RUkered

Hey J.T. - just wanted to let you know that I got your invite last night. I sometimes play with a couple of buddies who don't have headsets, so we end up calling each other instead. If I don't accept the invite, that's the only reason. Didn't want you think I was snubbing you or anything. On another note, I buzzed a guy in the 400k apartment and, surprisingly, he let me in. I was expecting a different layout or an extra room with a heist board or something. But it's literally the same as my 205k apartment. The only difference I can see is "the view." Am I missing something? Because if not, I'm not spending 200 more thousand just so I can saunter over to the window and see grass instead of a building.

I get into those situations sometimes because I rarely use a headset unless I'm playing with friends or crew members. I was chasing a bounty last night and ended up in a place I didn't know existed. I wasn't paying much attention because I was focused on where the bounty guy was, but I believe it was a bank. It had a fully explorable interior. Anyway, me and another person walked in at the same time with guns drawn, and ended up kind of standing there staring at each other until we determined we weren't going to shoot one another. I had my automatic shotgun out just in case. Turns out the bounty guy was upstairs behind a door, hiding around the corner. I learned this quickly because he headshotted me the minute I stepped through the door. I went back and shot the door open. I was creeping up when I hear a beeping noise. This sly s.o.b. has a sticky bomb trap set for me. I lobbed a grenade in to set it off. Peep around the corner. Headshot again. Third time was a charm though. I'm definitely heading in there the next time I have a bounty if I can find the place again. Looks like a fun place to hole up when people are after you. Does anybody know the place I'm talking about? I don't know if I can find it again. Also, I figured out a fun way to go out if something goes bad in a mission and you need to kill yourself. I was doing one of those "steal a truck from guys, drive it somewhere" missions with a level 136 (holy shit). He takes the truck and I stay back to kill dudes so they don't go after him. I get the message that he died and we're out of team lives. I haul ass to the truck and go to get in, but when he died, the driver's door was up against the concrete divider on the highway. Every time I get in the passenger side, I can't push the dead body out so it tosses me back out of the truck. I try ramming it with other cars to no avail. I finally realize there's no way I can complete the mission so I decide to at least make a show out of it. I placed a sticky bomb on the side of the truck and then changed my quick action to "salute." I saddled up right in front of the bomb, turned to face the camera in case he was in cinematic view, saluted, and then blew the fucker sky high. If I had my mic on, I would have been playing Taps. A minute later the guy sends a message saying "lol."

I blame that on Talladega Nights being the first movie I saw her in, and they did their best to make her look as frumpy as possible.

I watched the series for the first time a couple years back, and just found this out about 2-3 days ago. Blew my mind. And I'm generally the "hey that actor played so and so in such and such" guy. Chameleon is spot on.

Can't remember if I read it here or somewhere else, but somebody said that watching other players on the TV in your apartment could be almost as fun as playing the game. I doubted it, but I no longer do. I finally bought an apartment last night, turn on the TV, and the first thing I see is a dude in a cargobob slowly descending. Then I see a tank come into view. I'm thinking "that dude's about to blow the shit out of that helicopter." Cargobob guys picks up tank guy, and they proceed to fly all over the map blowing the hell out of everybody. Flying tanks. This game is the shit. Also, if we could get something like this coordinated, this looks like a ton of fun. EDIT: The action doesn't really start until around 2:46.

If you or anybody else on Xbox is on and wants to do that, let me know. I'll drop whatever I'm doing and join you. I did the same thing with a random guy a few days ago, but haven't run across that same race since. Been meaning to mention it but keep forgetting. My Xbox name is the same as here for anyone that wants to add me. I'm usually on in the evenings/late night eastern time.

Harms - you win best bounty collection ever. That is awesome. I've only collected one so far, and I still don't know why it happened. I was at the Los Santos Customs near the $25,000 garage. I had just left the garage and was heading to the shop to put insurance on my lifted Jeep before I lost it, and I see a bounty icon heading down the road. Then, for some reason, the guy turns and starts heading to the back of the building where I am. I was worried he was going to steal the Jeep or blow it up, so I shot him. Took care of almost all the cost of insurance. But why the dude decided to drive right past me, even driving out of his way to drive past me, with a bounty on him makes batshit sense to me.

I believe one of you mentioned that mission where you have to kill the guy at his house, and he's heavily guarded. Then when you start shooting guards you get a 4-star wanted level. Yeah FUCK that mission. Me and my buddy roll up to a gate, toss a sticky grenade in, detonate it, and then lose the cops. Go back to the other gate, rinse and repeat. That took out a lot of guys, but we'd still die once we stepped inside. What's the strategy to this thing? It drove us insane.

I tried that one by myself and gave up after 3-4 attempts. I blew up the first two cop cars with a grenade, no problem. Then I had to blow up a SWAT van, but I couldn't figure out how to get inside the gate before getting shot to death or the time expired. I tried lobbing some grenades over the wall, but my aim sucked. And jstout - if you feel like you need some redemption, just invite me into a survival or a gang attack and watch as I try to go into cover, miss it and go into cover at the wrong angle, leaving myself completely exposed. Then I panic and try to outrun the swarm of bullets that my back is soaking up, usually ending up getting shot to death from four different angles simultaneously. Or when I finally bought a sniper rifle, I thought I was being all slick on that mission where you drive into the LA spillway (I think that's what it's called?) and steal drugs. I parked in what I thought was a safe enough distance to snipe, got out of the car, aimed, and got blasted in the face to death.

That was even more satisfying that I could have imagined.

They're like 600 bucks apiece, though. Yeah I should have logged back in here and read this before I bought them. I played a few hours last night and ended up with nearly 100k. I got a little too excited and went to Ammu-Nation to max out all my ammo. I didn't bother checking prices first. Needless to say, I am back down to around 30k. No worries there. I think we're in the same time zone because I think it was after midnight when we got in the same session. I always need to get to bed myself, but when people are on, it's hard to shut it down. That mission you guys were talking about parking on a ramp and shooting people - if I'm thinking about the same mission - I have a little tip for anyone who hasn't done it yet. If you stand up there and decide "screw shooting - I'm flinging a grenade in the middle of all of them," don't. Apparently cocaine blows up. And J.T. - that mission we whipped was a nice ending to the night. Had you played with me earlier, I doubt you would have been praising anything. I was playing with a buddy of mine and we were doing the mission where you steal the drugs, deliver them, then go back and blow up all the gang's cars. I just could not get my shit together. When I wasn't getting shot, I was blowing up. When we cleared all the cars, the final gang member that runs was always escaping. We finally got tired of him escaping, so on the last one - we cleared the area. My buddy stood over in the general area of where that guy appears. I planted sticky bombs on all the cars, and then got in my car to meet up with him. I detonated the bombs, the guy appears. We roll up on him and shoot him. Mission failure - the gang member died. Uhhhhhh???? *cue my head exploding*

Good to know I'm not far away from sticky bombs. I love those things. I just realized last night that I have to win a bunch of races to unlock vehicle upgrades. So I'm screwed, basically. More often that not I'm a pretty decent driver. I do my fair share of slamming into parked cars and poles, but generally I can zip through traffic and around corners without too much incident. Put me in a race though, and I'm a bumbling idiot. I may have to try what I saw on youtube - some guy was doing a race by himself, and it was counting toward his wins. It's my only hope. Either way, I plan on doing a little stat grinding tonight.

So that's why I kept getting my ass kicked. I did a short, 1-lap race with a guy a bunch of times in a row. It was the muscle class so we both used our personalized cars, and the guy was always way out in front right at the start. He was a level 5, so I didn't think he had made any mods to his car. I think out of 10 races I only won 2 - and that was only because I started cutting corners and managed to not wreck or fishtail. On the upside, my first victory consisted of me accidentally giving the guy a PIT maneuver near the finish line, spinning us both out. I knew I couldn't get turned around in time, so I decided to just slam it in reverse and hope for the best. So that was fun. And J.T. - you were talking about only being a level 6 in that survival, but even though I was 17 or 18 or whatever, I wasn't much better off than you. I'm still running around with the same guns I had from the beginning (no idea why) and my stats are all pretty crap except for driving. I should probably focus more on working on them instead of spending half my time in a lifted truck barreling down Mount Chiliad at 140 mph.

Apparently I've just been really lucky with storing getaway vehicles. I've managed to put them within a couple blocks away each time. I hope I can eventually kill every member of the Lost so I can successfully take people to the cult, because damn. If I zip by them within 4 million yards they start shooting at me and scare away the people I'm hauling. Also, do you guys still need members to reach - what was it, 25? If so, I'll join up.

It's been a while since I watched that episode, but I think it's implied that those were just victims of the plane crash, and all the destruction around the house was a result of it. I don't think it's meant as an end-of-series flash forward.

I never even bothered getting anything past bronze on any of the school stuff in SA. I was so frustrated by that point I just wanted it over with. All I wanted to do was take a passenger plane to the height of the map and dive out of it right at the "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" part of Killing In The Name anyway. And thanks for the heads up a few pages back, Neil. I was just misremembering everything and mixing up two or three different GTA games, but I had never heard of the Ghost City before. Looked it up on Youtube. That's pretty cool. With all this talk of 5, I've gotten back into 4 for some free roam multiplayer. I was actually surprised at how many people still play. Naturally, it took about 5 minutes before I did nothing but repeatedly try to ramp a motorcycle into the chopper my buddy was flying. I got hit during a jump one time and managed to stay on the bike and not die. I was at the airport and ended up clearing the highway before I landed. Haven't been able to duplicate it since.

I can't wait for this thing. I've put more time into GTA games, starting with GTA2, than I have any other game. Even though I played the hell out of it, I was too stupid to figure out the point of it. I didn't realize I was playing it like I'd play all the others for eternity - steal shit, run from cops, have shootout with cops, die. The only thing different was plowing into buildings at 100 mph because you couldn't see where you were going. Natural - you mentioned not being able to get to new locations right away. If I remember right, I used to take the Dodo in GTA3 and try to fly it (mind-numbingly difficult), and one time I managed to make it to a locked part of the map. I can't remember right now, but did it automatically give you 5 police stars for getting to an area early, or was that only introduced in the later games? Anyway, back on point - they've only improved with each installment in my book, and this one looks no different.