First, I’d like to say that if you think of search­ing a green or red dump­ster for extra weapons, you prob­a­bly play this game too much. I saw one of each on the way to the library today and that’s what went through my head. Any­hoo, after beat­ing the game and caus­ing chaos while com­plet­ing the side quests, I dis­cov­ered some awe­some stuff.

01. Hold­ing down the Y and B but­tons allows you to rev up the tires on any of the motor­cy­cles, sports cars, police vehi­cles, and the drug vans [ you learn this on a bike halfway through the story ]. What I like to do is, when there’s a bunch of cops chas­ing me, I rev the ties and then speed off as they try to open the car door or take me off the bike. The cop [ s ] will then catch fire and run around scream­ing. Trust me, it is hilar­i­ous. If there’s a group of them, they’ll run into each other and often into other passerby, thereby mak­ing them catch fire and run around like crazy. This allows you to save your ammu­ni­tion and take theirs when they burn out.

02. When you’re in a vehi­cle, you actu­ally don’t have to touch the arrows on the touch­screen to change the sta­tion, you can press the station’s icon. Dis­cov­ered this ear­lier today.

03. I highly rec­om­mend com­plet­ing all of the para­medic and fire fighter mis­sions so that you’ll have Infi­nite Sprint [ your char­ac­ter doesn’t tire after 30 sec­onds ] and Fire Retard [ immune to fire … per­fect for the pre­vi­ous tip ] respec­tively. When you have Fire Retard, you can stand in a group of peo­ple on fire and the cops will run in to appre­hend you and regret it while you laugh.

04. When you sync your game with Rockstar’s Social Club, there’s a sec­tion that shows how long you’ve been on the run with a 6-star Wanted Level. A 6-star Wanted Level is when the author­i­ties are after blood and they bring out the tanks. Need­less to say, you don’t stand a chance but hav­ing a such a level for a good period of time shows how awe­some you are at evad­ing the author­i­ties right? Kind of like, the mark of a vet­eran player. Well, it’s actu­ally not that dif­fi­cult so check it : all you have to do is get a 5-star Wanted Level and head towards the lower-left sec­tion of the map. You can either jump into the ocean or drive your car into it and punch the glass to escape, and swim towards Hap­pi­ness Island. Once you’re there, head towards the Statue of Lib­erty to get the body armor and just attack what lit­tle cops come at you. There’s no way for a tank to get on the island so you’re rel­a­tively safe. You might even get bored, which is why my longest time was 08:56.

I’m sure there’s some stuff I left out but now you can fig­ure out some fun stuff to do in Lib­erty City. I don’t know if this is a wide­spread prob­lem or if it’s just me but there’s so many cops on me at any given time that my game either slows down for a cou­ple sec­onds or it freezes / crashes. Awe­some. My crim­i­nal level is now “First Route Marshal”.

05. I was talk­ing with fel­low blog­ger and friend Sega­ManXero about jack­ing ammu­ni­tion and drug vans and remem­bered some­thing else I do. You’ll need Infi­nite Sprint for this one though. Unlike the drug vans, where you can just walk up to them and car­jack the gang­sters, you have to cause dam­age to the ammu­ni­tion vans [ called “Ammu*Nation” ] by either ram­ming them [ the dif­fi­cult way ] or just run­ning behind them with a shot­gun. After a cou­ple shots, the dri­ver will come out and attempt to kill you with his own shot­gun. You have to hit him before he hits you or you’re screwed. It should go with­out say­ing that the more safe­houses you have, the bet­ter. Oth­er­wise, you might have to drive across the whole city in a van that will blow up if you so much as nudge it against 3 cars.