GUEST SPESHIAL Painful Moments in Gaming: GTA Vice City

As if this week wasn't painful enough, LEGEND Dr Wo 69 has an eleventh hour entry!

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee got a 419 in North East Banana Grove.

It took a stupid amount of concentration to get to Vice City in the OG GTA and when it came onto the PS2 in full 3D glory it was the version that I played the most and enjoyed the most in a murdering sense. I tried San Andreas but it was just too god damn big! Yeah you can do all this crazy stuff in it with bikes and parachutes but I could never recognize a landmark to let me get my bearings. Vice City, 3 islands, couple of bridges, airport all you need to have fun in.

I took a vow on this game that I would NEVER CHEAT! EVER! Not one for anything, if I needed a weapon I would go and find it, if I wanted armour I would buy it, if I wanted an Apache Gunship I would have to steal it. The reason for this, is that I wanted the best Criminal Rating possible and by entering the cheats your rating gets a raping. I learnt this from GTA3.

So I plodded through the game getting busted only 5 times, got stuck on the final "Bank Job" for a about 6 months but thats cool, I was just filling time doing all the property missions, finding hidden packages. Oh the hidden packages, jumping motorbikes across rooftops to light up a pornstars shapely body on a skyscraper, making a killing on the frenzies you know all the bits in between, then I finished the game, hoorah!!! What next?

Well I came up with a game that I played on and off for god knows how long but I remember doing this during secondary school, then Uni, then after, then some more. To get your criminal rating up all you need to do is kill things, lots of things and not get caught. Getting Busted lowers your rating and just looks bad, so my game consisted of tooling up with the multitude of weapons, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, M16's, chainsaws the lot and cause as much carnage as possible get the army out, steal a tank, cause more mayhem and then leg it back to a safe house and save. The Army are A-Holes. Stupid programmed A-Holes, but they still would kill you very quickly so jumping into the tank was the key to survival and then trying to get the tank into a garage also, not the easiest of maneuvers.

This game was a cathartic exercise for me, (just like playing through the first level of Doom). Mass murder is a great way to release aggression. Whenever I was, pissed off, pissed, bored or needed a "recharge time", in with the Vice City and yeah chunking along the highway in a tank with the barrel turned backwards to go faster blowing shit up. This, that is all the behaviour above, continued for X amount of time where X is undetermined due to me never noting down when it all begun but I only ever had 2 save files, 1 of them I abandoned 5 missions in as it was gay and just kept on with the original file.

I had an overwhelming urge about a year ago to investigate the old girl, it had been a while since I had seen the Pink and pretty lights of that sea front, maybe I would just go and shoot 1 innocent bystander for old times sake, nothing too grotesque, I had matured slightly. Games had began to include moral decisions, times had changed but it would make me feel good just to slip back into that blue velour again and pop some rounds into a rollerblader.

In it goes, loading data- save data corrupted.

I cant even remember my last entry as at the time I just didn't look......

Dr Wo.

Cunzy1 1's note: One of the overiding themes of pain week has been software failure. I'd just like to point this out to all those who go on about 1000 years.