Currently Playing: GTA IV

AKA Back to Libery City. Turns out the mission I was stuck on is the final mission. The Official Stratergy guide doesn't really help either. Apparently I'm supposed to use the speed boat to catch up with the chopper and press triangle. The fact that the time limit is so tight that multiple attempts have never seen me get close enough doesn't seem to bother them. Of course the fact that Rockstar hate checkpoints and I have to go back to the beginning of the mission every time doesn't help either.

The Guide does point out though that if I make a different choice the mission before I'll get a slightly different take on the last mission that doesn't involve a speed boat. Hurrah. Fortunately I have multiple saves (I tend to keep five or so on the go and rotate through them) so making the other choice wasn't difficult. The mission itself is a ball ache though.

Let's be honest, despite all the plaudits GTA IV got the crux of the experience can be annoying. The driving model is terrible. The cars understeer like fuck and then snap into terrible oversteer. I spent most of last night pinging of walls and traffic like some kind of demented pinball.. Presumably practice helped but in isolation it's terrible. The much vaunted gunplay is still pretty rubbish too. A lot of later missions involve shooting through doorways and you just can't get a useable bead on a target in through the narrow openings. Even when your trying to get a lock on a target around a corner that you can clearly see the gun appears to be firing into the wall impotently.

On the cargo ship mission you're supposed to climb up a crane and snipe as many guys as you can. Which is fine. Then you have to slowly make your way through to the upper decks clearing bad guys as you go. Once you get to the bridge you can open the cargo hold and then more bad guys have arrived and your supposed to clear your way back down again. Sadly by this point a combination of over whelming numbers and broken combat will probably leave you very thin on health. I'd tried this mission multiple times last year before giving up and taking the other choice. Not this time. I basically just ran and jumped off the ship. Swam around to the docks. Climbed the crane again and sniped as many as I could before once again taking to the ship. This worked quite well. Then I managed to snipe a lot of bad guys from above the cargo hold before leaping in. Then there's another cut scene and your confronted with a boss battle. By this time I've got very little health and I'm bricking myself about dying. Fortunately I whittle the number of bad guys down before getting a cheeky sniped head shot in.. Then it tells you to make your way off the boat. I drive back to my safe house very carefully only to find that I can't 'save' mid mission.. not only do we not have a checkpoint apparently I'm not even finished...

I eventually cleared it and saved and made my way to the final mission.. I got most of the way throught it.. I'm chasing the final boss through the park only to find that after three massive gun battles, chasing the copter on a motorbike. Getting aboard the copter and following it too the park watching a cut scene on of my NPCs in the party has been killed cos I left him alone to chase the bad guy as instructed.. And guess what.. No checkpoint back to the beginning.

I'll perservere tonight...