Woo, it was a really long day today in San Andreas. First off I worked a bit more on the side missions, collecting all of the oysters and the cars for the import/export mission. I also started collecting horseshoes in the new Las Venturas area (which is awfully similar to Las Vegas, of course), but held off on them for a bit since it looked like I’d need a helicopter to reach some of them. I should do them soon though, for the weapon spawns in this area. I also did the Ammu-nation weapons challenge, which is really easy on the PC thanks to mouse aiming.

I found more of the schools in the new areas, including the boat and bike schools. They weren’t too difficult, and I easily got silvers in the boat school, giving me a fairly fast boat at the Bayside dock. And the only tough bike school test was the last one, where I had to land into a stoppie from a jump, but it didn’t take too long.

After all that, I finally got back to the story missions, and discovered that Mike Toreno wasn’t dead after all. Instead he claims to be a government agent, and he sent me on a bunch of his own missions. Eventually, he had me buy an old landing strip, and the flight school missions opened up. I passed those, though one of them where I had to circle and then land the plane was really frustrating. Here the keyboard controls actually make things worse, since it’s really easy to overcorrect and swing the plane wildly around. But a lot of the time it was my own fault for forgetting to put the landing gear down… Still, I’m not looking forward to any aircraft missions.

I resumed collecting the horseshoes, but there are still about eight or so that I can’t get without a helicopter, parachute, or jetpack. Wait, jetpack? I went back and started doing the airstrip missions, since although they’re optional, the final reward will be a jetpack. I’m sure it’ll come in handy… The airstrip missions were among the ones people had a lot of trouble with initially, but there are some tricks that are now known to help a lot — in the first one I just had to stick to the coastline rather than try to fly directly there, and in the second where you have to jump a bike onto a plane you’re better off just staying off to the side and avoiding the barrels entirely and diving in at the last second.