Intermission: GTA: SA

Or, for the acronym impaired, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

For those looking to buy it, I hope you like not being able to finish your games. I know I don't.

Two thirds into the game your let into the last island, Las Venturas, essentially the last leg of the game before it's conclusion.
There, you meet a character names Mike Toreno. The first few missions of his include driving up along side a tanker and getting your friend to hijack it, which was quite fun when other cars on the road wern't punting you off your bike.

But eventually, he sends you to buy the airstrip, a boneyard for unused planes. Then he instructs you to learn to fly, with the mission about it titled "Learning to fly", which not only conveys the overall objective but is also a nod to Pink Floyd, incidental or not.

Anyway, the first two flying challanges are relativly easy, so long as you don't touch the roll or yaw keys.
The third one forces you to fly through a big ring of hoops around the airstrip. You've never had any experience turning the plane before this course, so it seems a bit like teaching you how to hold your breath underwater then making you do laps, with no proper instruction on how to swim.

So you'll fail. It's inevitable - in fact, it's never a case of if in the GTA universe, it's when.
You will die eventually, and you lose 70% of all the missions you do on the first try, and most of them on the second and third. That's just the way it is.

But that's ok, because I sort of knew that when I came into the game. But the flying and driving school is set out to be as frustratingly difficult as humanly possible.

In the third challange, you have to get each ring pretty much perfect, and if you miss any one of the many you're forced to restart. It's an endless parade of failure, entire days going by in game as you try to meet the challenge's unreasonable goals.

Evnetually, after at the very least four solid hours of game time trying, over the course of about a day or so, I finally do get it. I think I got a bronze, but hell, I finished the course. I was feeling damn good about myself - I beat the game.

Then it told me to do it again, only this time I had to land the plan as well.
That was it for me. The game makes damn sure that if you are on your high horse, you aren't on it for long. For every genuinely fun mission, there's one which is abysmally hard, and it's not just because of objectives. Sometimes the game likes not telling you anything at all, or giving you the bare minimum of the mission objectives.
Sometimes is the abominable controls, like the Red Baron mission for Zero, and occasionally it's based on a random dice roll within the game, like with "wrong side of the tracks", where you winning is entirely determined to whether or not Big Smoke woke up on the right side of the "can actually shoot straight" bed.

It's come to the point that I'm starting to believe nobody playtested San Andreas, or at least not the PC version, because if they did they would notice some serious problems with the key bindings.

One mission with Zero, everyone's favourite RC enthusiast and professional whiner, where you have to control a small RC helicopter to help get Zero's RC car to his compedator's base.
If they had tested it before release, they would know that binding the magnet control with your helicopter to the LMB (Left Mouse Button) while the rest of the helicopter controls are spread out along the keyboard is not good design, and as far as I am aware nothing else works apart from the LMB.

When the players of your game spend two or three days trying to get through just one mission because it's gratuitously dfficult, then you don't have a good game. And, of course, you can't proceed until you have mastered all the courses in the flying school.
I can't remember the last time I had any actual fun playing San Andreas after being introduced to that godforsaken part of the game. Seriously. It seems so long ago.