Coming to an iPhone/iPod Touch near you this fall from the creators of the greatest game in history, Grand Theft Auto, is Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. I guess it’s going to be an exact port of the DS title. Are you excited?

 
Who doesn’t wanna play the original top-view, Grand Theft Auto on their iPhone. Carjack Streets might be the closest thing we get and while it’s not out yet, seems promising. Scheduled to come out in January or February of ‘09.

Once Monday rolls around you’ll be able to cruise around San Andreas on your Xbox 360, for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has showed up on Xbox.com. The game, which will cost the usual 1,100 Microsoft Points ($14.99), isn’t too bad; in truth, I prefer it to the gritty realism of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Plus it has that Marshall Jefferson song on one of the radio stations, embedded here for my amusement and your pleasure. Rock your body.

via Maxconsole

Ah, the circle is completed. The GTA that we knew and fell in love with back in the ’90s is making a comeback in spirit with GTA: Chinatown Wars on the DS. Yes, the cel-shaded look is trendy but the isometric viewpoint and map/minigame screen are very suited to the DS (more natural than the Wii, apparently).

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]

Imagine: Grand Theft Auto on the Wii. Need to hail a cab? Just wave the wiimote around in the air. Tryin’ to stab a guy? Shank him with the wiimote. Taking your e-girlfriend out for burgers? Eat the wiimote. Sounds like a perfect fit, right? Rockstar doesn’t think so.

In a recent Nintendo Power interview, Rockstar co-founder said that they didn’t develop a GTA game for the Wii because it just “didn’t feel natural”.
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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?

Facial animation made big news at SIGGRAPH earlier this month, with Image Metrics showing off their Emily Project. The process is not motion capture, so it requires no markers or special cameras. The actor simply acts and then software analyzes the images to create the animation. Since this is achieved at the pixel level, the animation looks surprisingly realistic.

Image Metrics is the company that has been producing animation for the GTA series. Video games on the (current) next-gen systems get all the attention for looking so real, but when this tech gets integrated into games, look out! Can we start the hype for GTA V yet?

I actually don’t recall many ultra-violent games for the NES. Am I misremembering?

Oh, MADtv, is there anything you won’t make fun of with your trademark guffawing, low-brow humor?

(via NoWhereElse)

Flickr’d

Like Microsoft with Yahoo!, EA refuses to concede defeat in its pursuit of GTA publisher Take-Two. The Redwood City, Calif.-based corp said today that it has extended its self-imposed deadline to acquire Take-Two by one month. So now we have till June 16 to read all sorts of fun stories like:

“T2: You’re undervaluing our company”

and

“EA: No we’re not”

Both EA and Take-Two are down in early morning trading, with EA losing one-quarter of a percentage and Take-Two down just over one percent, as one 10:01am EDT.

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.

I’m really wondering what happened that let R*’s crown jewel out so early. Folks have been playing this game since last Wednesday and it doesn’t launch until the 29th, a strange bit of highly professional piracy indeed. Oh well. R*’s loss is our gain as we watch hundreds of hours of HD encoded GTA in the privacy of our own man dens.

1UP.com got a chance to interview Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar — the company behind a little series called “Grand Theft Auto,” which is apparently quite popular with the kids these days.

Houser talks about living in New York (he’s British) and the places he finds unique and interesting, like Brighton Beach, which inspired Hove Beach in GTA.

He also talks about the mixture of British and American humor in the series, the shift away from movies like Goodfellas, Boyz in the Hood, and Miami Vice towards a more Eastern European organized crime influence in GTA 4, character development and interactions, and, of course, the controversy that constantly surrounds the game’s violent nature.

It’s a pretty interesting read. Check it out.

Break out your telescope

Unlike Manhunt 2 before it, Grand Theft Auto IV has passed that British censor board just fine. In so doing, however, we’re given a quick little play-by-play of what to expect from the game’s more “adult” moments. “During gameplay the character can pick up prostitutes… What follows is an un-detailed portrayal of masturbation, fellatio and intercourse.”

Oh, man! Someone call Jack Thomson!

And inside, a fun “tourist” video showing off Liberty City. Lots of in-game footage for you to stare at.

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This reminds me of old times where you’d have a sheisty, inaccurate, hand-drawn map of say Hyrule crammed into the tiny instruction booklet. Some enterprising fellow uploaded some pics and promptly removed them, but not before they made it to the tips inbox at Kotaku. They’ve got it all nice and gallery-ed up so take a look.

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]