So Grand Theft Auto IV what does towlie think read a full review and interview with Dan Houser VP of Rockstar games.

As we're sure you're aware, this week sees the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, the highly anticipated latest iteration of the popular violence-based, sandbox-style video game series. This time, the action is set in Liberty City, a living, breathing replica of New York. Dan Houser, Vice President of Rockstar Games and co-writer of GTA IV, spoke to Vulture about building a nuttier, dirtier Gotham.

DRIVEN INSANE: Now that the year's biggest video game has arrived, it may be time to add a new feature to my blog : Who's Mad at "GTA IV" This Week?

Well first up its the predictable list of manly feminists, immigrant groups, New York City police obviously and New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

Then there's the industry's most laughable critic, A Florida attorney named Jack Thompson, who called "GTA IV" "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio." LOL

GTA the greatest threat to children since Polio ?????

Amid the hubbub, there was one voice that's new to this debate. Mothers Against Drunk Driving are protesting about a part of the game that involves getting the main character pissed as a fart so that he can barely stand, then have him drive a car. Now most well adjusted adults know that if you cant even stand then your probably in no fit state to drive well NO your too stupid to know the difference according to MADD (madd by name madd by nature ?) "Drunk driving is not a game, and it is not a joke," MADD said in a statement. The group asked the Entertainment Software Rating Board to reclassify "GTA IV" as Adults-Only, a step up from its current Mature rating.I am not entirely sure what difference raising the age rating will help but obviously I am not quite madd enough !

MADD's protest ignores one thing about the drunk-driving simulator: It's really difficult — and not much fun — to control your virtual car when your character is intoxicated. And much of the sober driving in "GTA IV' would be illegal and dangerous in real life.

"GTA IV" publisher Rockstar Games responded, "We have a great deal of respect for MADD's mission, but we believe the mature audience for 'Grand Theft Auto IV' is more than sophisticated enough to understand the game's content." Expect to see any number of variations on this statement from Rockstar in the months ahead.

"Somebody think of the children"

DARN KIDS: "Grand Theft Auto IV" isn't supposed to be sold to anyone younger than 17, but a lot of kids are going to find a way to get their hands on it. How concerned should parents be?

Not very, according to Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson, two Harvard Medical School psychiatrists who conducted a federally funded research project on the effects of video games on preteens and teenagers. In their new book, "Grand Theft Childhood," Kutner and Olson write, "Perhaps the biggest lesson learned from our research is that parents should not worry about violent or other M-rated video games having a profound effect on their children's behavior or values."

Most young gamers, they write, "had incorporated their parents' fundamental values into their lives" and realized that "these games were entertaining but outrageous fantasies." Other factors — violence or abuse in the home, treatable mental health problems, even access to real weapons — are far more likely to result in children behaving violently, they say.

Kutner and Olson sum up their results with one word: "Relax."

Now for more GTA related goodies a excerpt from a interview with the VP of Rockstar Games and co writter of GTA IV Dan Houser.....

So the gaming industry has changed a lot since the last GTA ...

Yeah, fuck all this stuff about casual gaming. I think people still want games that are groundbreaking. The Wii is doing something totally different, which is fantastic. We're hopefully going to prove that there’s also a very big audience for people who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies. We always said: We’re not going release a large number of games. They’re going to have the production values of movies. They're gonna be about themes that interest us whatever the medium, instead of the weird, special video game–only themes that too many people make — orcs and elves, or monsters, or space. We felt you could make a good game and have it be about something we could actually relate to. Or aspire to.

When it comes to designing New York, where do you even start? With the map?

It's not just getting the roads laid out sensibly, which we do, or picking all the landmarks — it's also the more subtle details of dirt, or lighting. We had people out photographing on rooftops on time-lapse cameras so we could get the lighting as close as we can. We had guys looking at Census data; this part of Queens should be more Chinese. The [pedestrians] can go up and speak to each other now, so we got them speaking Russian, Spanish, Chinese. It seemed we'd set a high bar in the past and wanted to take it to a new place, where you feel less like a video game and more like this weird digital fantasy world.

How do you do that?

We're doing things in this that other people would think is insane. Here's a simple example: pedestrians, the guys that walk around, it's a massive-scale production to do that. We ended up with 660 speaking parts. 80,000 lines of dialogue, it's ridiculous.

Can you give us an example of something in the game we wouldn't notice right away?

I think one of the things we try to capture in the game is that New York is the world leader in walking around meeting insane people. [Rockstar Games president] Sam [Houser] and I were walking home and we just met this absolutely crazy homeless guy, who was telling us how he recently killed someone, and drifted into insanity. After 30 seconds of this guy's life, we both thought — he's brilliant! [In the game] you meet freaky characters, and then you can do little random interactive things with them.

Who are a few of your favorites?

We go for that full range of classic New York archetypes. You've got the angry sleeping-pill-popping sort of Sex and the City type woman, you know, whose looks are just beginning to fade — a career woman who works in fashion. The guy who's like, "Yo, buy my record." There's the kid who's like the overconfident cokehead, and then you see him later and he becomes a crackhead, and he's a real mess. And then you see him a while later and he's fresh out of rehab.

So all the pedestrians fit the neighborhoods?

The people in Soho are expensively dressed and into shopping and vacuous in their own way. People in Noho are slightly different, people in Harlem are different. We give them a little character, maybe a two-sentence description — usually a cynical take on a classic New York persona: an English guy living over here, who thinks he's a real hot shot, but he's a complete phony, which is why he's come to New York. If he gets pushed when he's on his cell phone, he runs away from you.

We're trying to pick up personalities that are worth of spoofing. We're not trying to go after every single black person, or every 25-year-old Hispanic kid. We’re saying, this is the neurotic guy who wants to be hard. This is the hard guy who wants to be a poet. And this is the angry guy who's trying to go to anger management class. We're just trying to get male personas and fix them to any race.

On the fashion side, we're literally doing fashion shoots and taking the photographs and turning them into the models. We have street stylists to help us dress them. It's got to look right.

How realistic did you want to go with this?

We try to get the essence of the place, not a photo-realistic, digital tourist guide. We wanted a kind of spiritual tourist guide that feels like New York, but a blown-out, larger-than-life version. We want it to feel you're the star of your own movie or TV show. We wanted an element of the classic New York of the seventies and eighties too.

It’s got a bit of that bad, good old days feel.

We’re not at all aspiring to virtual reality — what we are aspiring to is what feels like you're living in your own world, halfway between 3-D cartoon and action movies. Aaron [Gorbut] in Scotland, the art director, the thing that he's a genius at, and his main guys are brilliant at pulling off, is making the worlds look lived-in in a way no one else can. They don't just think, "How do I make a beautiful model for this house and the sidewalk?" They worry about, "How do I seam them together and put a nice dirt between them?" You never notice that as a consumer, but you do notice that it looks really believable. Other games look so rigid.

How did you pick which areas of New York to feature?

We went from maybe doing the whole of New York State. And then it was just Manhattan, then it expanded out again and was going to be a bunch of suburbs, maybe like Westchester or out to Long Island with woods so you could go bury people. We made lists of what must we keep, what can we drop, what's got to be there, what can we smash in together. Like how we don't do Staten Island and do New Jersey: we would all vote on it. We didn't want to offend anyone in Staten Island, but you get the same suburban neighborhoods in Jersey, plus some factories and stuff.

What kind of research did you do?

We started videoing a lot of neighborhoods, and then the videos were sent off to North [Rockstar's studio in Scotland, where most programming is done] and put on plasma TVs around their office, so while they worked they could look up and there was New York.

Did the guys from Scotland come over here?

In March or April of 2005 we had 60 or 70 of the guys here for a week and a half, driving around in SUVs in the rough parts of town. We'd have cops who used to work the beat driving us around Washington Heights, and saying it used to be great because it was really different then and you could shoot people all the time.

How have the radio stations in the game improved?

We went basically from about eight or nine stations in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to eighteen different radio stations this time. We wanted [the news station] to feel like 1010 WINS, so we got one of the main voices [John Montone] to be our news reader. Problem is, in New York now, you can't find seventeen radio stations you want to listen to. We tried to get stuff that would feel like what you would want to hear if you came to New York. Not necessarily what you do find here, but what you ought to hear if it was like the way you'd imagined it.

It seems like the video game–violence issue might finally be dying down. Do you foresee any problems with GTA IV?

If you don’t like any violent content in your entertainment, then I apologize because I do. And I’ve unfortunately been exposed to it my entire life. I agree that the world would be a greater place if all of the guns and all of the bombs disappeared, but that certainly is not in the agenda. If we equally got rid of a lot of books that talk about violence, okay. But if we don’t like these games because they've got content that we’re happy to see in movies and TV shows, then what you’re saying is you don’t like the medium because we don’t have a George Clooney type sticking his face in front of the camera. There is nothing in the game you would not see in a TV show, or a movie a hundred times over, so I don’t understand what the conversation is about. We set out to make games that felt like they could culturally exist alongside the movies we were watching and the books we were reading, and hopefully we’re getting close to those goals.

I thought you might back away from the sex, but you can still pick up girls, right?

We wanted it to feel like a gangster film. And you can't do that if you can’t use bad language, or have a hooker on the corner, or a strip club, or all the other things that are part of that world.

Now from the 20% I ve managed to make my way through I think this might be another classic game from Rockstar that you will still be seeing copyied well into the future of gaming beyond even the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Towlies Rating

New South Park tomorrow and Hands on With GTA IV 4 Multiplayer: City of Chaos

Well the new south park is out tommorrow but I ve found something to make most grown men wet themselves yes I am talking about the new GTA now I found a great little piece on http://kotaku.com

Please note this is a review by kotaku.com not myself.
Enjoy I know I did ohh cant wait !!!!!!!!!!!!!

A couple of months ago, before I had a chance to play GTA IV, I got into a discussion with an industry insider about Rockstar, and in particular, the Grand Theft Auto franchise. We were talking about whether the polarizing series, much beloved by gamers and reviled by non-gamers, had jumped the shark.

Would this be the last GTA, I wondered. The insider was quick to say no, even after I pointed out that I had watched a chunk of the single-player campaign, which impressed me, but didn't seem to include any giant leaps forward for the franchise.

"Did you see multiplayer?"

"No."

"Just wait."

After spending a morning at Rockstar late last month, playing around with Grand Theft Auto IV's single player campaign, the guys walked me to the room next door to check out Grand Theft Auto's first real take on multiplayer.

Over the course of several hours I had a chance to check out five multiplayer modes, including a short co-op campaign, out of what is rumored to be the game's more than dozen multiplayer modes.

I was happy to find that Grand Theft Auto has most definitely not jumped the shark.

I was initially disappointed when I discovered that my expectations, no matter how unreasonable, that GTA IV would let you play through the entire campaign with a friend weren't to be met. But that was short lived.

The sheer level of customization in the game, the wild variety of play, and the unsurpassed size of the maps made the lack of a full co-op campaign seem like an afterthought.

To start playing a multiplayer game you bring up Niko's cell phone in the single player campaign and, using the in-phone menu, select multiplayer. So you can drop into one of these sessions whenever you want.

While you can't play as Nikko, the campaign's main character, you can customize your own character, creating someone by choosing male or female and then selecting among four different heads, four torsos, four legs and several types of glasses and hats.

All but one of the multiplayer modes supports up to 16 players. (The co-op missions only support up to four.) The host has an amazing array of options that they can control. While setting up a game, the host can choose to modify the routine, like re-spawn times, weapon selections and friendly fire, or the unusual, like the time of day, the weather, how heavy the traffic is or how many people are on the street. You can even control police presence in your matches.

While the game allows you to select parts of the map to play in, choosing specific boroughs, smaller neighborhoods, or areas like the airport, it doesn't prevent players from roaming the entire city during any given match. Instead the respawns and weapon drops only occur in those areas.

While the high level of customization adds a lot to the experience, I was just as wowed by some of the little things built into multiplayer, like the ability for players waiting in a lobby to turn on their radio and listen to GTA's soundtrack.

Deathmatch

My first experience with GTA 4 multiplayer was deathmatch and team deathmatch.

Instead of winning with kill counts, both of these modes look at your cash total to see who won the match. Cash is earned by killing members of the other team and you can get extra cash by darting out to collect the money they drop when they die.

The controls were solid, as I've mentioned before, but what made this deathmatch feel so different was that it felt like it was taking place in a living, breathing world. People were walking around, there were cars to be stolen. You can actually load up a car with your entire team and try to drive-by the other team mates. You could even, if you felt like it, take off to parts unknown, areas on the map nowhere near where the action was taking place.

Deathmatch was fun, and the added twist of an open world and a huge map, definitely upped the value, but it was still deathmatch.

Cops N Crooks

The next mode we played was Cops N Crooks, a variation on your typical deathmatch mode where you have to find and take out the bad guys.

The team playing as cops can see the crooks on their radar, but the the crooks can only see the escape point on the map and don't know where the cops are until it's almost too late. The mode has two derivations: In All for One you need to kill the boss, played by one of the crooks. In One for All everyone has just one life and once the crooks are dead the cops win.There were some really nice touches to the game that made this stand out from some of the other modes I've played in shooters. For instance as the bad guys, you can give each other waypoints on the live map, allowing one player to drive and another to navigate.

We also played matches were the bad guys split up into two groups, doubling the chance for the boss to get away because we weren't sure which group he was with.

Lots of fun, plenty of potential, especially when you factor in that this all still takes place in GTA's open world.

GTA Race

This was the mode I least wanted to play, but came in as one of my favorites to mess around with. Imagine Mario Kart in a real world, with real cars. Now add machine guns, pistols, rocket launchers, Molotov cocktails, in fact every weapons in GTA. Now, let people get out of their cars and do whatever they want to win, or prevent other people from winning. Wow, just wow.

This mode lets the host choose vehicle types before a race, the race course, time limit and number of laps. Sure the game has checkpoints, and you need to hit them, or most of them, to complete a lap, but being the fastest doesn't get close to guaranteeing a win.

In our introduction to the mode, myself and Newsweek's N'gai Croal were burning around the course, which I believe took place near GTA's Central Park, when we came to a stone archway we absolutely had to go through to complete the lap. Problem was, there were cars, lots of cars blocking our way. By the time I had assessed the situation, one of the other players ran up to me and killed me at the wheel.

The race quickly devolved into a deathmatch until we realized that Croal had nosed his car through the wreckage and was burning through the laps. In another race, this one taking place at an airport complete with moving planes, I didn't bother trying to speed through the course and instead clamored on top of an airport gangway with a rocket launcher and just waited. When people came by I blew up their cars. Meanwhile Rockstar's Jeronimo Barrera was taking great pleasure trying to mow down Croal in what looked like a golf cart.

From what I played of it, GTA Race could easily be a standalone game, something that would occupy a gamer's attention for months.

Hangman's NOOSE

The final mode we played was probably the most impressive. Hangman's NOOSE is Rockstar's answer to a story-driven campaign mode. Instead of allowing players to complete chunks of the single player campaign with a friend, the developers decided to create side missions, featuring ancillary characters, that can be played as a group with a total of four people.

Rockstar declined to say how many of these co-op missions the game will ship with, but I'd think it would come with more than the one and I'd bet that the 360 DLC will be all about this mode.

The mission we played was Hangman's NOOSE. In it you're asked to rescue a crime boss from an army of police who are picking him up on the runway of the airport. The missions started out on the runway and as we shot it out with cops, two more armored SWAT trucks drove up, unloading more and more cops.

The first play through was pretty succinct, we grabbed the armored truck, got the boss in it and tore across the city to our extraction point while the city's entire police force mobilized to stop us.

The second play through didn't go nearly as well.

A Rockstar developer took the wheel of the armored car again, and another rode shotgun. Croal hopped into the back to shoot at pursuing cops. I opted to swipe a helicopter that was on the runway and followed the wagon as it entered the interstate, trying to gun down the stream of cop cars in pursuit.

Then it happened: Croal was shot. The hit didn't kill him, but it did knock him from the truck which continued to speed toward the drop off point. Soon Croal was surrounded by cops on the middle of an interstate. I turned my chopper around and told Croal I was coming for him. Landing the copter in a nearby clearing, I got out to try and find Croal, but he had snatched a car and was already out of the police infested area.

I ran back to my copter only to find its rotors had been snapped off during my crap landing next to a copse of trees. The whole thing ended with me being gunned down by a phalanx of cops as I ran down the interstate toward the distant extraction point, and the whole team losing.

The missions was actually very straight forward, lacking almost completely in narrative and pretty short, but that works in GTA IV. It works because the game, especially in the multiplayer modes, seems to be providing you a way to create your own experiences.

I could replay Hangman's NOOSE a dozen times and not get tired of it, mostly because each time through created a different experience. It's so open ended that they story you play, as with single player, often seems like your own.

I've certainly not played enough of Grand Theft Auto IV to being able to say whether the game will live up to mounting expectations, but I can certainly say that Rockstar hasn't been caught resting. This game, and it's unusual and varied take on multiplayer gaming isn't packed with obvious innovations, but it still manages to innovate where it counts most: In storytelling.

For anyone who is still reading and hoping to find out about the new south park here you go...
Episode 1205 is titled - Eek, A Penis!

Airdate: 2008-04-09

While Ms. Garrison is off trying to find a way to become the man he was always intended to be, Cartman is put in charge of the classroom.