Am I tripping or car damage is wrong? I played the game last time when it was ported to iOS (and actually beat the game for the first time) and I don't remember the cars being so fragile.
I have to share this: when I played the game for the first time, we only had a pirated version available with machine Russian translation (it was the way in Russia, no other option was available and pirates actually mass produced CDs with cracked games and machine translations (but there were some groups which actually did a good job at translating games and even made games by themselves: Sea Dogs (oh man, sweet memories of that game + Captain Blood novel made my childhood) series maker, Akella, I think, had been pirating games and translating them at the very beginning) which were really bad. No one had internet at the time. So I never understood what I did wrong. I was stuck on the mission named Marked man, the final damn mission of the game and I went for the bridge every time and was killed. I thought it was a bug in the pirated version so I never finished the game because I was not able to understand, what I was doing wrong. When I played it on iOS, I think it was pretty obvious that you have to use the tunnels...
I learned the cheat code "gunsgunsguns" from a friend, who I saw once or twice a year when we met in the village which I was forced to go to by my parents...
And most of the info about games I got from the paper magazines I had to buy every month... I feel old, even though I'm not. I remember one time when we were reading the magazine with some per-release screenshots of GTA3 and my friend saying "the game is not even out and I already want to play it". We used to play GTA2 a lot together.
When I played Vice City, I had better grasp of English already and the pirated version provided a way to launch the game in English, so I went for it. I was the most popular guy in school because everyone was playing Russian machine translation and they were not able to understand the missions, so I had to explain to them what needs to be done. Or was it San Andreas?.. Which was infamous for it's bad translation? I don't remember.