It was another looong day in San Andreas today, and I’m almost finished now.

I did the rest of the casino missions, involving a robbery of one of the other casinos, doing some work for the Mafia as well to get their confidence, and some more tasks for the band and Rosenberg. I also saved Madd Dogg (previously seen in the OG Loc missions) from a suicide jump, and agreed to be his manager. There was also an interesting detour to Liberty City, though it’s entirely indoors so you don’t actually get to explore the city there.

Most of the missions weren’t too difficult, but one called “Freefall” was one of those really annoying ones. I had to intercept a plane by flying out to meet it, turning around, and then getting close enough to hit a ring following behind it. Except that my plane isn’t faster than the other one, so I had to gain altitude and dive towards it to speed up. I’m not very good at the airplane controls to begin with, you waste a lot of time on each attempt on the easy initial part of just getting out there, and for some reason the framerate started getting choppy during this mission, making the controls even worse. After numerous retries, I turned the graphics options down a lot just to smooth out the framerate. It still took a few more attempts after that, but I eventually got it.

I also encountered Tenpenny and his thugs again, and after a bit of a ruckus with them, it’s only Tenpenny left now, and he’s on the run.

After that it was finally time to head back to Los Santos, and we got Madd Dogg’s mansion back from a drug dealer and made it the new base of operations. Mike Toreno popped up again and had one last mission, involving stealing a Harrier-like jet plane and sinking some boats. The jet controls more like a helicopter than a regular plane, which actually made it easier for me, but I failed the first attempt at the last second when taxiing it turned out to be trickier than expected…

Sweet was finally released from jail, and it was time to start taking back the neighbourhoods. I did a long series of gang wars to take control of all of the areas of Los Santos, which took quite a while just because there’s so many of them.

Rioting broke out when Tenpenny was captured but released when the charges were dropped, so people are running around crazily, shooting at random, and cars are catching fire and exploding. It’s time for the final mission though, and…I’ll do it tomorrow, as it’s already pretty late tonight. I did take the opportunity to take advantage of a glitch and steal a SWAT Tank from the start of the mission and stash it away in a garage, though. It’s one of those unique vehicles that you’re not supposed to ever see outside of this one mission. Maybe I should steal a Rhino, too…