The same THING happened to me on Just Cause 2. I was so bummed at that “Bomb” mission. I tried again and again to get past this level and finally had to give up. Sucks.
Sadly Just Cause 3 burned me the same way in a mission called, “Abandon Ship” that made me abandon that game. However just playing around in “Just Cause 3” was fun.
I loved Red Dead Redemption because it LET you pass through missions IF you failed them, which I did.

I stopped playing GTA SA for exactly the same reason than you Luke (this stupid mission in the National Guard warehouse), so there is absolutely no way that I will play this game. Thanks for having warned me.

also it was GTA 3 that you could just put bombs into any car you would like.

I would have stopped playing GTA SanAn if it wasn’t for the cheat codes, because some of that stuff was just TOO LONG… I remember one mission it was a driving mission (it was around the time you unlock the first island)… and I just turned on “cars can fly” and it still took me like 5 minutes of flying over everything to get there.

I also hate games that don’t have better spaced check points… I get really impatient having to do the same thing over and over again, especially when I am able to get really hard stuff done and then its something stupid that fails the mission, and I have to start all over again.

Ya I always laughed when I headed over to my buddies place and found them grinding away at the gym in GTA. I always figured why not go to a real gym?

@ Luke Maciak:
Whoops, I said I never “died”, what I meant was I never failed on that part, neither Ryder (NPC) or myself (CJ) died.

JKjoker wrote:

would love to try it, but it has a fatal flaw : No XP support,

I was not aware of that. But yeah, I’m sitting at a Vista machine right now and it is full of fail and misery. Or rather the OS has few neat features that you pay for in the thousand little annoyances. And I’m not counting the UAC here – that I am fine with. I’m talking about super-duper-slow file transfers, bizarre networking issues and etc..

JKjoker wrote:

but the two worst things i remember from SA were the grinding (you have to GRIND to get your character to run/swim decently, thats freaking BS,eventually you edit the config files to accelerate the process),

Yeah, and it was not even good type of grinding either. Most of it was just “go to the gym and push a button for 10 minutes” type of grinding.

@ Anooonymous:

I did not know that. That’s actually a pretty good idea. I ought to try that. :)

@ Phil:

I never died either – but the NPC I was with died all the time if I failed to run out and clear the area for him between crates.

IceBrain wrote:

I don’t mind repeating them over and over, but sometimes you get the feeling that the game is preventing you from coming up with your own “solution”.

Yes! That! Drives me up the wall. Especially since there often so many entertaining ways you could complete assassination type missions but GTA will never let you because they want you to have this 20 minute chase sequence.

I don’t remember which game was it but one of the GTA’s used to have a car bomb item. You could rig a car and it would explode on a timer. But did the game ever let you install these in the cars of NPC’s it sent you to kill? No, of course not. Their cars wouldn’t even spawn until after you talked to them and the chase was on.

I’m the opposite. Loved SA, and even the frustrating missions only push me to try over and over again ’till I get it.
GTA IV seems easier (I only got really stuck on the last mission, because there’s a boat chase to heli chase, and then a friendly heli appears and you have to jump to it right before the boat crashes), but I’m also more experienced now, so it may not be.

On the other hand, I’ve played Just Cause 1 and I thought it was incredibly boring; the map areas were completely indistinct, to the point I couldn’t tell where I was without looking at the map.

But yeah, GTA IV is still very scripted. I don’t mind repeating them over and over, but sometimes you get the feeling that the game is preventing you from coming up with your own “solution”.
There’s one mission where you have to kidnap a guy from a police escort. There are tons of ways you could stop the convoy, but instead of letting you come up with a way, they give you a truck, then tell you exactly where to park it, etc.
That’s really the frustrating part, imo.

I remember exactly what mission you are talking about for GTA:SA, but I NEVER remember it being particularly hard. I think I maybe had to do it twice or three times, but I never died during the part where I need to load the crates. I think I always died during the ensuing car chase. Though I don’t remember the bad guys respawning while you moved the crates…hmmmmm.

Just a heads up:

You can beat the game pretty much ignoring missions.
Blowing up random things and causing chaos is more than enough to further the main story. (missions unlock purely based on the level of chaos)
So just go steal things and blow stuff up. My factions were barely visible on the map by the time i hit the endgame.