Grand Theft Auto: Vice City/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Acceptable Religious Targets: Conservative Christians. Pastor Richards preaches to his flock that "selfishness is a virtue" (a parody of the "prosperity gospel" preached by many televangelists), has a harem of five mistresses, and is using donations sent by his listeners to build himself a mansion in Hawaii. Alex Shrub, meanwhile, is a corrupt congressman who is targeting the "Puritan vote" and supports legislation to crack down on pornography, while secretly engaging in crossdressing and an affair with a porn star.
  • Alas, Poor Scrappy: After joining your team, the annoying Hilary King is gunned down by the VCPD on his first big job just seconds after he arrives.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Sonny Forelli -- a Complete Monster of a mob boss who is trying to crush Tommy's fledgling empire, or somebody who is justifiably concerned with the fact that a made man in his organization has built a criminal empire for himself in South Florida and is now openly defying his authority?
    • Tommy Vercetti -- is he a smart entrepreneur who managed to live out the American Dream, or a Jerkass thug who bought out the city and betrayed the men that he had sworn an oath to in the name of personal gain?
    • Examination of the motives of Sonny Forelli and Tommy Vercetti can easily turn them into, respectively, an Anti-Villain and a Villain Protagonist. Sonny sent Tommy down to Vice City to make a drug deal, and when it goes wrong, Tommy tells him that he will recover the money and the coke for him. However, Tommy then stabs him in the back by creating his own criminal empire in South Florida and keeping everything for himself. Sonny had every right to do what he did to Tommy and his business.
      • Although, it is heavily implied in the dialogue between the two in the final mission that Sonny set up the drug deal that landed Tommy in this mess to go wrong and did not intend for him to survive. It is also implied that Sonny had also set up the incident that landed Tommy in jail several years prior.
  • Best Level Ever: Vice City actually had many of these, "Publicity Tour", if not for the actual mission, then for the dialogue.
    • The actual mission arguably counts as well. Basically, you're escorting the band Love Fist to their concert, but their crazed stalker rigged the limo to blow up if you drive below a certain Speed. So you're driving through town like a maniac, avoiding traffic and sliding in the rain (it's always dark and raining during this mission to conceal the game's graphical limitations: everyone in the car is technically sitting still) until the band figures out how to disarm the bomb. Definitely one of the more different GTA missions.
    • The fast-paced "Phnom Penh '86" could count as well. In a total reminiscence of Vietnam-era aerial raids, you team up with Lance and fly in a helicopter to a drug gang's stronghold of three mansions, and while Lance drives the helicopter you fire a M60 machine gun at fully-automatic armed gang members which continue to appear from the mansions corridors, terraces and backyards, you erradicate them.[1] Also note that the mission's name is actually the capital of Cambodia, rounding off the "jungle war" theme. Bonus if played while playing Radio Espantoso's tropical songs, like Irakere's Anunga Nunga.
    • "Bombs Away!" arguably fills, you remote-control a RC toy plane carrying homemade bombs to sink escaping Cuban boats all while Cubans shoot at your plane with Ruger Mini-14 assault rifles from their boats, the charm is the GTA series introduction to an aeronaval styled combat. Bonus if played while playing V-Rock's song Megadeth's Peace Sells.
    • Hell, any RC mission can fill (note that curiously they always feature carrying bombs...)
    • In "All Hands On Deck!" you again engage in aeronaval combat, you must protect Colonel Cortez in his way out of Vice City, which results in fighting in his yacht against a group of armed French agents which come aboard attacking from boats, helicopters and forming a boat's barricade to block Colonel Cortez's way out. Eventually a AH-64 Apache military helicopter comes firing all over the yacht, and you must take it out.
    • Probably the most cool and badass mission in the entire game, "The Job", where you, Phil Cassidy, Cam Jones and Hilary King rob the Vice City's El Banco Corrupto Grante. The SWAT storming into the bank later makes it even more epic.
    • No love for the final mission, "Keep Your Friends Close..."? You know, the one that is a total Shout-Out to the finale of Scarface?
  • Complete Monster: Sonny Forrelli may qualify for this trope. In the final missions it is revealed that he set up the entire incident which landed Tommy into jail and no explanation why he did that is given and after the entire drug deal went wrong in the beginning it is implied that Sonny planned for the deal to go to hell and wanted to have Tommy killed. This shows that he has no problem betraying his close friend and one of his most powerful man in his organization for no reason and shows no remorse for this. And it is likely that Sonny would have killed Tommy if he would have given the money he made from his empire's operations .
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: The entire soundtrack.
  • Fridge Brilliance: During the Steve Scott missions, Tommy is dead-set against featuring a giant shark in Scott's "movie" Bite, claiming that it wouldn't be successful. Then you realize that Tommy's been behind bars from 1971 to 1986, so he missed the release of a certain wildly successful 1975 movie featuring a giant shark, or at least the GTA equivalent. You can even hear him say "Who wants to watch a movie about a fish?" just after the first Porn Studio cutscene.
  • Fridge Logic: The Prologue states that Tommy served fifteen years for killing about ten people, while during actual gameplay, murdering over half the city with a military helicopter that you stole can be overturned with a measly one hundred dollars. Easier to sleep at night by taking into account Gameplay and Story Segregation.
    • The song Kids in America plays on one of the radio stations, and it contains the line "New York to East California." In the GTA universe, Liberty City is New York and San Andreas is California.
  • Game Breaker:
    • The free aim on the PC port turns the assault rifles, M-60 and minigun into this. Without the need to manually aim, you can hit enemies at sniper distances with ease. It also makes shooting drivers out of their cars a breeze.
    • The helicopter is this for missions. As soon as you can access one, you can bypass a lot of problems that were specifically set up to hound people in cars. With the exception of missions that force you into vehicles, taking a helicopter is always a better choice than driving.
    • Collecting 30 hidden packages causes a .357 Colt Python to spawn at some of Tommy's safehouses. While it has a slow rate of fire, it kills most enemies with a single hit.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: This game was made at that point in time when Rockstar still made liberal use of the voice talents of famed actors. One of them was Burt Reynolds, who played Avery Carrington, who was unceremoniously killed and eaten later in the series. Fast forward to 2011, where he plays himself as the mayor of a Vice City in the GTA series' most prolific competitor to date.
  • Spiritual Licensee: This may be the best Scarface game ever made.
  • That One Level: The race against Hilary. You have to race him in an (admittedly decent performance) sedan while he uses a supercharged muscle car. You can't steal a better car, assuming you could even find one, because the sedan is mission-critical. The VCPD try to arrest you, and only you, for street racing. Assuming you get ahead, Hilary actually drives even better because game mechanics only spawn NPC traffic in relation to your car (the road is functionally empty from his POV). Finally, there's a glitch on the bridge near the end of the track which can cause you to clip through and fall to your death. This one mission has singlehandedly spawned countless pages of text on GameFAQs consisting of nothing but every method and theory in the world to win it.

    Part of what makes it so frustrating is that you're racing Hilary so that he will be your driver for a bank heist. Putting aside the fact that you're hiring him specifically because he's supposed to be better at this than you, he's gunned down just seconds after showing up to pull your bacon out of the fire, resulting in an unnecessarily hard escape sequence against the heavily armed SWAT team. You might as well have not hired him to begin with, ultimately making that awful race pointless.
    • Right after you off Diaz and become the new boss, you have to go to the mall to smash store windows. The clock is set to five minutes... starting from your house! For reference, the mall is at the back end of the first island, and you start from the center island. A good driver with a fast car (which the house will provide) can get there within 1-2 minutes, leaving three minutes to kill everything in sight, but if you get bogged down you fail. There's a helicopter on the roof that can get you there even faster, but there's a chance that won't spawn, forcing some Save Scumming to get it.
    • "Death Row", which is easily the most hated mission next to racing Hilary. To explain, you now know that Diaz is the one that messed up your deal at the beginning of the game. Tommy is content to wait it out, but Lance, like an idiot, jumps the gun and gets himself captured. You have to rescue him before he's beaten to death. You have to do this starting at the Malibu, while Lance is being held at the dump on the other side of the map. His remaining health is your timer, and starts right away. Sound annoying yet? Good, because it gets worse. The dump is barricaded by mooks armed with automatic rifles and high-powered machine guns which will chew through even an armored Tommy or a helicopter if you do a flyover. They're positioned high up on cover to make killing them harder and more time-consuming. Once you rescue Lance, you have to get him to the hospital, which is when three sports cars with goons decide to chase you down. If you blow them up, a fourth comes along. On top of all of that, there's literally no reward. You don't get paid jack for one of the hardest missions in the game.
Back to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
  1. ↑ Diaz "request" in the mission introductory cutscene.
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