hypercoder

Excellent! Thanks for the confirmation - me being on a PS2 I don't know how things go for the PC version. I had the jet pack appear on CJ when he came out of the gym one time but didnt' think to take that over to a Safe House. Cool! thanks for the input

Thanks! I was, at the time, 4 star wanted and I ran around the corner and saw that scene - thought it was cool so I grabbed the camera

Two things you can do to make these challenges a piece of cake: 1. Do the Burglary side mission for infinite stamina. 2. Show up wearing a jet pack - when the race starts put on the jet pack and skim to the checkpoints at water level, when you get to the bikes you'll be light years ahead of everyone else.

Ever see the clown driving the Mr Whoopie truck around town? Ok, he creeps me out - mostly because I think he looks like John Wayne Gacy - the guy from Chicago (he dressed up like a clown) that killed 33 people. What do you think?

Here's a "How To" vid (crappy as usual) to set up the jet pack so you have it everytime you load the game from an out door save point. Do these things: 1. Get the jet pack 2. Go to any outdoor save point 3. Drop the jet pack 4. Go to the Save icon 5. Hit Cancel 6. Look where you are standing now 7. Drop the jet pack there 8. Save the game If you've done it right you'll start off with the jet pack and this will work every time you load the game - even if you shut the system off. Works until you save indoors or without the jet pack.

Lately I've been in downtown SA - on the third floor ledge of the tallest building in SA, where it faces the freeway at the Commerce intersection. I did all this with the Sniper Rifle then picked off the spare with a Heat Seeker... As soon as traffic screws itself up (and it will) I get head shots on the drivers so I can build up a pile of cars then take a shot at one of the fuel doors. Great for spectacular explosions and vehicle launches - this is a great site because the traffic will keep coming in to fuel the fire. Best is 17 vehicles so far - this (crappy) vid shows how it looks with 13 vehicles to start:

Courier missions Like Zoom mentioned - you want high cycle skills here, but your worst enemies are not the police vehicles or SWAT wagons - it's the cops on foot patrol... get temporarily stuck in a corner and they will run up and bitch slap you off your wheels. Welcome to the land of failed missions... dammit. If you're approaching a corona and you see a cop on foot - run him over. The 4 wheel vehicles are fairly predictable - they like getting in front of you and braking to stop your forward motion. Easy enough to deal with - when they're next to you, slam on the brakes - they'll do the same thing with a swerve and you can navigate around them. Sometimes you don't want to drive fast - because you'll lose the vehicle tailing you and new ones will spawn in front of you, this can be a real pain if you're approaching your target corona for the package delivery. Quite often the cops will stay in their cars if you haven't gotten off your vehicle - so they'll sit there as well, gives you a few secs to manuver or evade. Road blocks - you can have up to 8 to 12 SWAT guys waiting for you at a road block, automatic weapons and enough combined skill to make your mission miserable. If they are near your target corona - do a 180º and go back about a block or so then return - the SWAT trucks will still be there but the guys with the guns will be gone. If the trucks are gone there may still be a couple of SWAT guys walking around - but not often shooting, run them over, do your thing and split. The hard part about these mission (for me at least, on my PS2) is getting credit for the delivery - toss your package and there can be a 5 or 6 second (real time) lag before it's shows delivery complete. Sometimes you have to pick the package up again and retry tossing it. I've had some that simply would not take the package and I ran out of time...

At some point in time you're going to go on a personal mission to blast away anything that moves or flies. Why? Because you can! So where do you go to make your stand or do you just run around at will leaving a path of destruction? I've tried multiple locations for maximum damage effect - some worked pretty well and some had limitations that were shortcomings in the fun level. Outside the Pay 'n Spray in Doherty - cops line up in the freeway on ramp well enough, you've got something behind your back to limit accessibility by helicopters, but no real traffic to blast away. The Strip in LV, just outside the Four Dragons - lined the center of the street with remote explosives, created a vehicle barricade and took out about a dozen cars all at once. Instant 3 star wanted and cops approach from 180º. Got to run around a bit but gets challenging to keep it up for long. The Church in LV - there's armor here and the cops get stuck at the hedge and can't come right at you. Good blasting effect but traffic thins out after you hit 6 stars. Pilson Interchange, NW LV - jet pack and grenades, once you hit 6 stars you jet to the opposide of the road to evade tanks and carry on business as usual. You can run quite a while here. Being on the ground makes you an easy target, get some elevation and in most places you're too high to shoot down on the cops. Of course grenades or molotovs can pick up the stragglers. Place I found a couple of days ago is right downtown SA - the ledge facing the freeway interchange in Commerce, you're on the tallest building in all of SA but only slightly above the road... You can get there by chopper, jet pack or BASE jumping down from the roof (access door in the NE corner of the ground floor). I've approached this two different ways: With an early mission game save that limits wanted level to 4 stars. Weapons are Heat Seekers, Molotovs, Sniper Rifle and the occasional M4. Because the way the road is layed out and the way these idiots drive there's bound to be an accident soon. When that happens I've been getting head shots on the drivers so I can pile up a bunch of cars - then go for the fuel door on one of them and watch the fireworks. So far my best chain reaction from 1 car has taken out 16 more (from the pile and those that crash into it). On my 100% game (oh yeah, unlimited ammo) I go in with a jet pack and a Mini-gun. Blast away - this weapon will take down vehicles in seconds, get long range shots on escapees, drop choppers like anchors and keep you safe from about anything except raining debris. I've been hit with doors, hoods and entire cars from the multiple explosions. Some of the best vehicle launch scenes I've seen yet... the cars are coming down hill and gaining speed the go flying from their won impacts into stopped vehicles. If you drop your jet pack, go to aiming mode then step into the jet pack it'll stay hidden as long as you're in aiming mode - the second you let off the button you can fly away and you don't lose the jet pack after multiple hours (game time) of havoc. Go to "Stats", "Crimes" and then "Kills since last checkpoint" and you can get the body count. Just did 410 before I decided to fly off into the sunset in search of a cold beer and a hot girlfriend... So where do you go and what do you do/use to create your own version of mass destruction?

Yeah, it's Rays last mission when you take him to the airport, you'll have to do anything that comes before that.

Was looking through my Stats and found this: That's about 39,750 miles in no time flat... what sux I don't even know when it happened, I have no idea on how to reproduce it.

Obviously there are multiple approaches to the other islands, one of them being by boat. What I found is if you're in a boat and the cop boats are blasting away at you - just press the triangle button (exit vehicle) but stay in the boat. The cop boats will go stupid - not the guy standing on the bow firing at you but the drivers of the boats will power down. Shooting the guys on the bows of the boats is easy... Take off again and the cop boats re-activate, exit vehicle again and they go stupid. By doing this you can get them right next to you and jack their boats (whick is a typically faster boat anyhow unless you've got a Jetmax). If you're inthe water they respond to you being there, but stand in a boat and they just drift around. If you have a 'Tropic'. Get up into the cabin but don't drive the boat - you can swing the camera view around and see below the water by looking through the windows (makes it look like the water is gone). This window trick works on several vehicles in several places. The Seasparrow windows do the same thing, but normally you have to be in the water angling to look through the open door. Helps with looking for oysters. Had a cop car in front of me while standing in the LV Pay n Spray and I could see through the wall by the road, looking through the windsheild. Also found numerous incidents of cop vehicles (and foot patrol) going stupid because I was driving backwards with a reverse camera view.

Ummm yea well known fact... Oops - just saw the newsletter that says every single person that plays the game automatically knows that and I just realized it's on the splash screen when the game is loading. Wow, you did all that prior to the first mission? Here I've only beaten the game 5 times now and I can still be impressed.

Trying different things to see what I can get away with... found I could fly from Mulholland to the Boat School without getting 'wanted'. Also, shot down several of the fighter planes now by using the Seasparrow, here's one of them: Take note though... the moment that plane goes down - there's a missle coming right at you from a second plane.

Just stuff I've seen or done and didn't expect: I derailed a train in Idlewood was was able to easily push it around - but I couldn't get it back on the tracks so I pushed it out into the street, couldn't drive it. So... pushed in down the street, on to the freeway to East Beach then up to Red County and got it out into the water. It wouldn't sink. At first I thought the water was too shallow so I pushed it out into deep water - and it still wouldn't sink. You'd think of all the vehicles in this game that go straight to the bottom the train would have been one of them, instead, it floats. Was trying to jack a cop chopper at the Seasparrow location north of the Abandoned Airstrip and it got stuck inside the rocky hill there - I could see his prop above the ground but everything else was under it. Went down into the lower level police garage in San Fiero and in the back corner there was a Sparrow morphed into a Perrenial. I was able to get into the helicopter and fly it out of the garage (car fell off once I started the chopper). Got any weird sightings?

One of the Ray missions - you had to take him to the airport via the tunnel, that's when he gives you the bullet proof Patriot. I've gotten there by... taking a boat to the north side (up by the Stadium) of Staunton Island the running it up on shore, then pushing it down the street and back into the water on the other side of the barricade that stops you from just sailing over there. You can buy the apartment up onthe hill and save there as well. It is possible to get to the third island before doing your first mission.

I kind of took advantage of the fact (that I couldn't get into the Johnson house) by building it into my strategy - at first I did weapon sweeps on the BMX to build up the bicycle skill, once that was maxed I went to motorcycles - same concept, and when that was maxed I went to using cars to build the driving skills I had started by doing all the R3 missions I could. On helicopters and fighter planes: Cop choppers will let you get nose to nose with them while you're in a Seasparrow - makes taking them out real easy, just get the hell out of Dodge before they blow up in your face. If you're on the ground, I've taken out 5 or 6 of them using the sawn off shotgun. You can evade heat seeking missles by holding the square button (drop engine rpm/altitude button) when the missle is coming in on you but be warned that if you are over water they will go under and do a U turn and come back for you. Try to avoid landing on the water because it kills the engine and it makes you a sitting duck before you can take off again. Zoom: Thanks for the helicopter on the garage tip! And for the restaurant trick... I've got Barbara as a girlfriend, just need to take her out sometime. Don't know if anyone else has tried this - but it works: You can store/save vehicles in the Doherty garage before you own it.

For anyone trying to date Michelle in San Fiero - she likes to go to 'Mistys' restaurant, it's just down the street (2 blocks west) from the driving school.

I've been able to fly a helicopter all over the place with minimal trouble from the Harriers by keeping low or in canyons - natural or man-made (because of the buildings)... and any time I get the chance I lead the ground vehicles over cliffs or into bodies of water. I can see them flying around me but they don't often shoot, I've had a couple crash into the terrain or buildings because of their flight patterns and my position. Using the Molotovs is going well - I can take out a swarm of cops with one toss and there's no damaging concussion like there is with grenades. Challenging getting weapons though when I still don't have access to the Johnson house, that would have made life easy, but hey, the idea is to make it tough right? BTW: Doing the NRG-500 Challenge was hilarious with S.W.A.T. trucks running around inside the dry dock with me

It's not past me to drop down and grab one of the open bribes to keep the wanted level down if my targets in the area of one. You can also avoid risk of higher wanted levels by using the machine gun instead of the rockets. Big explosions tend to piss the cops off Levels go up quicker if you take out the cop choppers - typically they're trying to manouver for position or trying to keep up, I haven't found them to be much more trouble than ingnorable; unless it's that one jerk that's always trying to land on your rotor and take you out - he's gotta go...

Cash I got, I'm doing Vigilante for the armor boost to 150... In the hood I like using the cop bike because you can fire forward and some of those cars have the fuel door under the license plate. But I prefer Hunter when I want to kill a couple of hours and a few hundred criminals. Took it up to where it paid $1 million (level 140) for the payoff, then decided to find out where it payed $2 million - turns out you only had to go to level 200.

I like the concept here so I've got CJ in 'training'. I have not done the first mission at all (Big Smoke?) which means I can't get into my own house... In the mean time I've gotten him up to 'Hitman' on 9mm, Tec9, Sawn-off shotgun and M4 weapons, got about 300 Molotovs - they work so well for taking out multiple targets and being fireproof makes it a more reasonable weapon to employ. Health at 150 haven't done Vigilante yet - but it's due soon. BMX and 8 Track are complete... largely doing all the 1st island stuff before hitting the other islands. Muscle is up to 'Buff'. Stamina and Lung capacity need to come up yet, but I plan on developing those when I get the 'safe' oysters. Taxi missions are done and can be a real benefit when it comes to impromptu exit strategies (nitro!), helps that they are relatively plentiful in the vehicle population. Got enough respect to recruit a gang member - I like doing Vigilante on a cop bike to I put my recruit on the back and use him like armor for about the first 8 levels. Like you already know - this is going to take some time. I was really pressing it and hadn't even saved the game up to 7.45% completion, but the game hung for a second and I figured in case it locked up I didn't want to lose everything. Got busted once - one of those lame a$$ events like when the other drivers go crazy and run you over then the cop runs up on you BUSTED! Crap - was trying to run as clean as possible for the first island at least. We'll see how it goes when I move off the first island.

It only works if you drop the jet pack on the spot where you 'wake up' before you save. If you save without the jet pack it won't be there when you start again.

Don't know why not - but then I only play on the PS2. It's been especially handy at Angel Pine - makes getting to the top of Mt Chiliad a breeze.

FYI: I've gotten it to work several times now at the casino - it's all in the placement. not going to bother with Catalinas cabin, pretty sure it will work but I'm not going up into that area anymore - maybe one of you guys can scope it out.