Mechanics

Four of our GTA Vice City pages are about getting ahead of the game rather than playing through it: the cheat list, the safehouses, the quick money and the tank. They read as separate subjects, but all four bear on the same balance sheet. Two of them put cash or hardware in Tommy's hands, one takes cash out, and one bypasses the whole ledger at a price that is not paid in dollars. This guide runs them in that order, from what pays best to what costs something you cannot buy back.

The Ledger At A Glance

What Pays: Races And Emergency Missions

Our money guide names two routes and three races. V.C. Endurance is the headline: a win is worth $40,000 and the race takes under four minutes, but you put $10,000 down to enter it and a crash is how you lose that stake. Dirting is the safe one at $5,000 for a five-minute course, held back only by the fact that the game offers it once every three days of in-game time. Cone Crazy is where the page's real trick lives. The payout doubles every time you beat your own best, so the advice is to finish your first attempt at the last possible second and then shave a single second off each run, so that the doubling keeps happening for as long as you can stand it. The page puts the result at millions in under half an hour.

Emergency vehicle missions are the alternative for anyone who would rather not race. Each completed level pays noticeably more than the last, and the page says the climb continues all the way to level 1,000, by which point the page puts the earnings at around $50,000. Unlike V.C. Endurance, the page mentions no stake to put down first.

What It Buys: Nine Safehouses For $41,500

The safehouses guide lists nine properties, bought from the floating house icon outside each one, and saving the game means picking up the pink cassette inside. Two cost nothing, and the other seven add up to $41,500, less than the cash the money guide's V.C. Endurance run makes in two wins. Six are yours from the start of the story, five of them for sale and the hotel for nothing. The two Downtown properties wait for Phnom Penh '86, and the Vercetti Estate is handed over after Rub Out rather than sold.

Price and usefulness do not line up neatly. Four of the nine have no garage at all, and those four are also four of the five cheapest. The Hyman Condo is the one to save for: it is the most expensive property on the list and the only one with more than two parking spaces, and it repeats the Ocean View Hotel's weapon spawns so you are not driving back to the beach to collect them. One thing the page does not settle is exactly how much it holds. It says eight vehicles in one place and three garages of three each in another, so treat the figure as roughly eight to nine until an editor checks it in game.

What Is Earned Once: The Rhino

The tank sits outside the cash ledger, because the tank guide gives two routes to it and neither costs a dollar. The first is to find 90 hidden packages, after which a Rhino appears at Fort Baxter Air Base north of Escobar International Airport, guarded by soldiers you either barge past in something fast or drop in on by helicopter. The second is to earn a six-star wanted level, at which point the army arrives in tanks of its own. The catch the page stresses is that a tank crew cannot be pulled out; the driver has to climb out on his own, so the advice is to wedge the tank somewhere he has no choice, and then get yourself out of the jam you made.

For the six stars themselves, the page suggests the West Haven Community Healthcare Center in Little Haiti, shooting bystanders and police and then bringing down the police helicopter when it arrives. Its other suggestion is to do the damage from a Hunter, and it names two places one spawns: Fort Baxter, again after 90 packages, and the helipad at the southern end of Ocean Beach once Keep Your Friends Close is done. The story also puts you in a Rhino once, during Cortez's Sir, Yes Sir!, which is the one way to drive one before you have earned it.

What Skips The Ledger: The Cheat List

Our cheat code list runs to 61 entries for PC and console, and it comes with three warnings that amount to the price. Entering a code can switch off trophies and achievements, so the page tells you to keep a separate save for cheat sessions. A code cannot be deactivated once it is in; the only way out is to quit or reload, so save before you type. And the Definitive Edition has retired some codes while adding others: the page lists Fat Skin, Skinny Skin, Invincibility and Smoke a Cigarette as no longer working, and says the helicopter, motorbike, aeroplane and buy-all-properties codes fail on PC.

Set against the rest of this guide, the list is a shortcut to almost everything above it. PANZER spawns the Rhino the tank guide makes you earn, the three weapon set codes hand out guns without a single package found, ASPIRINE and PRECIOUSPROTECTION do what the safehouse health and armour pickups do, and YOUWONTTAKEMEALIVE adds two stars at a time towards the six the tank method needs. What the list does not contain is a money code. There is nothing in its 61 rows that adds cash, which is why the races and emergency missions above are the only fast money our pages know of. Where the rest of Tommy's time goes, the 71 rampage and jump icons, is covered in the rampages and unique jumps guide, and the GTA Vice City hub puts the two halves together.