Written by: Rik
Date posted: May 12, 2019
As mentioned in the main review, one of the optional side-missions in GTA III involves stealing cars from a list and delivering them to a garage (Import/Export). There are two garages in the game, one in Portland, and one in Shoreside Vale. What’s slightly weird is that the Portland one is available first but is actually harder: a number of the vehicles on the list aren’t widely available until you get progress further into the game. While completing the Shoreside Vale version, on the other hand, I found several of the cars pulling up outside the garage just as I’d made a successful delivery.
There’s definitely something a bit weird about the way traffic is generated, which you’ll notice while doing these missions. In particular, the car you’re driving seems to have an impact on which other ones pop up alongside you in the game. Sadly, I didn’t manage to work out how to make the ice-cream van (Mr Whoopee) more likely to appear: it’s by far the hardest vehicle to source. If you’re a bit sneaky, you can do the mission ‘I Scream, You Scream’ for El Burro, and not follow the instructions to rig it with explosives. But if you’ve already completed it, chances are you’ll be driving around for hours looking for another to pop up.
Tips ‘online’ seem to include hanging around the Cartel Mansion in Shoreside Vale and/or completing police or fire truck missions. Neither strategy was particularly successful for me, but I did find that one popped up in Shoreside Vale on a couple of occasions when I was in the middle of something else. On the first of these, my terrible sense of direction meant that I drove around in dangerous areas for too long and therefore my Whoopee got shot to pieces.
Fortunately, on the second, I managed to survive and complete the list. So my advice would be: stop looking for a while, and one might pop up. Possibly. Well, I’d certainly say at least that driving around desperately trying to find one turns a fun side-quest into something rather more frustrating.
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