oh hell, I thought GTA3 had the best music. It wasn't all licensed popular music. I dunno, when they started licensing the music for VC and then SA it just lost some of its charm. At that point I might as well just listen to MP3s.
Anyway, I liked SA and the gangsta stuff was cool.
It was a little slow getting started but some of the parts were pretty awesome, like the gang warfare and stuff was fun. The graphics were nothing special. In fact, I think GTA3 was the only one that really impressed me graphically.
But GTA3 had horrible map layout. On the other hand, it was possible to find insane jumps. The map layout in VC was better but there weren't any just totally awesome jumps. SA had a crappy map layout AND no insane jumps. Unless you count the jump at the top of the mountain.