno communicates with Carl during missions. It's quite amazing how he manages to have a loudspeaker just where a plane-dropped package fell, despite it being carried away by wind quite a bit.
• Cap: The game has a 9-digit money counter, though under normal circumstances only eight digits are shown on the HUD because acquiring that much money requires a lot of grinding Vigilante missions or casino games. If you do manage to go past $99,999,999, it rolls over and adds another digit. And C.J. will still complain about desperately needing money.
• The Caper: The game, in a clear homage to Ocean's Eleven, has C.J. robbing a Vegas casino with a colorful group of characters.
• Captain Crash: Woozie, a very bizarre ally, can drive magnificently. Walking into walls, however, is a frequent occurrence. Even more amazing is the fact that he can drive while being blind. And even more amusing is that his gang acts like he isn't blind at all. It is rather confusing especially since you meet him during a high speed race. Through the countryside. Eventually he confesses to C.J. that he is blind. You can almost see C.J. trying and failing to contain himself before he replies, "no shit!"
• Captain Obvious: In the WCTR show "The Tight End Zone", Derrick Thackery frequently states blatantly obvious facts about football ("If you score more points than the other team, you win."), but in a twist, they're treated like insightful wisdom by his stupid call-in guests.
• Car Cushion: This happens to C.J. if he jumps out of the plane in "Stowaway" with no parachute.
• Car Skiing: You can pull this off and get a bonus for doing so. Also, there's a side-mission in a stunt driving school where one of the tasks is to do one of these.
• Cash Gate: There's a similar situation to Vice City — you need to buy an abandoned airfield to train your piloting skills and advance the main plot. The guy who tells you to buy it says you can blackmail the owners into selling it for a dollar, but you really have to pay $80 grand for it.
• Casting Gag:
  • C.J., voiced by then-aspiring rapper Young Maylay, claims he's not part the rap game during one of OG Loc's missions.
  • The DJ of the classic rock radio station is Tommy "The Nightmare" Smith, an arrogant, aging has-been rocker whose former bandmates have gone on to greater fame while his own career has dwindled. He's still convinced that he's the most important musician ever, and gets angry when people point out he's living in the past. He's voiced by Axl Rose.
  • In the mission "Catalyst", Tenpenny, who is voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, whose wife was a drug addict in Menace II Society, claims that his wife loves what Ryder is brewing, which is probably drugs.
• Celebrity Paradox: The DJ for the Classic Rock station (K-DST) is voiced by Axl Rose, who often takes shots at the heavy metal/grunge station Radio X. Radio X plays the Guns N' Roses song "Welcome to the Jungle".
• Central Theme: The betrayal and revenge theme found in the first two games is expanded upon. Loyalty to your homies drives most, if not all the plot. The game deconstructs the True Companions sentimentalism in street gangs. The people who you think are your real friends will sell you out if you get in their way. Your real friends turn out to be the ones who are there for you when you are really down, and more often than not, their friendship won't have much to do with where you're from or how similar or different you are from them.
• Chain-Link Fence: This works surprisingly well, since you can vault fences, but it generally doesn't occur to the cops. They can still shoot you, though...
• Chainsaw Good: There's a couple of chainsaws scattered around the map. As the guns dealer would say: "works best in a crowded area". Fittingly, one was in an out of the way hick-like town.
• Character Development: C.J. gets quite a lot of it.
  • During the early game, C.J. has basically no long-term aspirations; as such, he's always doing what others tells him instead of taking the lead and coming up with his own ideas (Los Santos missions basically consisting on blindly following instructions), he never stops to think about the possible consequences from his acts (such as what may happen after stealing and killing Madd Dogg's rhymes and manager respectively), and never dares to stand up against Tenpenny's constant harassing (even though he doesn't really have a real, plausible way to coerce him to do his bidding before Sweet's imprisonment.
  • In the latter part of the game, C.J. does stand up against harassing (he points a gun against Toreno when he believes he's not going to keep his promise, and even laughs in Tenpenny's face when he learns he's in trouble — he gets punched for the latter, but the point is that he did it); although he still follows other people's instructions, he's able to take the initiative if needed (the attack on Madd Dogg's mansion was C.J.'s idea, as was using Ken Rosenberg to learn more about Caligula's Casino for the heist); he realizes some of his earlier acts have caused unexpected damage (namely, Madd Dogg is almost Driven to Suicide, and Tenpenny getting free causes a riot) and sets out to repair it; and ends up owning a casino and several businesses all over San Andreas, which still doesn't prevent him from eventually coming back to the hood to take care of it.
• Checkpoint Starvation: In the original release, only the final mission of the game, "End of the Line", has any checkpoints. Since the tablet and Windows Store versions, the game starts to have them, at least.
• Chekhov's Gun: When C.J. asks about his mother's murder, Ryder mentions in passing that a Green Sabre was seen at the scene of the shooting. A green Sabre shows up in a later mission when C.J. finds out that Smoke and Ryder are working with C.R.A.S.H. and the Ballas.
• Cherry Tapping: How about the dildo? No, wait, it gets even worse: you can beat people to death even with a goddamn flower bouquet. Yep. The best part is that all of these weapons are obscenely powerful, killing any non-boss in three hits!
• Chokepoint Geography: The town of Bayside is secluded from the rest of the desert area. It's surrounded by lots of water, with most of the land outskirts consisting of very tall, insurmountable on foot mountains, and the only access to the rest of the desert being a single tunnel. Although in the final game this serves no purpose, and no other part of the map is similar, there are several hints that indicate that Bayside originally was supposed to be accessible during the San Fierro section of the game,^note The most solid hint is the official strategy guide claiming that the boat school (located in Bayside) is unlocked after "Pier 69", while in the final game, Bayside isn't accessible until a later mission. so that chokepoint would have served to function as a Broken Bridge preventing early access to the desert and Las Venturas.
• Choosy Beggar: In one early mission, CJ and crew are fleeing from the police, with CJ complaining that all they have to defend themselves is an A.K.A.-47 ("this fucking antique", as he puts it). He's told to shut up and shoot back.^note Justified in that CJ is told that the AK-47 came from Emmet, who's known for selling old, low-quality weapons. CJ was worried about the weapon quality, and he's proven right when it jams (something which is very rare for an AK-47).
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Frank Tenpenny, the Big Bad, has a raging case of the syndrome. The only character he doesn't screw over (often fatally) by the end of the game is Big Smoke, and then probably only because he hadn't yet outlived his usefulness.
• Chubby Chaser:
  • Forth Right MC on Playback FM. "I want a woman I can bounce up and down on!"
  • Two of the player character's optional love interests are female chubby chasers. Like all of the other women Carl romances, this is a way of getting more mileage out of the character customization. You can only date the gearhead Latina chick and the attractive police officer if C.J.'s fat meter is 50% or higher.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Medics from the ambulances can often revive dead people, unless their heads have been blown off.
• Church of Happyology: The Epsilon Program. In the words of their leader, Cris Fromage, they "tithe money in exchange for salvation and merit badges," and their success may be partially attributed to their leader's charismatic, James Earl Jones-esque voice. Oh, and their holy text, the Epsilon Tract, has never even been written. Kifflom! They make their first appearance in the HD Universe in Grand Theft Auto V.
• CIA Evil, FBI Good: Inverted with Mike Toreno who, while remaining extremely morally ambiguous, actually follows through on his offer to get Sweet out of prison.
• Clean Up the Town: A large part of the story involves C.J. and his homies (Sweet, anyway) trying to clean up their crack-ridden 'hood.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • The Truth is weird. He clearly rambles in a style suggesting he's mad, but at the same time, seems to know a great deal about things not obvious to C.J. He's also a stoner. And he apparently got high with some really awesome polar bears.
  • Mike Toreno can come across like this, too, although he's much more balanced than most cuckoolanders.
  • Maccer is pretty weird as well, with his hypersexual personality and tendency to randomly talk vulgarly.
• Cluster F-Bomb: This was the first GTA game to have prominent use of the word "fuck" in it, and fuck, does it get used a lot: 426 times counting its variants and not counting random pedestrians/drivers curses, the in-game radio, and the couple instances of Mexican curses like "pendejo" or "chinga tu madre".
• Color-Coded Armies: Street gangs in Los Santos are marked by what color they show off the most: Grove Street Families are green, Ballas are purple, Varrios Los Aztecas are aqua, and Vagos are yellow-orange. Ballas and Vagos will shoot at C.J. on sight. When fighting turf wars, the map of Los Santos is divided into sections, shaded according to who controls it (barring the Aztecas, with whom GSF have an effective alliance thanks to Cesar being Kendl's boyfriend and later forging a friendship with C.J.).
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: All of the street gangs. The Grove Street Families are green, the Ballas are purple, the Aztecas are aqua, and the Vagos are yellow-orange.
• Color Wash: Used for an accentuated atmospheric sense. Since San Andreas was a really huge state, with contrasting environments, there's a Color Wash scheme that differs from place to place. Los Santos had a slightly orangish weather with heat hazes. San Fierro had a unnaturally teal lighting to convey a mild-to-cold atmosphere. Las Venturas went for a less blatant color scheme, but still conveying hot weather. The contry-sides had a pastel green/brown tint to them, and the deserts took it further with bright white/yellow skies that turned purplish at night.
• Combat Pragmatist: You, C.J., come up against the head of the Da Nang smuggling ring, the Snakehead. In the final showdown, he tosses you a Katana and you duke it out with him. Sounds fun right? But this is Grand Theft Auto. Most players will more than likely have a couple guns on them. Why bother fighting the guy when you can just pump him full of lead, right?^note Even if you choose to fight fair and square, the katana's ability to behead opponents at the player's favor means that the fight can end quickly either way
• Commune: A dark example, with a community of violent survivalists.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The Rhino Tanks are the definition of Badass, being incredibly rare to find unless you get a six-star wanted level, or obtain one from the military base. However, these vehicles are very heavy and definitely not nimble when you drive them. However, if you manage to outrun the police, FBI and army in your souped-up Infernus and tear through the countryside, prepare to have the horror of your life when a Rhino Tank bursts out of the woods and charges straight for you at speeds upwards of 120 miles per hour.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: Subverted, in a way? When taking Katie Zhan out driving, she will constantly urge the player to go faster, but going too fast means her happiness meter will rapidly decrease, causing her to end the date, if the player exceeds a relatively low speed.
• Compressed Hair: The player can choose to get a giant afro, which remains entirely undamaged by the wearing and removal of any headgear.
• Conspiracy Theorist: The Truth again. Subverted by Toreno indicating that any well-known conspiracy theories are, in fact, true. In short, Hitler never died, Germany (not the U.S.) nuked Japan, and Bill Clinton was a Soviet plant.
• Construction Catcalls: The "Deconstruction" mission has C.J.'s sister Kendl complaining about the people of a local construction site hassling her and calling her a hooker. C.J. takes this badly. Very badly.
• Constructive Body Disposal: One mission has C.J., using a cement truck, pushing a construction foreman into a rectangular pit while the foreman is locked inside a portable bathroom stall. C.J. then proceeds to dump cement from the truck inside the pit.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: Certain events trigger allies into harassing you into continuing the mission. Such as if you... accidentally kill your Las Venturas casino employee girlfriend. Yeah, accidentally... that's the ticket.
  • Another variation of this occurs in the "Learning To Fly" missions. If you die or otherwise quit before at least passing every sub-lesson with bronze awards, Mike Toreno will pester CJ with phone calls telling him to finish the mission.
  • Occasionally, if left alone for long enough, C.J. will sing fragments from various songs of the in-game radio, such as Young Turks, Nuthin' But a G Thang, or Never Gonna Get It, to name a few.
• Continuing is Painful: There's respawning guns right outside your door, if you do certain fetch quests. Relatedly, you could save after the accomplishment of any difficult task, but too much saving in San Andreas creates a "can't beef up my stats by exercising" glitch. Sigh. Luckily, later patches corrected this.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999) - "Jesus saves" graffiti in Los Santos near the Lowrider shop.
  • Grand Theft Auto III (2001) - Claude from III is featured in a mission.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) - Numerous references - Lance Vance and Tommy Vercetti figurines in the RC shop, Vice City maps, etc.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: The game averts this with Tenpenny by having him only appear in cutscenes, presumably so no clever player could kill him before he's supposed to die (also in a cutscene). During the one mission where he is in gameplay, his fire truck is invincible and follows a pre-determined path.
• Convenient Questing: Averted. The opening of the game drops you off in enemy territory and you have to haul ass on a procured bike to get back to Grove Street before you get perforated by the Ballas.
• Cool Car: Not just top flight rides such as sports cars, but even half decent cars such as the Sentinel will have NPCs giving very generous compliments to CJ such as "nice car!".
• Coolest Club Ever: Jizzy's Pleasure Domes. Not a club per se, it's an illegal brothel sitting at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge (or its gaming equivalent, the Gant). Regardless, this is one of the posher interiors in the game, with a three-story dance floor and mezzanine. There are also dance clubs to entertain dates in all three cities.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: If only on the PS2 and Xbox version, by default.
• The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: At the end, your brother stops you from shooting Officer Tenpenny, since he was already fatally wounded and this way it would be an 'accident' with 'no one to blame'. This might fly better if the car crash didn't come after a 5-minute wild chase through the entire city, with Tenpenny firing at you all the way, which started at a building that contains about 2 dozen dead gangsters. Then again, considering the quality of police forces in ''GTA'' games, perhaps it did work.
• Corridor Cubbyhole Run: The corridor is up the middle of a rising plane with the cargo loader door open. The random obstacles are barrels the enemies (human?) are pushing at you.
• Counterfeit Cash: One storyline mission involves The Mafia trying to flood the new Triad casino in Las Venturas with fake casino chips, though the job is amateurish enough that even a layman can spot major flaws. Of course, the dragon on the fake chips has sunglasses and a cane, and the leader of the Triads is blind, so it was probably intended to upset him. It does.
• Country Matters:
  • This word is dropped several times through the course of the game. Considering the other offensive words that are used and the overall cringe worthy subject matter of the game, it's not surprising.
  • It even extends to the game files - a large amount of assets related to the countryside have the prefix cunt- attached to them. The Country Rifle weapon is internally named cuntgun.
• Coup de Grâce: Subverted when it comes to Tenpenny, where he's already dead after delivering his last words, and when the player character takes aim to put a bullet in Tenpenny's corpse, another character tells him it's not worth it.
• Coup de Grâce Cutscene: The game has several of these, including Pulaski.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • Los Santos, whose representation of gang wars is largely based on Boyz n the Hood. On the other hand, San Fierro is not even better, since it's a city where street gangs, drug manufacturing and Asian organized crime are prominent. The only quietest and safest areas in the state of San Andreas are the towns of the rural areas.
  • Downplayed with Las Venturas. While the city has practically zero street gangs, there are several legal businesses of The Mafia, one of them is a casino.
• Creator Provincialism: A lot of place-names are thinly-disguised ones from Scottish cities. There's also an exact replica of the Forth Rail Bridge. Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh and Dundee and evidently like their in-jokes.
• Crime of Self-Defense: The gangs can use you for target practice and the police isn't the least interested, but then you kill just one of those Ballas vermin and the police are all over you. In that specific case there's at least the justification that the Los Santos police unit that deals the most with the gangs, C.R.A.S.H., are corrupt as hell and working directly with the Ballas, but you get the same reaction for attacking every other gang in the series, too, such as the drug-trafficking Loco Syndicate in neighboring San Fierro.
• Critical Existence Failure:
  • Played straight with cars, motorcycles, boats and helicopters; you can damage these vehicles as much as you want with no effect on their performance whatsoever, up until the moment they catastrophically explode. The engine will release smoke as a damage meter of sorts, and fire means it's going to explode in the next ten seconds.
  • Averted with fixed-wing aircraft; taking damage to the wings or rudder can cause the stabilizer fins to snap off, resulting in a nigh-uncontrollable plane. They are also a lot more fragile than other vehicles; hitting any solid object will usually make them catch fire, if not destroy them outright. If you run into a solid wall, that's all she wrote.
  • And vehicles do not handle properly if their tires are damaged. It is common for tires to be shot out, or damaged by spike belts. Several missions become noticeably easier if the player thinks to have C.J. shoot out an enemy vehicle's tires before a chase begins.
  • Played straight with C.J., of course. Unless you fall from a great height without a parachute, that is. And even then, if the paramedic and vigilante side-missions are completed (giving C.J. extra health and armor) it's possible for him to survive even these falls, but with only 1% of your HP left. Get punched by an angry pedestrian afterwards, and you guessed it: dead.
• Crowbar Combatant: Subverted: as a Shout-Out, you can find one in Area 69, on a desk, but you can't pick it up. Some Game Mods replace the dildo with it.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option:
  • One of the missions involves burying a construction foreman alive in concrete merely because his workers made catcalls at your sister. Oh, and what you buried him inside with concrete poured around it? A Porta-Potty.
  • Early in the game, the mission where you steal Madd Dogg's rhyme book also counts as you do throat-slashing at least a dozen of innocent mansion security without any real justification besides just wanting to help OG Loc.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Being a Wide-Open Sandbox, this is common practice in the Grand Theft Auto series, albeit not to the degree that it's very glaring to your average player. San Andreas however is the biggest offender with regards to interiors.
  • Barber shops^note Except the barber shop near C.J.'s home (since according to the storyline the person running that particular one has been cutting C.J.'s hair for years), and another on the southeast corner of Los Santos, fast food joints^note This one at least may be justifiable, weapons shops^note most of the time; one shop is larger than the others, dancing clubs and tattoo parlors are all identical and even use the same workers, so it gets a bit jarring to see a guy that sells guns in San Andreas can also pop up in every other county that sells guns. Strangely, there's a two-floor weapon shop in the game files that doesn't show up in the final game and can only be visited via glitches and/or external programs.
  • During the burglary missions, there are also only a handful of building interiors depending on what kind of building you are breaking into. Strangely, there are (again) some more burglary houses in the game files that could add more diversity, but they don't show up in the final game and can (again) only be visited via glitches and/or external programs.
  • If you pay close enough attention, you'll find quite a few branch shops of a certain "Guadalajara Jewelry Plaza" announced with a Mexican flag (Guadalajara is Mexico's second largest city and has a large, active jewelry industry).
• Cutscene: The game has a main character with a highly variable appearance, yet the cutscenes work with whatever you put together.
• Cutscene Incompetence: C.J. is constantly pushed around by Tenpenny in their cutscene encounters throughout the game. This might make sense in the beginning, when you haven't had the time to train, but it's ridiculous when you have maxed out muscle and enough weapons to fill an armory, in addition to fighting the Mafia, U.S. Army, secret government agencies, and thousands upon thousands of gangsters of all kinds (and no doubt many police officers). There's a cutscene in Las Venturas when Tenpenny punches C.J. in the stomach, flooring him, even though C.J. should logically be able to take Tenpenny in a straight fight with full muscle.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: No matter how low C.J.'s very relevant stats are, if you make the corona over the hitman's plane, he can now defy the laws of physics and leap from one plane to another and somehow get inside.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • One mission tasks you with swimming after Ryder, then destroying his hijacked boat. Alternatively, grab your sniper rifle and pop him in the back a few times while he's still in the water. Problem solved.
  • Another mission tasks C.J. with stealing four bundles of dynamite within a set time limit. Or C.J. can shoot the man at the detonator, making the timer disappear.

D

• Damage-Sponge Boss: In a vehicle example, Pulaski's car has truly insane durability, able to shrug off ten times the amount of firepower a normal car could take. Its wheels, however, are as weak as normal, making the chase part rather easy if you thought to pop the tires ahead. In an NPC example, Big Smoke is almost as tough as the above car, with body armor being the justification. In this case, the easiest way to defeat him is knock him down right away and just stomp on him until his health is depleted.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Some DRIV3R players found it difficult switching over to San Andreas, as in the former pressing the triangle button applied the brakes, but in San Andreas it made you enter/exit the car - pain ensues for everyone involved if you happen to be driving at top speed when you press it.
• Danger Takes A Back Seat: T-Bone Mendez pulls a variation of this on C.J., trying to scare him into admitting he's a double agent. It doesn't work.
• Dating Sim: The game has this feature. It doesn't tie too much into the story aside from stealing an access card from one of your girlfriends, though you do receive rewards like special outfits and access to their cars.
• Dead Air: This happens to James Pedeaston, host of "The Wild Traveler". His audience stops calling in after a few insulting and disturbing comments. When the silence begins, he starts begging people to call him, and only receives two calls, one of whom was a jumper.
• Dead Foot Leadfoot: Almost always averted when you shoot a civilian dead while he or she is still in a car; this is par course for all Grand Theft Auto III-era games. However, shoot a cop chasing you in his squad car, and a glitch may occur, causing his lifeless/headless body to continue giving chase until you pull it out and jack the car.
• Deadly Remote Control Toy: A mission has Carl using a remote control toy airplane to destroy delivery vans for a remote control toy shop. The mission giver is the owner of a rival remote control toy shop.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The player would normally lose his weapons when he dies, but the penalty can eventually be negated by dating a nurse, after which death only means respawning at the nearest hospital minus a trifling fee. However, if you die during a mission you have to restart it from the beginning.
• Decon-Recon Switch: The same game both breaks down and later puts back together Best Friend and True Companions. The first act has Big Smoke and Ryder betray the Grove Street inner circle to Tenpenny and the Ballas for a cut of the drug money; Carl's return doesn't change that because he'd been run out five years ago when things changed. The following acts have Carl, now forced to venture out on his own, forge a new network of friends and allies across the rest of San Andreas that he can rely on because he and them work together in facing down common threats — notably, all but Sweet don't share his background of poor Black inner city hood (Cesar is also a street gang leader but Mexican, Wu Zi is a Chinese Triad leader whose businesses interest usually don't cross with street gangs, The Truth is a white New-Age Retro Hippie, etc.), underwriting the point that bonds forged in common struggle tend to be more genuine compared to just having the same background.
• Deconstruction: The game itself has a bitter deconstruction of Best Friend and True Companions. Instead of showing Undying Loyalty among Childhood Friends, they are traitors and bastards in sheep's clothing (Big Smoke and Ryder) who are more than willing to betray their closest friends (C.J. and Sweet). The idea of street loyalty is even mocked by Tenpenny, who mocks C.J. for thinking a bunch of ruthless street thugs would be loyal to each other.
  Tenpenny: Homies for life? Street Loyalty? That's all bullshit, Carl. Didn't you learn that when they ran you out of town, just 'cause you let Brian die?
• Decoy Convoy: One mission has CJ driving an SUV with tinted windows so an allied mob boss can escape the country. The added difficulty is that if the vehicle becomes too damaged, the assassins will be able to see the boss isn't inside and go after the other cars before he can reach safety.
• Defiant to the End: Eddie Pulaski, one of the antagonists is this after Carl causes him to crash and asks for any last words. Eddie's response? "Can I fuck your sister?"
  CJ: You an asshole to the end. Punk motherfucker! *head stomp*
• Department of Redundancy Department: Played for laughs on the news radio station WCTR...
  Lianne Forget: Staying in Venturas — it used to be a patch of desert, then it was a mob town. Now, it is the corporate headquarters of America. Richard explains from the streets.
  Richard Burns: That's right, Lianne. It used to be a patch of desert, then it was a mob town. Now, it is the corporate headquarters of America. Back to you in the studio.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: The game featured the ability to customize some vehicles to enhance their performance and appearance: Usually your car would only really benefit from the nitro speed boosters, but feel free to blow money on the golden dollar-symbol hubcaps and pimp hydraulics.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Tunnels are just big enough to get a helicopter/VTOL jet through.
  • There's a sign atop a bridge saying, 'There are no easter eggs up here. Go away.'
  • San Andreas also changes how C.J. speaks based on his physical appearance. The developers knew some players would try to get CJ as fat as possible, so they have C.J. speak alternate lines to any NPC he interacts with based on his weight (he'll say "Lunch money!" when he takes someone's money for example), or based on his clothes (dress in a suit and he'll say "Just cause I dress nice I can't bang, huh?" as he's stomping a pedestrian). He still speaks the same lines in cutscenes however.
  • Certain missions can't be started if C.J. is too fat and you'll get a special cutscene telling you this. For instance, the mission Green Goo, which requires C.J. to put on a jetpack, won't begin because the jetpack won't fit around him (although if you unlock the jetpack for free roam by finishing said mission or cheating, C.J. can still wear them no matter how fat he is - the limitation is actually due to a pit in Area 69 where you can drop to, but not climb off unless you're fit enough).
  • "Stowaway" has you destroying a plane by planting C4 before jumping out with a parachute, and the plane can be destroyed by shooting it from the inside. Not only do you get a funny mission failed cutscene for jumping out the plane without a parachute, but if you happen to have a parachute before you start the mission, you can just shoot the plane and jump out before the explosion kills you, skipping most of the mission.
  • Many areas have proper pathfinding for cars even if traffic never spawns there. Lose a wanted level in a place such as the San Fierro docks and you will see the police cars making their way back onto the main roads.
  • If you go one dollar past the apparent cap of $99,999,999, the money counter rolls over and adds another digit. The actual limit is $999,999,999.
  • Radio host comments will change based upon the weather and time of the day. Some DJs will also remark on current game events, such as the riots that dominate Los Santos during the final stage of the game beyond the evolving news report segments.
  • Something that can only be seen if the player rotates the camera to view the front of a car while driving: if CJ's Driving skill level is low, he'll turn around to look out the back window when in reverse. If his Driving skill level is high, he'll just turn his head enough to use the rearview mirror.
  • It's actually possible to save the game before going to Grove Street and doing the mission "Sweet and Kendl" if the player manages to accumulate enough money to buy an available safe house, be it through killing drug dealers, betting in horse races or doing side activities like Taxi and Vigilante missions. After saving the save file will display the title "In The Beginning", similar to Vice City.
• Diabolical Mastermind: The game has an over-arching plot involving the murder of the hero's mother, Beverly Johnson, as part of a coup d'état within the Grove Street families. Corrupt junk squad officer Frank Tenpenny is behind it, promoting Grove Street capo Big Smoke to drug baron in exchange for his cut. Big Smoke takes over as lead villain once Tenpenny is tried for murder (though he is later acquitted), with numerous gangs answering to him, including the Ballas, the Los Santos Vagos, and the Russian mob.
• Diabolus ex Machina: In a meta-example, this can happen as a result of certain gameplay mechanics. For example, since planes may occasionally glitch into crash-landings, it is possible, but unlikely, to get hit by a plane during a mission.
• Dialog During Gameplay: The game has this during some boss scenes. Thus, sometimes delaying the death blow so the player can hear what else the opponent has to say.
• Die, Chair, Die!: Shooting things well was gun practice, allowing the player to eventually dual wield, fire while walking and other such shooting improvements. Find a hubcap and just go nuts. Just don't shoot the gas tank cover.
• Dig Your Own Grave: Officer Tenpenny has C.J. do this when C.J. finally outlives his usefulness. Though it isn't C.J. who ends up in the grave.
• Dirty Business: Carl Johnson has to do a lot of this at various points in the game.
• Dirty Cop: Officers Tenpenny and Pulaski.
• Dirty Old Monk: The mission "Jizzy" has you drop off a prostitute to a priest at a hotel. Later he manages to convert the prostitute and you must kill them, all while the priest urges the girl to keep undressing during the getaway so he can see the extent of her corruption.
  The Priest: Don't worry girl, the Lord's army will come to our aid, just keep undressing!
• Disability Superpower: Played with and averted with Woozie. His underlings say that he has incredible luck, but it's mostly just them allowing him to win. Later, at his casino, someone comes in and drops two chips on the table, saying that they have a problem; Woozie immediately says that one of them is fake, and C.J. thinks it's this, allowing him to identify fakes by the sound — but Woozie dismissively explains that he just took a guess because why else would someone would only drop two chips on the table and sound so worried.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • If you look underneath the two bridges right behind Grove Street (to the immediate east of it on the map), you can find a submachine gun and some body armor, long before unlocking Ammu-Nation. There is also at least two AK-47 and a Desert Eagle lurking around Los Santos, waiting to be picked up. Those makes the earlier missions a lot easier. Actually knowing where the various weapon pickups are scattered throughout the cities is much more convenient than saving up to buy at Ammu-Nation.
  • There is also how killing drug dealers (can be recognized with black tank top or white covering up hoodie, usually standing still with arms crossed in front of them, a stance no other NPC does) drops more than a lengthy side mission would do. Best done before the mission which starts the turf wars, as Ballas presence were minimum.
• Disney Death: Mike Toreno appears to die around the time Carl turns on Jizzy, but later reappears to give you missions.
• Disposable Woman: Beverly Johnson, whose death prompts C.J. to return to San Andreas and kicks off the plot.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In the "Deconstruction" mission, C.J. finds out that some construction workers have been calling his sister Kendl a hooker. C.J.'s response is to head over to the construction plant to "teach them some respect." How does he do this? He smashes up their portables with a bulldozer, and then traps the foreman in his own porta-potty, pushes it into a hole in the ground with the poor bastard still inside, and then commandeers a cement mixer and uses it to bury him alive. And all the while he's doing that last bit, the poor guy is screaming "OH GOD, NO!" This mission appears to disturb a lot of players as it seems out of character for the violent, yet sympathetic C.J., as he buries a guy alive because his crew insulted his sister.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: After Tenpenny plays the gangs against each other, his acquittal set off a city-wide riot. The game takes place in 1992. Considering that the cities in the GTA universe so obviously replace real ones, and combined with all the real-life based events, this might actually run into Alternate History.
• The Dog Bites Back: When Big Bear finally makes it clear that he's had it with B-Dup's abuse and punches his face in.
  • Also, Hernandez turning on Tenpenny and Pulaski, who had repeatedly treated him very poorly.
• Dogged Nice Guy: C.J. doesn't get sex after like the tenth date, but then again, he also never asks for it.
  • Unless you collect all the oysters during the game, in which case the girls always invite him in for a "coffee".
  • Also, if you wear the Gimp suit when meeting Millie, you automatically enter her house.
    C.J.: Here we go again with the kinky shit...
• Do Not Run with a Gun: The games have the convention of letting you run around while firing small or inaccurate weapons, while forcing you to stand still while firing more powerful guns. San Andreas, however, ups the ante by letting you move slowly while firing the more powerful weapons, though that's once you reach a certain skill level (and even then, your movement speed when not firing them is still slower if you're holding them out).
• Donut Mess with a Cop: Three guesses as to where you receive missions from Pulaski and Tenpenny. There are also various cutscenes where a crime you're committing forces some cops to abandon their donuts and actually do their jobs, much to their frustration.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Judging from the voiceovers, Catalina ties C.J. to a rack, whips him and then has her way with him. This is played for laughs and then never mentioned again.
  Catalina: How was it?
  C.J.: Different.
• Downer Beginning: The game starts with C.J. (who left Los Santos for five years after Brian's murder) returning home to bury his murdered mother, which is grim enough. As soon as he arrives, he's picked up by Tenpenny and Pulaski, who steal a lot of his money, frame him for a cop killing they committed, and dump him in the middle of Ballas turf. And when C.J. does make it to the cemetery in Vinewood, he finds that his other brother, Sweet, is pissed at him for leaving and that his old gang is in shambles.
• Down L.A. Drain: The Los Santos storm drain system appears in a particularly memorable mission. Before and after that, it's a good way to slink around half the city, as it has slopes that lead to street level everywhere, and there's absolutely no traffic.
• Dress-Coded for Your Convenience: The game combines this with Color-Coded for Your Convenience with street gang members (Grove Street Families green, Ballas purple, Vagos yellow, and Aztecas cyan) so that you knew who would shoot at you on sight (Ballas and Vagos).
• Drive-Thru Antics: Early in the story, CJ drives his crew to the Cluckin' Bell, and after everyone places a modest order, the resident Big Eater Big Smoke rattles off one so long, it easily eclipses the rest of the gang's combined. The order is extra-long because he's trying to buy time for the Ballas to turn up and attack the gang.
• Drives Like Crazy: An early Running Gag is Sweet and Ryder taking issue with C.J.'s questionably poor driving... then telling him to drive anyway. Being a Grand Theft Auto game, this is probably a lampshade hanging.
  • Every other AI-controlled vehicle in the game. Oh, you're trying to get patients to the hospital? Let me just run this red light and sideswipe you. Not to mention the fact that a fender-bender can turn into demolition derby when the guy you hit decides to kill you for it.
• Driving into a Truck: In at least one mission you have to do this.
• Drugs Are Bad: The Neighborhood-Friendly Gangsters ain't down with that shit, at least the hard ones such as crack cocaine — weed is OK, apparently. C.J. comes around to this realization when he sees that even a badass like Big Bear can be made into a bitch for rock. You can encounter drug dealers through out the game, and they will ask you if you want some rock. Even if you say yes, C.J., in no uncertain terms, tells the guy to take his business elsewhere. Also, each dealer carries $2000 without exception, more money than the vast majority of Los Santos missions provide; so in the early chapters, waging your own personal war on drugs is to your extreme advantage.
• Dual Wielding: If C.J. gets his weapon skill up to Hitman with the Pistol, Sawn-Off Shotgun, or Micro-SMG, he can pack one in each hand for double the devastation. You will lose accuracy when doing this, but when Rule of Cool is in full effect like this you simply won't care. This also makes the AmmuNation shooting range challenge slightly easier.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: OK, you've completed all the collectibles, bought all property, completed all side missions, you're a proven master of vehicles both on the land, water and in the air, the Grove Street Families' territory is bigger than it has ever been and yet when your brother is freed from jail due to your connections with the government he still treats you like a noob, chewing you out on leaving Los Santos behind again. Sweet's behavior is justified, since he has been in jail all the time without any contact to outside, and he has no way of knowing about your various exploits, or your reasons for leaving. Given this situation, it makes sense for him to react this way. Nevertheless, the sudden shift in mood can be a bit perplexing for the player.
  • Averted earlier in the game; after getting Grove Street back on its feet, Sweet finally acknowledges Carl after taking every prior opportunity to chastise him for running away years ago:
    Sweet: Ryder, give C.J. a break, man. He practically turned the Families 'round all by himself.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: A lot of missions only reward you with "respect", rather than money. Tenpenny's missions don't even give you that.
• Dumb Muscle: Jizzy specifically refers to C.J. as this repeatedly (apparently the game is assuming you've been spending some time at the gym). He's wrong, but C.J. was trying to get on his good side so he could snap at him behind his back.
• Dungeon Bypass: The factory filled with Russian weapon smugglers. Half of it can be bypassed by driving a tall vehicle to the back wall, clamber onto the car roof and jump the fence.

E

• Early-Bird Cameo: A logo for Daewang can be seen on a fax machine in the Definitive Edition, before it officially debuted in Grand Theft Auto VI.
• Early Game Hell: Previous games in the series were much more generous in regards to money rewards in early game — III gave rewards in the Portland missions around the thousands each time, even though there was nothing to spend them on (no safehouses, and the Portland Ammu-Nation selling only very basic weapons); Vice City dropped rewards in early game to the hundreds, and gave more things to spend them on (with several safehouses to buy, and Ammu-Nation starting to sell decent weapons much earlier), but at least offered some cash just by doing the story. In San Andreas, in contrast, the missions in Los Santos that reward cash can be counted on one hand, there are also several safehouses to buy from the start (and, considering the map is much bigger, they are more important than ever), and there's a new money sink in the form of customization options (haircuts, tattoos, clothes, etc). Completing side missions to earn cash (well, that or abusing Save Scumming when horse betting) is now not only recommended, but required, if the player doesn't want to stay completely broke. The rewards are much better around San Fierro, and by Las Venturas the player will be swimming in cash, but Los Santos requires a good management of resources.
• Earth Is Young: The Epsilon Program believes that the world is only 157 years old.
• Easter Egg: So, so many. There's a sign saying "There are no Easter Eggs up here. Go away." on top of one of the towers of the Gant Bridge in San Fierro. Furthermore, if you go to the Bridge's tourist gift shop, you will see a piece of the bridge's cable, and a plaque describing how much disc space the bridge takes up (A "staggering" 1.27 megabytes of space!). Also many audio Easter eggs on the various radio stations.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • The series often forces the player to hunt down antagonists before battling them. Occasionally, it's possible to kill the antagonists before or during the hunt—for instance, Ryder can be killed with a sniper rifle before he reaches the speedboat he's supposed to flee in.
  • A lot of the escort missions force you to make sure your vehicle doesn't blow up while roaming gang cars are shooting from you at all angles. You could either have mad skills in driving... or just drive off road and avoid rival cars altogether.
  • In one of the first missions in San Andreas, you have to follow a train in a motorbike with Big Smoke in the back seat shooting bad guys standing on top of the train. The shortcut is to get the bike, run ahead of the train, climb a concrete rail and a bridge, stop at the roof of a building and jump on top of the train as it passes. Now shoot at will. But there's a time limit for this technique, as there's a certain bridge passing over the train that knocks you from the top of the train. Alternatively, tap the accelerate button instead of holding it to make the bike go faster, which is also an Easy Level Trick on any bike races.
  • Ambulance missions in San Andreas got even worse than they were in previous installments, since every new level reset the timer, making it impossible to build up a reserve like in previous titles. Unless you did them in Angel Pine (the town you're dropped into after The Green Sabre mission), in which case all targets spawn within the village, seconds from one another. Firefighting missions are far easier because the timer doesn't reset each level, and the time limit is generous, meaning you have lots of time to complete its 12 levels.
  • In the mission where after a helicopter crash, you lose all your weapons except for a knife, you can swim to surface and buy weapons before coming back to attack the ship.
  • In Zero's final mission, you have to face off against Berkley in RC helicopters. Your job is to remove obstructions so Zero can drive his RC to Berkley's base, while Berkley will use his helicopter to drop barrels on the path and tanks to attack Zero. However, you can grab a bomb and drop it on Berkley's helicopter, removing him from the game and significantly reducing the number of obstructions you'll have to deal with (or, as it is a Timed Mission, you can drop hard objects several times to any of the enemy vehicles, three drops are enough to destroy them and none of them recognizes you).
  • Taking over gang territory requires you to pop a few of the relevant gang members on foot to start a war for that territory, then kill several waves of really well-armed gangsters. This is mercifully optional during the first part of the game (and incidentally meaningless aside from earning a lot of SMG and rifle ammo), but not during the final part. Fortunately, the game only requires you to make the first few kills on foot. If you have, say, a tank, there's nothing stopping you from using that once the gang war is started.
  • Cutting ahead of officer Pulaski in "High Noon" and shooting his tires out avoids a lengthy chase against his far superior car. However, attempting to do it before the chase actually starts doesn't do anything. You can also just jack his car from the right side, which kills him as soon as he's shoved out. It's also possible to shoot the tires of Jizzy's car in "Ice Cold Killa".
  • Escaping Big Smoke's crack den in "End of the Line" is much easier if you completed level 12 of the firefighter missions, due to it making you completely fireproof.
  • In “Uncle Sam,” carefully drive the Packer around a corner where Rider doesn't stand in the way of fire and the mission should be easier to deal with.
• Easy Sex Change: With tongue firmly in cheek, one of the fake radio ads advertises this sort of thing.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Carl must infiltrate one of these under a base called Area 69. Yes, it's inspired by Area 51.
• Elephant in the Living Room: Played for laughs in the radio news broadcasts, where a government official being interviewed about certain mysterious black helicopters responds with just "Helicopters? What helicopters?", with the spinning helicopter rotors clearly audible in the background.
• Elite Mooks:
  • The authorities get stronger and wield heavier weapons as you gain a higher wanted level. At level 3, SWAT team members will rappel down from helicopters in full body armor packing Uzis. At level 4, more show up in armored SWAT trucks. At level 5, the FBI shows up in their lightning-fast SUVs and carry deadly MP5s. Finally, at level 6, the military shows up with M4s driving tanks and troop transports, the former able to detonate any car almost instantly on impact (mercifully, they cannot use the main gun).
  • Gang wars have three waves of escalating numbers and difficulty. The first wave has thugs equipped with same pistols and Uzis they always have. The second has a mix of MP5s and AK-47s. The third wave is equipped almost exclusively with AK-47s.
• El Spanisho: In one mission, Big Smoke is trying to negotiate with some Mexican gangsters before he loses his patience and demands...
  Smoke: Hey, excuso me, yo soy El Grando Smokio, and I want that grass. Comprende?
  Cholo: Hey, fuck you, cabrón.
  Smoke: Now, that ain't nice. Coughio up el weedo, before I blow your brains out all over the patio
  Cholo: ¡Ay, chinga tu madre, pendejo! (Hey, fuck your mama, asshole!)
• Elvis Impersonator: Several hundred wandering the streets of Las Venturas. And they are played by different ethnicities! The hispanic ones just do really awful Elvis impersonations, but the black ones would more accurately be called "Little Richard impersonators" and act accordingly. Amusingly, the game keeps track of the number of Elvis impersonators you've killed on the stats screen. Uh huh.
• Endless Corridor: Unlike the other GTA games, which stopped players from leaving the designated zone with an Invisible Wall, leaving the island (via boat plane or even swimming) would lead you through an endless zone of sea and sky. You can fly in one direction for an hour straight trying to get to Liberty City; it will also took you an hour to get back to land. And after going out a certain distance, you can't get back to land except by crashing or restoring the game. Subtly lampshaded in that one particular airplane mission happens a significant distance away from the map.
• Entendre Failure:
  Carl: Does the Pope shit in the woods?
  Cesar: I keep telling you, I don't know, holmes. Where His Holiness does his business is his business.
  
  The Truth: I never made love to my mother. She wouldn't.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: Carl goes from being poor in Ganton with only his late mother's house and the clothes on his back, to building a criminal empire across San Andreas.
• Erudite Stoner:
  • The Truth (voiced by Peter Fonda) from is one. Also grows his own stuff, for consumption and distribution.
  • Ryder too, to an extent. He wants to be one, at one point he claims he was thrown out of school because he was 'too intelligent for this shit', and not because he beat up a teacher for wearing Balla colours.
  • As his name implies, Big Smoke, however, has his moment (which is instantly ruined by CJ):
    Big Smoke: Like it says in the book... We are both blessed and cursed.
    Carl Johnson: What fuckin' book?
  • There's also this random NPC quote:
    "I smoke 'cause it gives me knowledge!"
• Et Tu, Brute?: Did anyone not see Big Smoke and Ryder selling out to Tenpenny and Pulaski from a mile away?
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: The Johnson siblings dearly love their mother Beverly, so much so her murder prompted Carl to return home in the first place. Officer Pulaski finds out how much C.J. loves his mama — the hard way.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Grove Street Families, the Varrio Los Aztecas and the Mountain Cloud Boys do bad things, but all of them strongly oppose the sale of hard drugs. Drug dealing is presented as the ultimate evil.
• Everybody Knew Already: Woozie's blindness. He's convinced that he acts normally enough to be indistinguishable from someone sighted, but he feels his way around everywhere and fires an MP5 like... well, someone who can't see (although, ironically, he still shoots better than many others, such as Smoke in "Wrong Side of the Tracks"). Everyone humors him.
  Woozie: I have a confession to make. I... I'm blind.
  C.J.: No shit.
• Everyone Is Armed: A cheat code causes all pedestrians to be armed, carrying everything from handguns to Rocket-Propelled Grenades.
• Every Pizza Is Pepperoni: Not only are all the pizzas CJ can get at Well-Stacked Pizza pepperoni, the restaurant's logo and radar icon depict a slice of pepperoni pizza. However, looking at their menu reveals alternate toppings.
• Experience Points: The game uses respect that can actually increase or decrease depending on actions.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: CJ and Sweet plan to attack the Ballas right when Cesar calls the former to meet him to show him something. CJ agrees and discovers that C.R.A.S.H., Big Smoke, Ryder, and the Ballas were all in on the drive-by that killed CJ and Sweet's mother. CJ talks about how he needs to warn Sweet what's going on before realizing Sweet's about to walk into a trap. CJ tells Cesar to get Kendl to safety before rushing over to find a wounded Sweet. CJ fights off the Ballas before both brothers are arrested.
• Exploited Immunity: Being the first game in the series where the player can swim, C.J. can evade pursuit by jumping into water. The pursuers will jump in after him, but they have Super Drowning Skills.
• Expository Theme Tune: The game brings us a rap song summing up the basic story behind C.J., and some explanation about the game's defining elements.
• Eyepatch of Power: You can have C.J. wear an eyepatch as soon as you get access to the Binco in Ganton. Having one of his eyes covered up doesn't negatively affect him a bit.

F

• Face–Heel Turn: Big Smoke and Ryder. Subverted in that they were never faces in the first place. Arguably, Ryder was, very early in the game. At least he was shooting with you and Sweet. Alternatively, at least he was pretending to shoot with you and Sweet. Perhaps it is a matter of Heel-Heelier Turn.
  • Averted with several characters (specifically Toreno, Cesar and Woozie) who are depicted as having the potential to betray CJ but who never actually do.
• Failed a Spot Check: Played with in this game, which has many RPG elements. Characters will notice if you are out of shape or if you are not wearing the appropriate gang colors. You can pick and choose clothes and whatever you are wearing shows up in the cut scenes. However, characters will not notice if you attend, for example, a serious business meeting in a gimp suit. Said meeting includes the character's sister. Ew.
• Fake Band: The Gurning Chimps, although, unlike their predecessor Love Fist, they don't have any songs on in-game radio.
• Fake Difficulty:
  • The gang wars provide a neat way to gain lots of ammunition and money in the early Los Santos part of the game. When you complete "The Green Sabre", you lose all of that without warning thanks to Tenpenny and all the territory you had becomes enemy territory.
  • The dancing and lowrider minigames are much harder than they should be due to the button prompts you have to hit being very badly synchronized with the music.
  • "Wrong Side of the Tracks" is infamous because Smoke can only aim at a certain angle at the Vagos, necessitating you to stay at a specific distance away from the side of the train or Smoke will miss.
  • Certain missions will automatically equip you with a specific type of weapon at key moments. You have no control over this, so even if you had been carrying a stronger weapon than what the game gives you, you're forced to use the weaker weapon.
  • This game has much bumpier and more hilly terrain than in the previous games, which means its even easier to tip over your vehicle than before. This makes missions like "Photo Opportunity" unnecessarily difficult as lowriders like the one used in that mission are more prone to tipping over and staying upside down.
• Famous-Named Foreigner: While not foreign, Eddie Pulaski is supposed to be a Polish-American - obviously named after Casimir Pulaski, featured in many American place names.
• Far East:
  • The Chinatown in San Fierro is chock full of this.
    • One of the pedestrians commonly found in the district are Japanese salarymen.
    • One of the weapons that CJ can get his hands on while roaming there is a Katana, a Japanese sword.
    • At the Cobra Marital Arts Gym, the master wears a Chinese martial arts uniform while his students wear a Japanese one. Also, the fighting style that CJ can learn at that gym consists entirely of kicks, which is characteristic of some forms of Tae Kwon Do (a Korean martial art).
  • The Yakuza cheat code fills the streets with Triads, all armed with katanas and riding black sport bikes.
• Fatal Method Acting: In-universe example. Early on, the player can listen to WCTR and hear an example. Jack Howitzer appears on "Entertaining America" to promote his new film and brings a gun with him. He tries to calm host Billy Dexter by saying that it's not loaded, then fatally shoots him. On the bright side, Dexter is replaced by Lazlow.
• Fat Bastard:
  • Big Smoke is quite heavy and usually lets the player and the other homies do all the work. In one mission, a rival gang attacks your gang in a car and during the firefight, Big Smoke eats everyone's food that they ordered instead of shooting back. This becomes more clear when C.J. later on finds out Big Smoke is actually on the side of the rival gang and is selling drugs, something that C.J.'s gang was fighting to get rid of.
  • Also C.J. if you have him eating a lot to rack up fat.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • Tenpenny serves as this once his true colors are shown.
  • Big Smoke, whose cheerful and chummy nature belies his criminal tendencies. Turns out Big Smoke was Evil All Along and that his cheerful and chummy nature was just a façade so he can turn on the Grove Street Families and side with Tenpenny and the Ballas out of greed and cocaine.
• Filth: Queens, The Gayborhood in San Fierro, has a porn theater showing the rather unimaginative Wizard of Ass.
• Fire Means Chaos: You will come across flaming cars during riots.
• Firing One-Handed: Carl "C.J." Johnson can dual-wield Sawed Off Shotguns.
• First-Person Snapshooter: The game had you taking pictures of photograph icons spread throughout the environments. The pictures actually end up as screenshots in the game's folder (including the in-game text telling you how far along you are in the sidequest).
• Flanderization: Catalina is a total adrenaline junkie, unlike in GTA III.
• Flunky Boss: Big Smoke constantly calls in Vagos mooks until you kill him.
• Flying Seafood Special: Sharks, dolphins and whatever else is underwater can become this due to a rocket glitch.
• Fog of War: The game utilizes this extremely well. If you mod away the drawing distance and go to, say, Mount Chiliad, you'll see that the map, while impressive for 2004, isn't quite as big as it seems. By utilizing the draw distance, making vehicles look like they are going fast, and the huge size of almost everything makes the map feels huge.
• Forbidden Zone:
  • Area 69, a military and research compound. Getting past the fence at ground level instantly gives you a 5-star warrant level, and you'll be shot down by missiles or the military's fighter jets if you approach the area by air. There's one mission where you do get the chance to sneak into the facility and see why the area is so heavily guarded; using alien technology, the military created a jet pack that allows the wearer to fly. You get to keep it once you complete the mission.
  • Easter Basin Naval Station, a military base located in San Fierro also applies. Entering the area or approaching the stationed ship will give you a similar wanted level like the Area 69.
  • The impound lots, located at the main police station in each main city. You will gain a 3 star wanted level if you're detected by one of the police officers at the lot while infiltrating without driving a police vehicle. Though, the wanted level can be avoided if you kill the police officer who detected you before he calls for backup.
• Forced Level-Grinding: At one point, sooner or later, you're going to have to spend an hour or so doing some diving practice so you can qualify for one of Woozie's missions. Thank goodness the Chinese Triads and the 'bad guys' will wait however long it takes for you to practice swimming. What makes this ridiculous is that the mission itself serves as a tutorial, even though you need to grind to unlock it, and the point of being able to dive (to avoid the patrol boats) is easily bypassed by sinking the boats or killing their crews. You'll also have to grind for muscle or fat build up when it comes to certain girlfriends so that they'll start dating you, but this can be bypassed by finding all the oysters in the game.
• Forced Tutorial: The game makes you complete flight school to progress, despite you being able to fly perfectly fine previously, and despite you never needing to use the maneuvers that the school teaches you. But you do get a prize for doing it well enough, so it's not a total time waster. It's very difficult though (Truth in Television if you've ever tried to get a pilot's license).
• Foreshadowing:
  • Let's face it, despite the subtlety, Rockstar really wasn't trying to hide Big Smoke's impending betrayal. The clues were right in our faces.
    • He moved out of Grove Street to buy a house in Idlewood (aka Ballas turf) with money he claimed was given to him by his aunt. It most likely came from drug dealing.
    • Big Smoke never attended C.J.'s mother's funeral and decided to stay in the house (possibly to attack Sweet once he would arrive inside), and right when he meets CJ, he tosses the bat right onto the table on top of the photo of C.J.'s mother.
    • The Ballas never target Ryder or Big Smoke during the first mission. Likewise, during "Drive Thru", Big Smoke doesn't fire at the Ballas.
    • During the "Drive Thru" mission, Big Smoke tried to change the subject right when C.J. talks about his mother's death towards Sweet, and on that same mission, when Sweet and Ryder attempted to kill the Ballas after the gang tried to head to their turf, Big Smoke deliberately uses the food as an excuse to refuse to even lift a finger to help them. It's also possible that his long order beforehand was a way to lengthen the time to keep the Grove Street Family out of the hood to give the Ballas time to kill the other members of the hood, including C.J. and Sweet.
    • During "Wrong Side of the Tracks", when C.J. asks Big Smoke what was really going on, Big Smoke immediately tried to change the subject and asks C.J. if he would like to go for a ride.
  • During "Just Business", while C.J. and Big Smoke are attacked and chased by Russians, Smoke parks in front of a barricade the Russians set up rather than find some way to go around them up until C.J. kills them, claims the motorbike can't pick up speed, and somehow, the Russians seem to know where the two were going.
    • During "Reuniting the Families", right after C.J. and Sweet meet up with the Families at a local hotel where the police arrive, Big Smoke and Ryder abandon them, but do return afterwards. However, during the police chase, Big Smoke, the driver of the chase, circles around the neighborhood twice and drives through an active car wash, causing C.J. to get soap in his eyes. There's also the end, in which the helicopter is hovering low and Big Smoke decides to floor it straight through rather than back up. He also claims the brakes were out, even though he had just had the car speeding, which was another sign he subtly tried to kill C.J. and Sweet.
    • The license plate on his car reads "A 2 TMFK" which could be interpreted as "a two-time motherfucker", hinting at his actions in the game.
    • Big Smoke constantly has Tenpenny and Pulaski visiting his house.
  • After being rescued by CJ from the Da Nang Boys, Toreno demands CJ's wallet to check who he is. It turns out that Toreno has checked CJ's background and finds out about Sweet's imprisonment and Tenpenny's leverage over CJ. After the Loco Syndicate was disbanded, Toreno contacts CJ and recruits him to do dangerous missions for him in exchange of Sweet's early release.
  • Woozie's blindness is hinted at in his introductory cutscene, where he extends an arm out to shake CJ's hand, but is standing too far from him and at the wrong angle, leaving Carl and Cesar very confused and suspecting something strange about him.
• Forgot the Disability: Wu Zi Mu is first met during a car race, with The Reveal that he's blind coming as a surprise to CJ. There are a few scenes where the joke is that he's blind (running into a wall or shooting randomly) and a few where other people forget about it, such as the heist planning scenes.
  Woozie: Hey, are you pointing again?
• Forklift Fu: There's forklifts, and at least one mission that requires the player to use one. However, they are so slow and unwieldy (due to the rear wheel drive) that pretty much any other vehicle in the game would make a more effective killing tool.
• Fowl-Mouthed Parrot: Tony the Parrot.
  Tony: Brawk, I never fucked over anyone in my life who didn't have it coming!
• Free Rotating Camera: The "Rotation And Tilt" variation.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • C.J. will sometimes mockingly say that he had a bad childhood when killing random people. That and he will also "blame society".
  • Catalina blurts one out when complaining about C.J.'s (subjective) lack of backbone in their crime sprees. C.J. is appropriately horrified by the aside.
• A Friend in Need: Cesar leading C.J. to the Wham Mission is what solidifies their friendship.
• Friendship Moment:
  • Cesar fully earns Carl's trust when he shows him Smoke and Ryder's betrayal.
  • C.J. learning about Woozie's blindness also qualifies, as the two become noticeably more buddy-buddy afterward.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: C.J. goes from being a random gangbanger (not even leader of his own street gang!) to semi-respected businessman and head of a criminal empire that extends over the entire state. However, because he's with the good guys, this may also be a case of From Zero to Hero.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In "Cleaning the Hood", while Ryder sarcastically greets Ballas pushers to take them out, take a close look at the background. You can actually see a Balla getting some head from a hooker.
  • Because San Andreas is a living environment, it's not uncommon for CJ to encounter NPCs engaging in non-sequitur-silled conversations, police chases, fights, shootings, vehicular accidents, plane crashes, and general insanity going on completely separate from what the player is doing...
  • Especially the plane crash, where it was acknowledged that to save AI processing, they are simply programmed to fly straight after appearing in a certain height relative to the player's position.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • An example: Ban Immigration Green cards Outright Today!^note The actual acronym should be BIGCOT, which could be misheard as "big cock".
  • San Andreas also has Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, which was an actual unit of the LAPD.^note Funnily enough, the San Andreas version is actually less corrupt than the real organization had ended up.

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