Moments from GTA3 and Liberty City

The most efficient player of a GTA game is not human; it is either the GTA pedestrian or a colony of GTA police officers acting as a swarm of cop cars. We are at a disadvantage. Let me enumerate the bullshit moments I experienced, felt burned by, and loved during my time with GTA3 on PC:

  1. Sayonara Salvatore – this mission you gotta wait outside the actual Sex Club for an Italian mob boss to show his ass and then kill him. The missions starts with the warning that he’ll leave the club in 4 minutes, so you gotta get moving and set yourself up out of site of his guards while you wait. I had to do this a number of times. But the bullshit was when I found a nearby roof to stand on, performed a risky jump to actually stand on the lip ledge of this roof to get an even better shot with my guns, and waited. When the boss showed his ass, an NPC spawned in on the ground below, came running up the fire escape up to where I was, and with a single shotgun blast launched me horizontal across the street, slamming against the building with like 20 health. I fall, lose 5 health, take 30 minutes to stand up from prone, and then three mob guards blast me with shotguns as soon as I do.
  2. Silence the Sneak – aforementioned grenade tossing challenge. I tried this so many times that, instead of getting pissed off and killing myself deliberately to start things over, the run that I actually succeeded at things saw me tossing the stack of 26 grenades they hand you at the start, then, limping and armorless I went off to the nearby hospital to heal, then down the street to the AMMUNATION to acquire even more grenades and more armor, and returned to toss those nades through this dude’s window. I did this lap a few times that mission, ended up just tossing grenades into the mess of cars I used to block the garage which the target tried exit, and it was a smooth but ridiculous finish.
  3. Plaster Blaster – there is a guy in a full body cast being transported from a hospital to prison in an ambulance in this mission, and he needs to die. When you get close to the ambulance you’re hit with an immediate 5 stars and are swarmed. My second attempt I just got out of the car, waited for the ambulance to approach me, and fired on it. A damn twist in the plot. “BULLETS WON’T HURT HIM!!” I got in my car and chased after the ambulance, all the way to the North side of the city. Then I realized, the dot of my target on the map was way south. Turns out, the target falls out of the ambulance and lays there wherever he falls. I race back, now with six stars on my ass, and see him parked underneath a pile of abandoned cop cars. I blow them up, he takes no damage. I drive my car into the smoldering rubble to clear access to him. As I do this, a cop car drives over him and I get a mission completed.
  4. Decoy – fucking Decoy. I attempted this like more than 10 times. You start on one island and drive to another to even begin the action. The task is to drive police transport car for 3 minutes with six stars tagged to your bumper. So much wonky physics shit happened during this mission. Sometimes army trucks get posted in the middle of the street as a blockade. You can easily plow through them, most of the time. My method was actually just to glide between the opening in the middle. But this one time when I did that, my car came to a full fucking stop because I tapped the corner on one of these trucks, and one of the army NPCs posted next to his truck just pivoted on his Y axis like some inhuman digital freak and pulled me from the truck, and I was busted for life.
  5. Same mission, Decoy, a later attempt, crossing the bridge in my hijacked Italian sports car (no carbon on the valves I assure you), I fall through the geometry into the water below.
  6. Espresso-2-Go – this one has you drive across all three islands in the game on a mission to explode coffee stands. You have 10 minutes to do this, which sounds like a fine amount of time, and it probably is, but the idea of doing a 10 minute task over again drives the tension in this mission. Anyway, I consider this one GTA 3’s final act of hazing for me. Completing this was like graduating. I became a made man in the psycho circus of goofy physics and aggressive AI. I raced across the whole map. Had to swap cars like 4 times cause they are so fragile in GTA 3, to the point I wondered if this was like a Dark Souls 2 weapon degradation being tied to the framerate kind of situation, but it’s not. Taking out the 2nd to last coffee stand I had about 20 seconds to make it. I drove blindly through sprites of trees in hopes that there would just be roads or through access on the other side to the final street where the coffee stand was waiting. There it was. I gun it like I always do. You only need to drive your car into these things. But I just bounce off the coffee stand. It’s car-proof. 5 seconds left. I get out of the car and madly hit L2 and R2 trying to find my grenades. I shoot my pistol. I switch to my grenades as the clock hits 00:01. A second passes. The grenade goes of… Mission Passed: $40,000

I can only say wowza after all that.