Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas/YMMV


 * Acceptable Religious Targets: A certain real-life religious movement gets this with the Epsilon Program, which also has elements of the Rael cult thrown in. Tell you what, take the weight off your nodes and I'll tell you all about it, Uncle-Brother!
 * Alternative Character Interpretation:
 * Is CJ a good person? Some people consider his Pet the Dog moments (such as his love for his sister, his friendships with various characters, his desire to clean up the streets from drugs and his general tendency to help people in need) to be enough to make him a good person doing bad things. Others find his reprehensible acts (he kills people for a living, he ruined Madd Dogg's life to help his asshole friend) too much.
 * Is Sweet a Jerkass who ran his brother out of town, blaming him for his little brother's death, and disrespects said brother for trying to get his family out of the ghetto, and deserves everything he gets, or a stand-up guy who cares deeply about his home, family and friends, and wants to get everything back to what it was in the good old days and ends up in a deep pile of crap he didn't deserve because of it?
 * Office Tenpenny is actually an interesting case. You could make an argument he's a Complete Monster, but there's also plenty of room to contend that he's no worse than CJ. Los Santos' criminals are completely out of control, and playing them against one another may be the only way to keep the violence down. Of course, given some of the comments he gives to CJ, you could also say he's a self-hating black man.
 * Base Breaker: CJ's somewhat Lighter and Softer personality in comparison to the other protagonists has led to many debates over whether it's a good thing or not.
 * Crazy Awesome: The Truth and Maccer.
 * Crosses the Line Twice: There's nothing funny about threatening people with prison rape, and yet Mike Toreno threatening to hand Sweet over to "Horsecock Harry" if CJ shirks his pilot training manages to be one of the funniest parts of the game. Blame it on James Woods' perfect delivery and his over-the-top mimicry of Sweet's "love cries".
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: Mike Toreno. Helped by the fact that he's played by James Woods, and gets some of the best delivered lines in the whole game. Woozie and Ryder also have a lot of fans.
 * Good Bad Bugs: Plenty.
 * The Mulholland safe house can store vehicles on the roof of the garage. This allows it to serve as a helipad.
 * Like the other 3d GTAs, various vehicles are rendered immune to some forms of attack for plot reasons. Through various methods one can steal them and drive them around unkillable.
 * Just Here for Godzilla: The inaccessible Hot Coffee Minigame certainly gave the game a high degree of notoriety.
 * Love to Hate: Tenpenny. Sure, he's a corrupt, self-serving bastard who's behind some pretty despicable acts, but he's often highly entertaining and gets some of the best lines in the game. His voice actor certainly helps.
 * Memetic Mutation:
 * Troper, you a busta.
 * You mother-fuckin' piece of shit gangbangin' cocksucka!
 * Hey, Cesar. The yay leavin' San Fierro, right? ...Right, but they're using bikes CJ, and they're going cross country!
 * All we had to do was follow the damn train, CJ!
 * Most Annoying Sound:
 * Just about anything Zero says during his missions.
 * And "All we had to do was follow the damn train, CJ!".
 * The Scrappy: Zero, mainly because of the "Supply Lines" mission under That One Level (among just about all of his other missions).
 * Sweet also catches a lot of flack for his bad, self-defeating attitude. No matter how much CJ bends over backwards to help him or elevate him above their troubled home life, he whines and complains about everything while accusing CJ of not caring about "the hood". Even when you bail him out of prison, he doesn't stop acting like a whiny and entitled prick.
 * Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: This whole game centers around the effects of hard drugs (especially crack cocaine) on the inner cities, and repeatedly makes sure that those drugs and the people who push them corrupt everything in the end if they aren't stopped. Given how horrible the cities in the games already are, it wouldn't have been effective if they hadn't gone overboard.
 * That One Level:
 * The Zero missions in general, but especially "Supply Lines", where you have to bomb a bunch of delivery vans using an RC plane. It's a Luck-Based Mission, as the plane has limited fuel and wonky controls (especially compared to flying regular planes in the game) that make you waste fuel trying to correct mistakes. It is probably the most hated mission in the entire series.

The PC version "fixed" this mission by simply tripling the amount of fuel you are given. In Version 1 (pre-Hot Coffee), you lose fuel no matter what. In Version 2 (post-Hot Coffee), this was fixed (as in it was a bug in Version 1) so that you only lose fuel when accelerating. If you let go of the acceleration button and tilt up, you'll glide without losing fuel or speed. Makes the mission a whole lot easier.
 * A mission where you need to save would have him jump before you can save him (at the very beginning of the mission), and players literally would have to start over and hope the glitch didn't happen again.
 * Contrary to popular belief, this occurrence is not random. It only happens if you use player model altering cheats.
 * Almost any mission where you are required to fly a plane or helicopter. You can definitely get the hang of flying, it's just that it's a pretty damn steep curve. And you think the regular aircraft are tricky, try flying the Hydra, a fighter jet with hover jets that you can manipulate to hover in place. Luckily, it seems the developers realized that the Hydra controls were awkward and only force you to fly it for one mission.
 * For some, "Freefall" is frustrating beyond all comprehension. You have to fly a plane and position it at exactly the right angle above and behind the bad guys' plane so you can fly through the ring. Their jet is flying in the opposite direction that you're flying, so in order to get in said position, you have to turn the jet around at exactly the right moment and fly through the ring while struggling with very frustrating controls. If you miss, you're screwed; if you succeed, you have to kill all the bad guys on the plane very quickly as they can kill you pretty fast due to close quarters. The only way to make that mission easier is to enter the "perfect handling" cheat so you can have an easier time steering the plane, and even then it's still pretty frustrating to do.
 * Using a game editor to reduce the drag and increase the top speed of the Dodo also works, of course. It took this troper about twenty tries before employing the editor... then about 10 minutes afterwards to develop cheater's guilt and go back without the edits (still another three tries to pass though).
 * This mission isn't too tricky for the players that have grasped the flying controls (easier on certain versions) as the target can be approached from behind after a sizable circular run with plenty of time to spare. However, it can still be That One Level for other reasons, the best being that it's delightfully ridiculous. If the widely-touted "something new in every mission" pre-release prospect showed itself rather questioningly in any one mission, this would probably be it.
 * "Wrong Side of the Tracks" is an early mission in which you drive a motorcycle alongside a moving train while Big Smoke, your passenger, shoots at the rival gang members perched on top. The problem is there isn't an indication that you need to stay at least another train's width apart from the train or Smoke can't hit them (luckily your enemies seem to suffer from A-Team Firing no matter where you are). The mission failure line "All we had to do was follow the damn train, CJ" has reached a degree of Memetic Mutation.
 * Additionally, Big Smoke will only aim at one gang member at a time, so you have to move forward or back to target a specific person. Admittedly, the game clues you in on the missed shots when you're not in position.
 * There's an early level where you have to impress a girl by dancing on the beach (read: playing a button-timing mini-game). Since this game pre-dated Guitar Hero (though notably came after Dance Dance Revolution), the concept of HDTV lag hadn't really hit the public consciousness yet. A lot of early adopters couldn't beat that mission.
 * "Tanker Commander". It's actually a fairly simple mission - steal a tanker truck and take it to a man who will buy it. However, you have two guys in a car chasing and shooting at you, the tanker can't take that much damage, and it's quite easy to make too sharp a turn and disconnect the tank, which means mission failure. One can't help but wonder if the reason why "Tanker Commander" is the nearest mission when you first join up with Catalina is so you can get it over with.
 * Though this one's a lot easier when you remember you can exit the truck without ending the mission and cap the two guys in the car through the windshield in the beginning of the mission for safe and easy driving to the destination.
 * "OG Loc" features an annoying motorcycle chase, and the guy being chased is immune to damage. Thankfully at the end of the chase, you can kill him.
 * The guy is immune, the bike isn't. Stock up on as many SMG ammo as you can before doing that mission and you should be able to kill him before you reach the ambush spot. Depending on your timing, the bike usually catches flames on the highway ("Catch me if you caaaaan" section).
 * Highjack is a bit of a pain, just because Cesar won't shut up. You have to ride along side a truck at just the right speed, and be RIGHT NEXT TO IT, and it's timed. Have fun.
 * One mission requires the player drive a motorbike into the back of a plane as it is taking off. It is not exactly easy under any circumstances, but on the early PC releases, there was an issue where frame rate would affect how fast the plane moved relative to you; depending on what settings you used and what specs your computer had, it was literally impossible to catch the plane.
 * The mission "High Noon" can get extremely infuriating. You have to chase down and kill in a car that is prone to spinning out and/or flipping over very easily while the target drives a fast car that can take a ton of bullets before exploding. Naturally, the mission fails if the target gets away. Should you bring the target's car to near explosion? He will bail out but shoot you with a desert eagle, which can be enough to blow up your car that is most likely heavily damaged from crashing and being shot at.
 * The level 3 shotgun level in the ammunation challenge can be a REAL pain in the arse, mainly because it comes down to luck AND you have to redo the previous 8 levels just to try it again.
 * The trucking missions where the police are chasing you can be very difficult. First off, your destination is almost always far from your start location (which is the very big and complex countryside), your truck practically moves at the speed of a go-kart, your truck also spins and gets knocked round with disgusting ease from hitting or being hit by virtualy anything despite being a truck, is destroyed easily by collisions with the ocps alone, losing the cargo is effectively losing the mission which happens at the slighted impact to the cargo and you have tons of civillians to avoid on the road. The last one is the worst of them since the police vehicles are significantly faster than your truck and far more aggressive.
 * Tough Act to Follow: A lot of gripes about Grand Theft Auto IV can be summed up as "it's not as big/fun/varied as San Andreas is." Considering that San Andreas consisted of an entire state and had more content than many games combined, it was a really tough act to follow.
 * What Measure Is a Non-Badass?: CJ. He's in the unfortunate position of being far more of a Butt Monkey and a verbal complainer than the likes of Claude or Tommy Vercetti.