Good call! Saving money for …
Damn.
(shadarr’s going to be laughing at my money-blowing ass when they release the DLC tank at $1,000,000.)
I’m not sure I’ll ever get the $500,000 achievement given my deep, deep love for grenades.
What cheat map are you referring too? I would love to know where to grab a free bullet proof vest.
Is the 500K achievement for having 500K in your bank account or just accumulating that much?
You definitely have to have the money in-pocket, ElG. I think the Achievement description makes it clear.
The way to do this, BTW, is to reload when you get killed instead of replaying from your cell phone. Health care costs in the game are astronomical. Call Michael Moore!
-Tomqbakies, when you finish the game, you get a spam email to an ingame website that has a variety of maps showing you all the pickups and secrets around Liberty City. You could probably find it before getting the spam if you really wanted to.
-TomOr you could just look around the web for a bit, as certain folks have already captured and uploaded the maps.
I didn’t intend to follow him wherever. I thought I was supposed to pop him at his train stop. But somehow he and I ended up traversing different stairwells, because I didn’t see him, and suddenly he was getting picked up by a car and driving away.
So I didn’t feel bad about cheating on the Three Leaf Clover mission (spoilers) a litter later on.
Just a money tip, you can jack an armored car and take it to a spot where you can ram it into the side of something repeatedly. Eventually it will catch fire and blow up, leaving a modest amount of cash strewn about for a few seconds. This costs no ammo and as far as I can tell doesn’t appear to affect anything else. Of course it’s pure luck seeing an armored truck passing by.
Of course if you need money that bad, missions are the way to go. You’ll soon enough be rolling in it.
I’m finding the visual of some criminal repeatedly ramming his armored car into a building for the sweet cash within to be highly amusing.
Another reason it is too bad money is so plentiful. Didn’t they explicitly say that they didn’t want money to be so easy to come by?
I think they did, Zen. My disappointment is that there aren’t any homes or businesses to spend it on. Just cab fare, which is trivial, and the occasional ammo/armor refill. I hope the DLC has some more clothing options, at least. I mean, one store with two kinds of eyeglasses, in the whole game? I’d also like to see some more variety of eateries. I’ve unlocked all the islands, and I’ve only seen fast food and diners. Seems like Algonquin should have an upscale restaurant or three.
Tom, there are plenty of upscale restaurants, but they’re only functional during dates. You should get out more. :)
It seems to me the main money sink is rezzing at the hospital, which you can circumvent by just reloading. This is how I ended up with well over a half million dollars and nothing to spend it on. But if I’d rezzed every time I got killed and had to frickin’ replay a mission again, I’d probably have a much more reasonable amount of money.
-Tom
Yeah, I especially miss the ability to buy up real estate from Vice City. At some point you collect enough money (say, $50,000) that you need to start investing it rather than just carrying it around in your wallet to increase your health care costs. I find it especially annoying that there are all these things they actually removed from previous games, rather than improving on them. Sure, the gang war and business stuff wasn’t perfect in previous games. So make it better, don’t just take it out and make money effectively useless except for the achievement.
I figure if they don’t make money very useful then its scarcity is pretty arbitrary. What a strange choice on their part.
Liberty City’s going to be hit with some massive inflation.
That does sound kinda regressive. It was one of the things I thought was odd about GTA3. The only thing I can recall 3 using money for was buying weapons. And if you tracked down the hidden packages, the weapons would all spawn infinitely at your safehouses, completely obviating all need for money ever (and the packages gave you money, too.) I mean, yeah, being busted or wasted lost you money if you had it, but it wasn’t a cost. You didn’t actually need to have money to respawn. I was therefore happy to see Vice City’s property system and the various money sinks in San Andreas (I don’t remember what all you could buy in that game, as I never got far.). Pity that Vice City, as I start taking over the city, looks to be tilting back into money being useless. I’m still hurting for it now that I’m spending great whacking chunks on assets, but there are only so many and I’ve already bought a couple of the most expensive ones, which will start making money for me once I do the legwork. And I still don’t really need to buy anything other than the property.
I can dispense with the gang warfare, though. It’s a cool idea, but I don’t think I really liked San Andreas’ implementation of it, and it was appropriate for that story in a way that I don’t think it would be for Vice City or what I’m hearing of GTA IV. Saints Row does it better, I think, with the single pushback effort per territory that you can neglect until you have time for it. And a lot fewer territories overall. I’m sure San Andreas’ fighting over a block or two at a time is more realistic and all, but it was also annoying to have this giant, bloody, difficult battle and earn some tiny sliver of turf that I’d then have to go defend on a regular basis.
Yeah. My stats currently show about $150 spent on dates, and $9500 spent on medical care. Then I learned to reload, and now I just look for a burger joint if I’m injured.
I really enjoyed playing the territory game, not sure why, but I can completely agree with this.
It was really cool how buying property in Vice City also started a chain of optional missions. Buy the movie studio and you get to do missions for the Porn director. A really nice incentive to save up money as a lot of those mission strings were both amusing and entertaining. San Andreas, I think, just added safehouses to the map with purchased property. Not as fun.
Yeah, that was something of a vestige of the previous GTA games, in which money was essentially your score. And your overall goal wasn’t to finish the story missions, but to earn a certain amount of money.
Once that happens, money is no longer important to you because you’re rich. That section of the game is structured to guide the player into experiencing a capitalist success story.
Of all the GTA games, Vice City definitely made the most interesting use of money.