Whoa. Rockstar just announced that the two DLCs for Grand Theft Auto IV, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, will be released for the PS3 and PC on March 30. That’s March 30 world-wide, mind you. The games will be sold separately (as downloads on PSN and Games for Windows Live) as well as in the familiar Episodes from Liberty City double pack.

This marks the first time that either of the DLCs will be available for anything other than the Xbox 360. (The rumor was that Microsoft gave Rockstar several sacks of money for a timed exclusivity deal.)

As far as extras go, the PS3 version looks to be pretty much a straight port of the Xbox 360 version(s). PC gamers can look forward to expanded multi-player options (such as a 32-person limit) and “an advanced video editor,” to quote the masterfully worded press release.

PC gamers are invited to complain about needing Games for Windows Live (near universally hated) and the Rockstar Social Club.

No word on price. Sorry.

Let me preface this by saying that I could be the worst GTA player on Planet Earth. I don’t know if my thumbs just can’t twiddle like they used to when I was a spry 16-year-old. I don’t know if the sandbox “oh my god everything is happening all at once~!” style of gameplay is exacting its revenge on me for some previous offense I committed in a past life. I simply don’t know what’s up. The bottom line is: I completely stink on ice when it comes to all things GTA.

And yet I still had a very fine time playing The Ballad of Gay Tony. Well, “very fine time” inasmuch as I can experience the emotion known as “joy” anymore.

The tale of the tape: when you go to the store and buy Episodes From Liberty City, you’re buying a stand-alone (that is, you don’t need to have GTA IV for it to work), $40 disc for your Xbox 360 that contains both The Ballad of Gay Tony and the previously released The Lost and Damned. Since biker culture doesn’t appeal to me in the least I skipped out on buying The Lost and Damned, so hooray for me that I get both DLCs on the one disc.

But only The Ballad of Gay Tony concerns us right now. If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to buy the retail copy of Episodes From Liberty City know that you can download it from Xbox Live, like any other DLC, provided you already have GTA IV.

Hopefully that clears up any misconceptions you may have.

Moving on.

You play as Luís Lopez, a thuggish but well-meaning Dominican gentlemen with a sharp haircut who’s the business partner (read: hired goon) of Gay Tony. Gay Tony runs Liberty City’s nightlife, which means Luís has to deal with all of the associated nonsense. You know, the mob loans Tony some money for a club and now wants to kill everyone he holds dear because he’s a little late in his payments. So you going around GTA-ing the city in order to protect Tony from enemies that are largely of his own creation. Tragedy.

Being that it’s a GTA game, I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with the basic mechanics. Run and drive about, shoot and blow up some stuff, watch tremendously written and directed cutscene, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary, but you do wonder how long Rockstar can keep selling us the same concept. In that sense, if you’ve played, say, Vice City for the PS2 then you’ve played The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Then again, EA keeps pumping out Madden after Madden, and sales there don’t seem to be suffering. Plus, Rockstar releases GTA games so infrequently that maybe my initial concern, that people could tire of the formula, may be overstated. Rockstar hasn’t Guitar Hero‘d the series quite yet.

The overall atmosphere is the biggest change to the game, so much so that you might even consider a character unto itself. If the original GTA IV was too serious (which it was), then The Ballad can be seen as an appeal to the PS2 era’s better angels. It’s fun again. The game still oozes violence, and you still confront adult subject matter (best not to play the game with children about), but the mere fact that you conclude a mission by parachuting off one of Liberty City’s skyscrapers speaks volumes.

Or didn’t you notice the name of the game is The Ballad of Gay Tony?

You’re also knee-deep in the city’s club culture, which is to say you’re knee-deep in one of the circles of hell, the fun one with coke and progressive house music. You walk into a club in the game and it’s just like walking into one of those Meat Packing District hellholes in New York City: it’s dank, there’s guidos everywhere (no disrespect, but come on, cut it out with the wife beaters and hair gel already), the DJ is playing a song you yourself downloaded from Beatport that very week, and the women, despite the fact that it’s 30 degrees outside, are covered up in enough cloth to fill a thimble. Not that I mind, but to relay a Louis CK story I heard some time ago, you just want to go up to these girls and take them home to their parents, and explain to them that there’s more to life than popping bottles with deadbeats in the “VIP section” of a club, then doing the walk of shame at 7am the next morning. Go to night school, clean yourself up, do something with your life for God’s sake!

The mere fact that I was able to work a Louis CK reference into this post pleases me greatly.

The song selection gets many, many stars, and that’s something fierce considering I only listen to three stations in the game: Integrity, Beats 102.7, and Electro-choc. Integrity is still the most entertaining station in the game, Beats has no shame in playing “Arab Money” (thank you, Rockstar) every 10 minutes, and Deadmau5 himself would do well to work the “Electro-choc” playlist into his next set. (As I write this, I’m listening to a Deadmau5 live set from the Amsterdam Dance Event where he mixes in the Zelda overworld song.)

“Pjanoo,” the song featured in the trailer, is nowhere to be found in the game. Sad clowns, all of us.

I dabbled in the multi-player, but only just. It’s largely the same—mayhem everywhere, always—but there are new weapons, parachutes, Halo-like kill streaks, and so on.

Rockstar has improved the replay mission feature. If you fail a mission, and I’m pretty sure I failed all of ‘em at least once, you’re sent a text message that gives you the option to replay said mission. This time, however, many of the missions are broken into segments, and each segment serves as a checkpoint for any subsequent replays. For example, in one multi-part mission you have to go around and blow up various items (a construction crane, a subway train, and a plane, to be exact). So if you succeed in blowing up the crane but then fail in your attempt to blow up the subway, you resume the mission from right after blowing up the crane; you don’t have to start the mission all the way from Step One.

Such a time saver, believe me.

You’re also given the option to upload your mission score (the game ranks how well you complete missions this time around, taking into account time taken and damage received) to the Rockstar Social Club. I’d be lying if I said I had any real idea what the Rockstar Social Club is, but I’m sure it’s swell.

OK, this is already twice as long as I originally intended for it to be, so I’ll finish with this: The Ballad of Gay Tony concludes the GTA IV saga quite nicely, finally bringing some levity to a series that desperately needed it.

Oh, and Ron Bennington lends his voice to the game. That’s a Good Thing.

Good news, everyone. (I hope people understand that reference.) Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City comes out tomorrow, and to help grease the wheels a little bit, this weekend will be a free-play weekend on Xbox Live for GTA IV. That is, if you have GTA IV but don’t subscribe to Xbox Live Gold, you’ll be able to play online multiplayer this weekend.

The deal goes from Friday to Sunday, and works for all the various GTA IV releases (The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony).

A couple of Rockstar people will be playing all night Saturday night, and their Gamertags are GwRockstar1 through GwRockstar16. Presumably there will be much trash talking and exploding cars.

Also, on Sunday, from 1pm to 3pm ET, you’ll be able to play with Henry Santos Jeter, who’s a singer in the band Aventura. So that’s neat, a successful musician taking time out of his day to run rampant throughout Liberty City with y’all.

Odds are you’ve already played Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Perhaps you haven’t opened the box, popped out the game card and moved your Nintendo DS’ Power switch to “on,” per se, but trust me: you’ve played the game. And depending on your point of view, your attitude toward the GTA franchise, that may or may not be a bad thing.

This time around you play as Huang Lee, a self-described “pampered little snot” who has to fly to Liberty City, all the way from Kong Kong, for two reasons. One, your father, who just so happens to be your family’s head, was just killed and you’d like to find out why; and two, to deliver a family keepsake— a sword—to your uncle. Fair enough. Only when your plane lands, and totally out of nowhere, you’re ambushed; it’s a scene right out of 2002’s Vice City. The men who ambushed you then dump your presumed-dead body into a nearby body of water; they also steal the sword you were supposed to deliver. So, to recap: you’ve flown halfway across the world, only to be ambushed and left for dead. Yes, it’s GTA, all right.

The plot—I can’t name too many people who appreciate the GTA games for their plot, despite the fact that GTA IV was one of last year’s better written games—then concerns your attempts to figure out what the hell is going on. Why were you ambushed, and by whom—why? And so on. Keep in mind that, in form, it’s a portable game, one played on a (well, two) tiny screen, and, in function, an action game; don’t go into it expecting The Great American novel, but, rather, do go into it expecting something infinitely more intricate than the shovelware nonsense you find on the DS.

The game’s developers, Rockstar Leeds (the same guys who developed the PSP’s Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories), try to preserve the game’s GTA-ness while taking into account the realities of DS gaming. That’s why the game is presented the way it is, with an almost-overhead view, one that’s certainly reminiscent of the series’ pre-GTA III installments. It is important to note, however, that the game isn’t 2D. All objects have depth, and the bold-colored outlines, found in so many cartoons today, help the graphics “pop out” more, if that makes any sense at all. Put another way, if you were to magically reposition the camera so that it’d be more like GTA IV’s, then you’d see Liberty City just as you did on the Xbox 360 (or PS3). The developers went with this almost-overhead view as a concession to playing on such a tiny screen(s); you see more of the city this way, and more clearly.

The game’s radio stations, so much a part of the GTA universe, are limited by the hardware. You won’t find any Nas songs here, though I’ll be damned if I didn’t recognize Deadmau5’s logo in the radio station selector.

Control wasn’t really an issue for me, but then I may be more forgiving than others in this regard. The D-pad, as you might expect, moves Huang up, down, left and right; hold the B button to run. You aim using the the R button, and cycle between targets using the L button., then use A to shoot. No, it’s not exactly analog control, but then again control has never been one of the series’ strongest aspects.

I hope you weren’t expecting an IGN-esque 9.265333333 here. As you’ll recall, I think assigning numbers to game reviews—I wouldn’t even consider this a review, more of a “here’s what’s up” sort of thing—is silly, and contributes to Metacritic, which is also terrible. All I can say in closing is that if you’re a big fan of the series you’ll no doubt enjoy the game. Those of you who subscribe to the “been there, done that” line of thinking probably won’t miss it. But outside of Chrono Trigger and maybe Final Fantasy IV (I am, or at least was, very much into RPGs), you probably can’t find a better DS game. So there’s that.

This is the trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV: Lost and the Damned. It debuted last night at the laughable Spike TV Video Games Awards—I’m sure we’ll post the winners at some point today—and it looks, I don’t know, quite aggressive. Loud music, bikers, the colors brown and gray, etc.

The trailer only mentions Xbox 360, which will lead to endless speculation about the existence of a PS3 version of the expansion pack.

My favorite comment on the original 1UP story: “That’s what M$ paid extra for? Expect better mods than this on PC.” That’s the impression I got, too.

via 1UP

GTA IV is set for a PC release on December 2 and Steam is currently offering Vice City for anyone who pre-orders before then. What are you waiting for?

Pre-order

Somehow I doubt it will have the same level of ultraviolence that GTA and GTA II had (gouranga!), but the screens (here and here) are encouraging otherwise. [via Kotaku]

Electronic Arts has “moved on,” and is no longer interested in buying Take Two Interactive, the publisher of, among of games, Grand Theft Auto IV. EA made it official sometime Sunday evening, ending the months-long back-and-forth between the two companies.

Ask any gamer, and they’d tell you Electronic Arts was simply looking to buy the Grand Theft Auto brand, which, at least in the U.S., is good as gold right now. And since the holiday shopping season is rapidly approaching, EA didn’t feel there was enough time to cross all the Ts and dot all the Is—you know, business stuff—in time to get some of the holiday GTA money. So they balked.

There are other, larger business-y concerns going on here, but I’m gonna guess that none of you care too much about that.

Besides, isn’t it an unofficial rule of the Internet that you must hate everything EA does and produces?

Downloadable content (DLC) for the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV should be available this November. Eurogamer, in true Woodward and Bernstein style, claim to have a source who swears up and down that the DLC is shaping up nicely, and will be comprised of two, 10-hour episodes.

Considering many games don’t even top out at 20 hours these days, gamers should be in for a treat in two months’ time.

That is all.

“This time-bomb has already exploded and the situation could get worse,” Ladda Thangsupachai, director of the ministry’s Cultural Surveillance Centre, told Reuters. “Today it is a cab driver, but tomorrow it could be a video game shop owner.”

Word on the street has it that those wacky folks over at Rockstar Games are sending out promotional Grand Theft Auto IV metal bats, to encourage the gift giving aspects of the game. Popular Mechanics reported getting one the in the mail along with a press release saying “‘Tis the Season To Swing Big and Go GRAND.” We don’t think they actually mean going on a grand crime spree. But try telling that to the teenagers arrested last week in New Hyde Park, NY. After beating and robbing at least three victims the group was caught and said they learned it from watching Niko Bellic. We hope the writers at Popular Mechanics don’t get any crazy ideas.

A Grand Theft Auto movie would be “super interesting” for Mr. Uwe Boll, the German director of great movies such as House of the Dead and Postal. You may remember Mr. Boll for being a giant douche in every interview he gives, up to and including this latest one with New York magazine, where he extols his love for the GTA franchise, He admits, rather caustically, that, if the game is ever turned into a movie, it’ll likely go to a Michael Bay or a Brett Ratner, a big-budget, big explosion hack director. Sounds familiar.

Honestly, I can’t be bothered with “hating” a director, especially since I’ve never seen his movies. Just know that he’d love to direct a GTA movie, but that he feels he’d never be allowed to.

Want to see some British kid playing Grand Theft Auto IV 100 percent LIVE? Yes!!

The soon-to-be-sued young man set up a Justin.tv feed of himself playing a pirated copy of the game. He’s pretty hardcore about it: full audio, takes requests in the chat room (“Turn on electrochoc!” “You got it!”), etc. Pretty fun while it lasts. Shouldn’t be too long before Rockstar gets to him and/or Justin.tv

Stagueve sent us this super cool tribute to GTA which shows flyovers of most of the GTA:SA scenery. I’m not sure the Who music is quite right, but it is sufficiently martial to make me stiffen up a little, especially in anticipation of GTAIV and the promise of Russian mobsters Hot Coffee-ing gazelle-like ladies from the Ukraine.

In fact, this very issue came up in Boston with a marijuana legalization campaign and they sued the Transit Authority and won. Ridiculous, isn’t it? But this is how we do it. Two steps forward, one step censored.

Jack Thompson was not involved in this little fracas but I’m putting him in the tags anyway.

Personally, I believe that the best achievements in GTA games aren’t listed, because they can’t be predicted. There should be an achievement where you upload a replay of something utterly insane that just happened, and if it meets their standards you get the achievement. Then they could pack it up and send it back out as free content to put on the ingame TVs you walk past. How am I not a game developer?
[via Kotaku]

The town itself looks interesting, and is obviously divided into island-style boroughs and about 50 or so neighborhoods. If you look closely you’ll see dots for new stuff like cabaret clubs, internet cafes, and old holdovers like Cluckin’ Bell and Pay n’ Spray. Just one month to go till you’re cruising those streets for real.

Apparently there’s some game called “Grand Theft Auto IV” coming out. I’ve never heard of such a game but so help me God if it’s violent or glorifies crime, I’m going to try to get on Fox News to talk about how bad it is for our nation’s youth. Maybe it’ll just be a courtroom style simulation where you play a lawyer who prosecutes people that steal cars. I’m guessing it’s that because Microsoft’s issued 500 Xbox 360 consoles with the game’s logo on the side and a briefcase containing various peripherals — much like a lawyer’s briefcase would contain various law-type things.

Xbox Drops 500 Limited Edition GTA IV 360s [Complex.com]

After reading part two of Edge’s interview with Rockstar’s president and GTA IV writer Sam Houser, published today, I went to the game’s Web site for the first time. I’m absolutely blown away by the attention to detail. Like, Radio Vladivostok is exactly how I’d imagine an ex-pat, Russian radio station. Dukes—Queens, where I live, unfortunately—is “where my maid lives… the best thing is the airport.” It’s true, people! Queens should be condemned. The bitterSweet, aka BlackBerry, let’s you “be everywhere and nowhere” simultaneously. It’s incredible that this is a video game.

Why would you watch some awful action movie when you can be immersed in such a detailed world?

The Making of Grand Theft Auto IV [Edge/Next-Gen.biz]