Sunday, February 26, 2006

Curse you, Red Baron!

I've been playing "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City." In the "Bombs Away" scenario, Cuban drug runners are on the dock and I have a three RC biplanes with bombs strapped to the bottom that I need to fly across the bay and drop on the boats. Since I was playing with mouse and keyboard instead of the game controller I was having a great deal of problem controlling the aircraft. It would rise and fall like a roller coaster, eventually crashing into the water.

Reload the game and restart the mission.

With practice I could get it to fly nearly straight and level but any attempt to turn would cause it to slip back into the climb-stall-dive-splash cycle.

Reload the game and restart the mission.

Finally, I was able to get a plane to crash into one of the boats and blow it up. The cheat book suggested that the explosion of one boat should be enough to detonate the other two but they survived. The Cubans jumped in the remaining boats and took off. I could barely manage hitting one boat as a stationary target, let alone chasing down two different moving targets.

Reload the game and restart the mission.

At one point, I crashed the plane into the dock where the Cubans were standing around. They didn't seem to notice. I ran the plane into one of them. He fell down then stood back up as if nothing happened. I kept hitting him until he didn't get up again. So, I drove the plane around the dock, essentially chopping their shins up with the plane's propeller until they bled to death. Then, I drove the plane off the dock into a boat and blew it up. Since the crews were all dead, the other boats just sat on the dock waiting for me to fly another plane across the bay to make a rough landing in the parking lot and then drive onto the next boat.

Somehow, I don't think this is what the programmers had in mind.

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