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.

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.

As the very first trailer alluded to, you’ll be able to use parachutes in multi-player. (Thank God it’s not weather balloons!) Other multi-player highlights include:

• The use of tanks and helicopters

• A bunch of new weapons with which to kill-streak your friends until they log off in utter frustration

Given that I played GTA IV’s multi-player for all of 10 minutes (not because it was bad, but I’m just more of a single-player gamer; I even prefer to solo in WoW!) I really can’t speak to these additions. Maybe if I were more social?

Moving on, this here’s another video that highlights the game’s whole nightclub/nightlife/celebrity atmosphere. That, for the record, is why I wasn’t so keen on the first GTA IV expansion. Motorcycles and whatnot just aren’t my scene, whereas I have no problem with listening to “Pjanoo” and other, similar songs over and over again.

That’s about it for Ballad news. In other Rockstar news, however, they just put a bunch of their older games in the PSN Store for all of you PSP Go owners. Games to be newly found there include Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition and Manhunt 2.

I think that ties up all the loose ends. The lesson is, never leave the house again.

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.

There’s but so much I can say now not having played it yet—give me a few days to fool around with it—but I will embed this video entirely because Pete Rock is in it for a split-second.

You know, as I type this, I am wondering what type of music y’all listen to. Like, I can drop the name “Pete Rock,” but if three of you even know who I’m talking about, without first going to Wikipedia, then we have a problem. Although the other day one of you guys caught my Eric B. & Rakim reference, which was beyond awesome.

But back to Beaterator. I should have clarified that to say that the PSP version comes out today, but that the iPhone (and iPod touch) version is still in production.

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.

The beauty of it is that you can follow the man’s exploits live on Ustream. It’s pretty much just a guy playing GTA IV, so not exactly must-see-TV.

One of the people in the video has an Arsenal shirt on, so that’s neat.

All of us here wish the man nothing but the best of luck in his future endeavors.

And I sincerely hate to use the same pic as Destructoid did, but it’s just too perfect not to use.

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.

Hopefully this video explains, once and for all, that, no, Beaterator isn’t a “music game,” but rather a music creator, à la Ableton Live. (It’s run-on sentence Thursday.)

And again, if all Beaterator does is give us the opportunity to discover more underground talent, then it’ll all have been worth it.

You do sort of get the feeling that someone came up to Timbaland one day all, “You should make a video game.” Then Timbaland called his agent and, some time later, here we are.

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.

The trailer is all in-game footage, which you probably could tell by the somewhat stiff dancing animation. (Has GTA ever been known for great animation?)

What I find sorta interesting, and I stress the “sorta,” is that Rockstar seems to be hiding the DLC name, The Ballad of Gay Tony, behind the name of the retail pack, Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City. I have zero information to that effect, and it’s only based on the press materials we receive. It’s all Episodes From Liberty City! and not so much Ballad of Gay Tony!

Anyhow, the game comes out on October 29. Hopefully “Pjanoo” actually appears in-game!

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.

There seems to be a bit of a discussion at Major Nelson’s Tree House, or whatever he calls his Internet Web site, about whether it’s wiser to buy the Xbox 360-ified Max Payne games at $15 a pop, or buy the actual, boxed copies from eBay for less. That way, you have the game, manual, and the sense of physical ownership that some people cling to.

Of course, not everyone still has a working Xbox1 (I do, but I’m silly), and playing the game on Xbox1 won’t net you any Achievements. Decisions!

I enjoyed Max Payne when it first came out. I never played Max Payne 2, so maybe I’ll give it a go this time around? We’ll see. I’m busy doing stupid quests in Fallout 3, and Banjo-Tooie comes out on Wednesday. I also just bought Fallout and Fallout 2 from Good Old Games. So clearly I’m very busy, and making the most of my college degree.

Photo: Flickr

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.

Rockstar and Xbox LIVE will also be holding sweepstakes promotions and give users a chance to take on DJ Statik Selektah in the new game. So mark your calendars and be sure to get in 5 days of solid gaming. More info here.

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!

Specific to the PC version: 32-player multiplayer, an all-new radio station called Independence FM (your MP3s plus ready made commercials and in-game announcements), mouse and keyboard controls (or your Xbox 360 controller if you prefer), and a replay editor. It allows you to save your last 30 seconds (or so) of gameplay, then you can change camera angles, music, etc. to your liking. Expect YouTube to be filled with ‘em.

But, if you’ve already played the Xbox 360/PS3 version, should you fork over another wad of cash to play the PC version? Judging by the review, I’d say no, you should be able to skip it without missing too much. A bump in graphical detail and some additional garnish isn’t enough to buy the game again.

Buying it for the first time, though, is a whole different story, one you should probably become familiar with.

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 IV uses 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.

via Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.

No details about the PS3 DLC were announced.

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”.

Instead, they went with the unique platform offerings of the DS: “The stylus and the chance to use minigames in that way was really interesting and exciting to us, and we thought we could integrate seamlessly between those two modes.”

While the folks at Rockstar have said that they may bring GTA to the Wii at some point in the future, there’s nothing currently on the horizon. To be honest, that’s good to hear. Thanks for not trying to cram some crap motion gimmick into a game that has no use for it, Rockstar.

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.

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.

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.

Rather than delving into all the financial aspects the WSJ article has on the current state of EA’s potential takeover of Take-Two, I’ll paraphrase and dish out what’s important. Take-Two currently has no other bids than the $2 billion EA is offering them. That puts Take-Two’s shares at about $26/share, which is up roughly 50 percent since EA publicly announced their intentions to take over the software company.

But without any other suitors, Take-Two is holding out until after the launch of GTA IV to boost their worth, which has been their main arguing point over EA’s offer. They’ve lambasted EA because GTA IV is expected to sell roughly $400 million in the first week. Take-Two is adamanetly telling shareholders to wait it out. EA’s tender offer expires tomorrow at midnight. If EA is unable to sway the shareholders to sell then they have the option to extend the offer and possibly raise their offer. I’d say it’s in TT’s shareholder’s best interest to wait it out.