Grand Theft Auto 4: Three Leaf Clover mission

Finally, a classic GTA mission to sink one's teeth into. Its got everything: long boring setup, run and gun action, wacky teammate AI, occasional glitches, and then a car escape. Now I know I'm playing GTA.

Really though, nothing says you're playing GTA like a lengthy mission that can be ended randomly by something stupid, that makes you want to rage. Sometimes its my fault; if you don't take cover early and often, you will get your armor and health stripped away by the countless (and endless?) enemies. Sometimes its the games fault; my teammates will sometimes pause in an area while I rush ahead of them and get ripped to shreds.

It doesn't help that the mission is dumb from end to end. Strangers who never worked together before, a plan hatched on the drive over, non-professionals with loose lips, no escape plan but to shoot your way out. Obviously, somebody saw the long bank shootout escape scene in the movie Heat and decided to throw that into the game 'because its cool', except in the movie it was a plan gone bad, and here the stupid escape seems to be the plan. Niko seems like a sensible dude - why would he even get in the car with these drug-addled losers to even go to lunch, let alone rob a bank together?

I read a little online about the mission, to see if I'm missing something obvious. Not really, this is pretty much how the missions is supposed to go down. It looks like you can play get-out-of-jail-free card (from your girlfriend Kiki) at some point; I'd like to see if I can do this without. And unfortunately I read a spoiler that this is the hardest mission in the game. Not sure what to make of that.

Another try, this time my two surviving teammates each break in a different direction. By the time I catch up with them, I get the dreaded 'you have abandoned your team' message.

I tried again, focusing on using cover and not letting them chip away my armor. It worked rather well. I also used the tip to get rid of your stars in the subway system. When you get down to the tracks and defeat all enemies, go up the stairs you're supposed to until your 5 stars turn into 3 stars, then go back down and run down tracks until your 3 stars become 0. Then backtrack and go up the stairs you were supposed to. Always be careful not to get separated from teammates for any length of time. Now its a fun mission.

So now I can purchase the best rifle, and travel to NJ, or Alderney, or whatever they call it. I'm sure there's no relation between these two things. So I drive around Alderney, to get the lay of the land, and see what I can recognize from real life. I try to jack a quiet car, so I can listen to the radio. Motorcycles are fun, and fast cars can be sometimes fun, but they are both too loud to adequately hear the radio. There are a lot of good stations, and I want to listen to them all, but right now I'm focusing on The Journey. It's mostly soothing ambient music, but I love that it is DJ'd by what sounds like the crazy sociopathic AI from Portal. If real life had radio stations like these, I might actually listen to them.

It would be cool if this game had convertibles, and you could put the top up and down. As long as the GTA game series keep on going, its inevitable.