The time had finally arrived. I decided to take on every task on the map. The challenges awaiting me were definitely epic, ridiculous, and difficult.
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| Jaywalking is dangerous! |
With Insurance Fraud and the Genki television show being the most difficult tasks (for me), the option to automatically complete all tasks within a single 'hood was well worth the cash. As an upgrade I think it was a good design call as some of the tasks in the game can be very difficult depending on how things play out in a given sequence. Genki is fairly heavily scripted but even a medium difficulty node seemed to be a bit rough (though I kept trying to take out the heavies... they destroyed me every time). Insurance Fraud is simply a pain. I was glad to be rid of it. I knocked out the hard difficulty nodes for both Genki and Insurance Fraud without a second thought. They aren't all that fun and probably would have required a lot of replays to knock them out.
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| I hate insurance fraud... but the screenshots are humorous. |
Escort offered two varieties: Drive around some guy cheating on his wife and avoid the news vans OR drive around with a Tiger as a passenger (again with vans chasing you). Both were equally annoying but the escort the cheater turned out to be the most difficult. I had to replay the hard node about three times to beat it. The biggest challenge is that it is completely random how traffic will play out in the area you run around in. Also the random requests from the guy along the lines of “get a second of air time”or “power slide for a second” can make things complex if you aren't near any ramps or if the game somehow opts to ignore your power slide five times in a row. (this is one of many reasons why I repeated this task three times) I was relieved when I finished the hard difficulty escort mission... never again (?).
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| Nothing calms a Tiger like the offering of a can of Tuna. |
Mayhem proved to be a fun task... albeit repetitive with the larger point requirement nodes. Unlimited rockets and unlimited fodder is fun for a bit but the huge point values and time limits really bogged down the medium and hard difficulty nodes.
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| Boom shaka laka! |
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| Very cinematic of FRAPS to capture this screenshot. |
Snatch was initially difficult as I kept having problems picking up the targets. After a while I seemed to figure things out and never hit any issues. You drive around picking up people and avoiding the very angry gang in the given area. These missions would be nearly impossible without the semi-invincible car they give you when you start the mission.
Trail Blazing came in two distinct flavors: Tron bike weirdness and Radioactive ATV or some such thing. The tron bike weirdness just required you to make it to the end of a long and winding tube dodging stuff along the way. It was bland. Radioactive ATV required you to race around town to a number of checkpoints but rewarded you for hitting pedestrians and cars with additional time. Your ATV is permanently on fire and destroys cars upon any slight impact. It was definitely ridiculous. The trick to the Radioactive ATV seemed to be ignore the cars, hit people, and boost often (if you happen to have nitro).
A couple more rounds of Heli Assult proved to be even easier when I realized the rockets fired from the helicopter sucked. Using the machine gun was a lot more accurate and easy.
Trafficking for “Zimos” (the Vocoder man apparently) proved to be entertaining for the most part. I would always intentionally bring along some Saints and immediately hit the Z key to request they join me. This way I would start the mission with 3 additional guns to keep the gangs occupied or at bay. Unfortunately a heavy flame thrower oaf trashed the near-invincible vehicle and we were forced to take a very weak Rescorts car. This meant after every delivery I would have to pick up a different car. Luckily Zimos seemed to never be hurt much and recovered quickly. These missions worked out reasonably well and provided lots of over the top drowning-in-enemies action.
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| Punk Saint and I aiming back at the Rescort oaf hoping to ruin our run. |
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| Zimos drives and I fire my explosive ammo based hand cannon at the Rescorts. |
No outfit change this time!
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