Things are a little bit crazy here today. The biggest problem is that, oh, 40 percent of our posts aren’t posting when we schedule them to. It’s an aggravation that we really all could do without. But moving on, we have a new trailer from Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption. We also have a release date: April 27, 2010 for North America, and three days later everywhere else.
What do I know about Red Dead Redemption? Very little, to be honest. We speculated that East Side Dave would be in the game, but there’s zero evidence to that effect.
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.
Not that any of you noticed, but I’ve been AFK for the past few days, so I’ve totally missed out on all the Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony videos and screenshots that have hit my inbox. I’m fixing that right now.
Rockstar’s Beaterator comes out today (and so does Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days… you couldn’t find two more different publishers in Rockstar and Square Enix) for the PSP. We’ve highlighted it in the past because A) Timbaland is one of the better “big name” producers out there and B) I have spent more than a few hours in Ableton Live and the like. It’s familiar territory, in other words.
What’s the longest you’ve ever played GTA IV? A couple of hours, maybe? That’s a shame, since the official Guinness World Record currently stands at 28 hours. “Currently” is the operative word, since a 26-year-old man is currently attempting to break said record.
Look what just showed up in our inbox: the trailer for Beaterator, Rockstar and Timbaland’s PSP and iPhone effort to bring the joy and excitement of beaterating to a new generation of Pete Rocks.
What was one of the biggest house songs of the year 2008? That’s right: Eric Prydz’s “Pjanoo.” (The Madonna remix is pretty cool, too. I like(d) house music, sue me.) What song is featured in the DEBUT TRAILER! of Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony? That’s right, Eric Prydz’s “Pjanoo.” Massive props to Rockstar.
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?
Heads up, 360 gamers. You can now find Rockstar’s Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne on Xbox Live. Each game costs 1,200 Microsoft points, or $15 in non-spacebucks.
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.
Soon you will be able to play GTA IV or its The Lost and the Damned expansion on Xbox LIVE for free. Specifically from Tuesday, February 17 at 9:00AM PST to Sunday, February 22 11:59PM PST, multiplayer service that usually required a paid Xbox LIVE Gold subscription will be free for owners of those games.
The PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV, which will be downloadable via Steam, comes out on Wednesday. The reviews embargo, however, must have lifted overnight in Europe as magazines there already have posted their reviews online. EuroGamer—the review written by one of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun gents—gives it a 9/10, calling the game groundbreaking and so on while acknowledging that it isn’t perfect. The lack of a mid-mission checkpoint feature is the main annoyance and big reason why they didn’t give it a 10/10. A fair point, I might add: oh, the number of expletives I’ve strung together because a car ran into mine as I was trying to flee the scene as part of a mission!
You know how in trailers of terrible “family” movies there’s always a part where the announcers says, “Here we go again!” in that dumb “enthusiastic announcer guy voice”? Think of that right now, only juxtaposed with the sights and sounds of Liberty City, for it has been revealed that Grand Theft Auto IVuses SecurROM DRM. That’s the same DRM that upset so many would-be Spore players (but didn’t bother Fallout 3 players).
Straight from a Rockstar rep:
GTA IV PC uses SecuROM for protecting our EXE… Product Activation is a one time only online authentication when installing the game. GTA IV has no install limits for the retail disc version of the game, and that version can be installed on an unlimited number of PCs by the retail disk owner.
So, if we’re to believe this shadowy Rockstar fellow, the actual restrictions imposed by SecuROM seem to be minimal. That is to say there are none, as all it’s used for is to validate your CD key. Certainly that seems reasonable. You should also know that the game requires Games For Windows Live—how in God’s name did Microsoft manage to foist that upon savvy PC gamers?—is required to play the game.
Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC is to be released on December 2. SecuROM or not, expect to find cracks available within two seconds of its release, if not before then. Such is life.
The DLC for Grand Theft Auto IV (Xbox 360 version) will be released on February 17. It’s entitled The Lost and Damned, which sounds a lot like a 70s cop movie. Rockstar hasn’t announced a price yet, but $15-$20 doesn’t seem out of the question.
Dan Houser, the face of Rockstar these days, told USA Today that the expansion will star a guy named Johnny, who is a “very different character” than Niko. No story details were released, not that many of you play the game for the story (I do, but I’m crazy), but he did admit that we’d see Liberty City from a different perspective.
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”. Read More
If anyone is curious about the difference in graphics between the two consoles, Gamevideos released this video comparing the two side-by-side. I can’t really tell which one I like better. My opinion changes with each scene. What do you guys think?
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.
Does that make me bad? Sadly it’s only in PAL but I’m going to give a shot regardless. You’ll be able to find this yourself without much trouble, but Kotaku has calls in to R* to figure out how the heck this leaked.
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.
Shameful. After MyFox Fox News Chicago ran a little piece questioning why a violent game is being advertised on city buses, the head of the Chicago Transit Authority had the ads removed. There are so many things wrong with this, from ignorance on parade to the violation of free speech as a public authority arbitrarily decides what gets to be advertised and what doesn’t. Earlier they decided that M-rated games were equivalent to X-rated movies. No doubt there are still ads for Cialis, the NRA, and the military still cruising around town.
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.
1UP.com 
