There have been a lot of missions in the Grand Theft Auto series. Hundreds of various missions tasking players to kill drug dealers, steal cars, destroy rival gangs and even do some yoga.
Not all of these missions have been great and a few of them are completely awful. But one mission in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is considered by many fans to be the worst of the worst. It was so bad that Rockstar had to fix it in later ports of GTA San Andreas.
In San Andreas, players meet a man who runs an RC toy store. This man is named Zero and he is voiced by David Cross. Zero has a problem and he needs CJ, the protagonist of San Andreas, to help him. His RC toy store is going under and he needs some financial help. Players can invest in Zero’s shop, which unlocks a series of new side missions.
All of these missions are terrible.
They all revolve around Zero trying to defend himself from his unseen rival, Berkley, who wants to destroy Zero’s shop and career. All of these missions involve RC vehicles and none of them are very fun and they all feel out of place in the San Andreas.
The second Zero mission, Supply Lines, is the worst and the one players hate the most.
Supply Lines sounds like a simple mission: Destroy some vans using an RC plane. However, this mission was the bane of many San Andreas fans. You can easily find forum posts from 2004, the year San Andreas was released, of players complaining they are stuck.
You can also still find players in 2017 getting stuck and frustrated with Supply Lines.
I personally got stuck at Supply Lines. I spent way too much time trying to destroy those damn vans. I eventually gave up and did other missions. Thankfully, this was possible because all of the Zero RC missions are optional. You can beat GTA San Andreas without finishing Supply Lines and many players did just that.
There are a couple reasons that Supply Lines is so hard. One problem is that the RC plane is hard to fly and not very stable. The plane you control is also fragile and the couriers you are attacking have thugs armed with SMGs. Take a few bullets and your plane is destroyed and the mission is failed.
The biggest problem with Supply Lines is the way the fuel in the RC plane works. In the original version of the game, the fuel in the RC plane would get used as time went on, even if you were gliding. This strict time limit combined with bad controls created a situation where many players just couldn’t reach the couriers fast enough to destroy them.
Rockstar changed the mission in later versions of San Andreas. Fuel would now only get used when players hit the throttle, letting them glide around and save gas.
Even with this change, Rockstar seemed aware of how awful Supply Lines still was, because in later ports of San Andreas they changed the mission again. In the Xbox 360 and mobile ports, the fuel tank is larger. This final fix helped make the mission more doable, but it still isn’t very fun.
Supply Lines is such a terrible mission that Zero’s voice actor, David Cross, has publicly complained about the mission. “So annoying. I hated it,” said Cross in an interview. “And I couldn’t fucking do it. The RC thing? … It’s impossible.”
Comments
13 responses to “The GTA San Andreas Mission So Bad, Rockstar Had To Fix It”
Am glad was not the only person to despise that & the other RC missions. Found them unbearable & unfairly difficult. Usually got a friend to do Supply Run for me because he was so much better at those missions.
Oh yeah… Supply Lines….
I tried to replay all the older GTAs a couple of years back and got through GTA3 and Vice City and had a great time, but my enthusiasm evaporated almost instantly when I picked up Supply Lines and remembered just how godawful that mission (and most of the flying missions) are in GTA:SA. I already suffered through them once… I refuse to do them again.
I thought I was just bad at games, turns out, games are bad at me?
But now that I’m a full-fledged adult, I’m still bad at games.
That mission does stick out in my head. I remember giving up a few times but always coming back and finishing it. From memory finishing the driving school was harder.
It took me so many tries to finally destroy all the vans. Just to find out that I also needed enough fuel to fly back to the fucking store. Worst mission ever.
Uggh, Supply Lines. aka “I’d rather do the ‘follow the damn train, CJ’ mission again”
I remember that sucking pretty hard. Flying was pretty hard overall on the PC release, not to mention the harrier jet mission where you needed 3 hands.
I hated flying in San Andreas until I managed to get my joystick working, then it was easy.
As a bonus I found riding bicycles and motorbikes using the joystick was much better.
I loved the RC missions, thought it was a fantastic set of side quests in the game. I recently re-bought San Andreas on PS4 and I had no issues in completing any of those missions. Yes, they aren’t so simple that you can beat them in one go, but the challenge to finish them was what was fun.
I must be the only one that has never had an issue with these missions or the Vice City version with the helicopter.
I didn’t like them but adult and child me, never had a problem with these missions.
I however just never liked the character Zero, so I hated spending time with him and my mental image of CJ, I don’t get why he’d waste his time with him, besides cash.
I had no problems either… The missions I recall struggling with across the series were:
*The stallion carpark time challenge in 3 (middle island).
*The wall climbing Patriot checkpoint challenge in 3 (3rd island).
*Final trucking mission in SA (never done it – only 3D GTA I have never 100% completed).
*The damn train mission in SA with the fat guy on the back of the bike.
*The buggy final mission helicopter climb in 4.
I do dislike the RC helicopter bomb mission for Avery in VC, but its not hard. My main reason for not liking it is the tedious RC heli stair climb.
Maybe it’s because I’m a quality pilot who doesn’t suck at flying (flying in VC/SA is a piece of piss!), but I never had a problem with these RC missions at all. Actually, I found them barely a challenge when using a mouse and keyboard. I had far more of an issue with the mission manning the minigun on the roof taking down the RC helicopters, but only when using the crappy analogue stick of a gamepad.
Speaking of crappy gamepad controls, there was a Vice City (Maybe VCS?) had a mission where you had to escort a boat loaded with coke whilst flying an RC plane with free-fall bombs where you had to bomb attacking speedboats. That one was WAY more difficult than any of the SA RC missions!
This mission is so bad, that it COMPLETELY derailed my playthrough of the game on the ps2 and I ended up waiting until ps2 emulation got decent, before I gave it a successful new attempt. The rest of the games quite good after that mission.