Me and Chris checked it out the other night. And no, I'm not talking about playing 2P pool at that bar down the street... I'm talking genuine dual-GTA, albeit slightly crippled.

I've only found one 2P icon in Los Santos. I would bet there's one in each city, perhaps more. The one I found is inside a fenced up hacienda. Start at the Johnson home and drive straight out the cul-de-sac. The area I'm talking about is just past the second bridge, on the right. You have to scale some fences to get to it.

Given the closed-off location of the icon, I figured it was some kind of enclosed paintball-esque arena dealie. But it's not! Once you activate a second controller and let Player Two choose a skin, you trigger a Free Roaming mission. So climb the fence and go nuts. If either player dies, you both are sent back to the hacienda.

The good news: it's not splitscreen. Although you'll have some wonky camera getting over the fence, it soon pulls way out so both players can see themselves. Yes, this means you have to stay fairly close to each other or risk running into an invisible Gauntlet wall. You can't enter buildings or trigger plot missions, but you can both pile in the same car and drive off. And recruit friendly NPCs into a gang and stalk the streets. I forgot to see if you can trigger any of the R3 missions.

We also couldn't figure out how to have one person drive a car while the other shoots from the window. The passenger player gets a moving reticle while riding, but neither of us could get it to do anything that resembled fun. That's why I was looking for "GTA San Andreas 2 player" for help... and getting nothing. Once this blog goes live I'll probably just end up Googling myself.

L1 is a dedicated "kiss" button in 2P mode. Seems to be purely for laughs.

To me, this seems to guarantee that GTA4 (or whatever they call it) will have online multiplayer. Consider this 2P mode the first draft.

Back in the world of 1P, I've cleared out all the Grove Street homie missions... Sweet, Ryder, Big Smoke, and that annoying tool O.G. Loc. I saved the Tenpenny missions for last. I'm starting to see C.J.'s character arc develop... lately he's been gettin' all existential with the gang, asking Big Smoke "why's it gotta be like this" and stuff. It looks to me like Carl is going to turn away from gangbanging and switch from acting-violence to reacting-violence, but I'm just guessing.

One difference between SA and the previous Grand Theft Autos is how slow your money rolls in. I had just over $2,000 to my name after running through everybody's gangland missions. That's nothing in the San Andreas economy. Then I discovered pimping. Hop into a Greenwood and you can trigger the R3 pimping mission, which is really just a complicated taxi run. You'll collect a ton of cash out of it, even after all the repairs you'll need for the Greenwood. I just purchased the $10,000 apartment in the lower left corner of the city and I still have $20,000 or so remaining.

Next time I play, I'm heading to the docks to find a moving van, because I want to devote some time to the burglary missions.