The GTA SA Nostalgia Run PT2: The Tags

I missed four tags.

My latest in-game endeavor has been to collect tags, and I'd made it through all of them when... I realized it wasn't all of them after all! And looking at the locations map - yes I do use a cheatsheet of sorts for such things - I couldn't pinpoint which ones I'd missed out on.

Fortunately I've recorded footage of my entire gameplay session so far - at least of the entire tag-related endeavor - certain technical mishaps have occurred at certain others points, and thus I reckoned it'd be quicker to watch through the recordings than to actually go by all in-game locations once more in search of the ones I missed. But next time I do this - if there is a next time - I am marking the tags on said map.

Why didn't I think of doing that immediately. It's not the first time I get stuck on a search like this, and compared to the horseshoes and oysters there's a whooping one hundred total tags out there...

But at least they're all located in the same compact area: Los Santos.

The endeavor went well!

I generated a list of numbers from one to one hundred, and as I watched through the footage I checked off the numbers I'd tagged, as they were numbered on the locations list.

I played the videos at four times speed, and paused the video each time I needed to mark something, as not to miss anything, and occasionally I skimmed past a part of the recording that was clearly in regard to some other gameplay element, like the sporadic gang-related incidents when you're called to defend a certain area on the map. It took one or two hours to go through it all, and I didn't need to watch the recorded footage all the way though. Towards the end I knew which ones I was missing.

I knew they were four before, by the way, because I loaded up my save file in the GTA SA Savegame Editor 2.8 (from 2008 - still works like a charm), not to cheat but just to see which ones/how many I'd missed.

They were numbered there too, but unfortunately not marked by location, and the numerical order was different from the one on my location map - and from the few other location maps I skimmed in a quick attempt to maybe find one that followed the same order as the Save Editor, which would have let me instantly place each of the tags I'd missed.

Unfortunately there seems to be no such map.

At least I didn't find one. I even skimmed through the Savegame Editor documentation - which lists memory locations in-game for each of the tags, but that didn't help me much. These are just hexcode values. If that's what they're called. VALUES, at least. With no hint as to their locations.

The Savegame Editor actually does show the checkboxes for both oysters and horseshoes along with their locations on the SA map, but alas there was no such feature for tags specifically. Is it just more difficult to read their location? Can the order differ, depending on which order you stake said tags in? Apparently if you CHEAT *god forbid* and just mark all tags as tagged via the savegame editor, then the actual visual representation of said tag doesn't change in the game itself, they just get marked as completed. You don't get the satisfaction of actually seeing the Grove Street insignia over all competing gang ones. A dissuasion for any people with a particular cheater inclination out there. It ain't worth it!

What is worth it though is actually printing out an image of the location map you need, if you need it, and then marking it as you go.

You can get clever and cover it with a plastic sheet that you use a whiteboard marker on too, as to re-use the same map checklist indefinitely (props to this other dude I stumbled upon who used this strategy)! It feels a little overkill for me - I don't plan on getting 100% game completion again anytime soon after I do achieve it - but if you do that's a good idea!

For now, at least, the tags are sorted. And most gang territories in the same swoop. Also: if you're having trouble getting around Los Santos to gather these - try the jetpack. Some of the tags are hard to see from a distance, but if you know roughly where they are this makes it soo much easier.

Another protip: you can't save that jetpack in a garage, so if you use it don't lose it! Get 'em all at once.

Now onto oysters...