GTA IV(4): Liberty City Has Never Looked So Good

Grand Theft Auto IV(4): Liberty City Has Never Looked So Good
by Ivan A. Cuxeva

A great social experiment gone wrong, that's how Rockstar describes their PS3 game "Grand Theft Auto 4" This game has evolved from the original PC version over the years and it's now ready to be launched a state of the art product where entire cities are simulated, this game is also available for Xbox 360. This game is actually rated 18+ so no youngsters should be allowed to play this game since there is a lot of violence, language and inappropriate situations; besides the ratings and restrictions those who are able to play it will definitively enjoy the great deal of detail the guys at Rockstar North put on this game.

Liberty City is a fictitious multi-cultural American city where all the action takes place. Then main character Niko (player) comes to America after being invited by his cousin Roman in order to find wealth and improve his life style, in other words he comes to live the American dream, however things turn out quite bad when he gets in debt and its dragged into the criminal underworld. Life can be quite miserable when you owe bad people something and the entire city worships money and status, this is the whole scenario Niko Bellic (the player) will have to face. Also, you might find some similarities among Liberty City and New York City as well as New Jersey.

Grand Theft Auto is known for its great deal of violence and shall we say "action" but this time around the guys at Rockstar are being congratulated for the incredible work done by the graphics team. Liberty City has been created and rendered with amazing precision and detail, so much so that it is said that everything to the last pothole and rooftop vent was carefully designed.

Among the many likable characters you will find in GTA 4 we have to mention:

Phill Bell: An Italian business man who works for the big guys in Liberty City and "takes care" of the small fries who give problems or don't pay their dues on time.

Roman Bellic: This is Niko's cousin who is very ambitious and wants to "earn some money" and make a name for himself in Liberty City. He likes alcohol, women and works in his car shop business which he refers to as "Roman Bellic enterprises".

Vlad Glebov: Amusing Russian mafioso.

Many Escuela: This guy adds some latin spice to the game, he is better known by is accent and the reggaeton music which always accompanies his rampages.

Words simply can't describe what you will have to do in Liberty City, this game is sure to keep you hooked for hours because of it's amazing graphics and yes, all the "things that go down in this place".

GTAIV could best Halo 3's debut

GTAIV could best Halo 3's debut
By Brendan Sinclair

Janco Partners' Mike Hickey says Rockstar's latest could "conceivably" ship 9.5 million in the first week, more than twice Microsoft's 4.4 million.

In announcing Halo 3's first-week sales of $300 million, Microsoft called it "the fastest-selling video game ever." That record might be relatively short-lived, if a new report from Janco Partners analyst Mike Hickey proves accurate.

Hickey attributes the success of Halo 3 to a growing fan base for the franchise, a general demand for high-quality content, and the game's release early in the current generation's life cycle. Those same factors will be playing into next year's release of Grand Theft Auto IV, Hickey said. In addition, the Xbox 360 installed user base will be significantly larger by the time GTA IV comes out, and the addition of a PlayStation 3 edition of the game should boost sales significantly as well. Putting those factors together, Hickey suggests that the market is generally underestimating the next GTA game's initial success.

With Halo 3, Hickey believes Microsoft shipped 5.2 million copies of the game for its first week of release, and sold through 4.4 million. That leads to a 67 percent attach rate (percentage of all console owners who purchased the game) in the US, Hickey said. He believes that rate dips to 46 percent when adding in Europe.

Although Hickey doesn't think Grand Theft Auto IV will sell to as large a percentage of Xbox 360 owners, he notes that the expanding installed user base for the Xbox 360 and PS3 could offset whatever shortcoming there is. Even with a projected attach rate of only 20 percent (which Hickey stresses is very conservative), that would indicate first-week sales for the game of 3.5 million units. Hickey seemed more comfortable with a 30 percent attach rate, which would suggest first-week shipments of 5.3 million copies. But there's also a best-case scenario.

"If the upcoming release of GTA IV attached at the same rate as Halo 3," Hickey wrote, "the title could conceivably ship 9.5 million units of [the] game in the first week, producing an astonishing $466 million in sales." In such a case, Hickey projects first-week sales of the game would approach 8.1 million copies.

Source: Yahoo! Games

GTAIV: Sony will lop $100 off its new PS3 80GB model

Sony will lop $100 off its new PS3 80GB model - $499 80GB PS3 by year's end

Wedbush Morgan Securities predicts Sony will lop $100 off its new console to spur holiday sales, says further cuts possible alongside GTAIV and MGS4.

Sony had a bumpy ride at the E3 Media & Business Summit. The event kicked off with the company announcing that the 60GB PlayStation 3 was being reduced to $499 alongside the introduction of a new 80GB model with a $599 price tag. The move was widely hailed by analysts as a long-overdue attempt to boost the console's sales. But on E3's last day, Sony confirmed that the 60GB model was no longer in production, leaving the 80GB as the sole SKU when suppliers of its elder sibling run out.

Today, though, two of the industry's more prominent analysts predicted that the days of the $599 PS3 are numbered. In a note sent out this morning, Wedbush Morgan Securities' Michael Pachter and Edward Woo predicted the 80GB console will also see $100 knocked off its price point before the all-important holiday seasons begins.

"The PS3 will remain at $499, with the 80GB model replacing the 60GB model at that same price point," Pachter told GameSpot.

Pachter and Woo also repeated their prediction that Sony might further discount the PS3 early next year to coincide with two highly anticipated games for the platform: the exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, and Grand Theft Auto IV, which is also coming to the Xbox 360.

Source: Tor Thorsen (Videogames.Yahoo)

Rockstar Leads and everyone follows? Interview with Rockstar Leeds founder Gordon Hall

Game GTA Grand Theft Auto IV 4

Rockstar Leads and everyone follows? Interview with Rockstar Leeds founder Gordon Hall

Rockstar Leads and everyone follows? Interview with Rockstar Leeds founder Gordon Hall

By Develop’s reckoning, Rockstar Leeds is one of the most profitable studios on the planet.

Since 2005 it has created six games for its headline-dominating parent company Rockstar Games – with its Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories titles being bestsellers on PSP and PS2.

When you look at the amount of games sold versus number of staff (the headcount currently stands at 70 having grown steadily since its founding in 1997 and acquisition by Rockstar in 2004), its staff probably have a higher per capita value of any other third-party studio from around the world.

But how did a team of upstarts that at one point worked on a Barbie Horse Adventures GBA game become one of the world’s most profitable studios working on the most recognised contemporary games franchise?

Co-founder and studio head Gordon Hall knows the answer – so we caught up with him at the Develop conference, just a day after Rockstar Leeds took home the Develop Award for best handheld studio, to find out.

So it’s the studio’s tenth birthday this year – run us through how you got to where you are now.
Well, I started out creating games when I was quite young at 14 or 15, but I left the games industry as someone told me ‘don’t bother with that, go and get a proper job’. I was tempted back when a friend I had made games as a youngster started a company called Twilight which then became Hookstone. I started as a programmer with an eye on the business side, but it soon turned out when I joined that the business didn’t have long left to live.

So I teamed up with some of the other guys to form Mobius – and it wasn’t easy trying to prove ourselves at that time. We went about 16 months without a salary until we signed a game and realised that we worked well as a small team, and that best suited handheld games, so we made sure we did some different titles to establish our name.

At the same time, we wanted to think ahead, so we sectioned a group of the team off and looked at the market to see what would happen in a few years time. About five years ago we thought it would be a ‘GameCube in your hand’-style machine and that Nintendo would be first with the high-powered handheld, so we wrote an engine for it before it ever existed, in order to make sure we were there first – but of course it never happened.

What happened instead was Sony announced the PSP and we had everything ready for those comparable tech specs and just went from there. Things went ballistic going from a studio comfortably turning over about a million pounds a year to, pretty much overnight, a studio being offered every franchise on the planet, and three publishers suddenly wanted to acquire us, and another two wanted to team up to keep us independent.

Rockstar were one of the ones who wanted to acquire us – we had just been working on Max Payne GBA for them, and that introduced us to a model of gaming that we had never seen before - a ‘balls to the wall, work your tits off because it’s worth it if you get it right, gameplay first’ approach where everyone at Rockstar from your senior producer right up to Sam Houser were looking at your game, playing it and commenting on it. That was really unique for us and compared to how the rest of the industry handles itself, it just felt right.

It must have been a pretty easy decision?
Well, when it came to the crunch, we let the staff decide – we had 37 or so guys at that time and we laid out what the possibilities were and asked what we should do. Although, in all honestly, I did lay it on a bit thicker on the Rockstar side because the idea of working on a smaller number of games with those guys really appealed and meant we could focus on quality.

Plus, out of all those interested in us, Rockstar didn’t want us to expand to 200 quickly – one of the deals we were being offered was for eight PSP games a year for one publisher, which is great on paper, but means less love from the publisher and a bloody hard slog to get those games done. So we joined Rockstar.

The big surprise came when Sam said he wanted us to do GTA. The game had never been done outside of Rockstar North, and I remember a pause in the meeting when, for a second he thought we weren’t interested – we were so stunned he thought the silence meant we didn’t care. Of course: we did care!

Did you feel you had to prove yourselves as newcomers to a set of studios that already had a strong reputation?
Absolutely. Games take a long time to make – when you make one you give up 18 months of your life, and that’s a long time. Some games now are being made on a four-year life cycle – that frightens the fuck out of me because that’s a huge chunk of your life. So one thing we’d always had done, before Rockstar, was always take a step back and play our games to make sure they remain fun to play.

When we were given GTA we realised we had to do the same, but just take it to the next level. So the big thing for us was multiplayer. GTA never did multiplayer on a console, and our team lives and dies on the calibre of our guys, and we realised that if we could get a prototype of multiple players in three months, then we could offer something fresh to the series. We really pushed that hard – and it didn’t work for some time, it was a struggle – but the minute we had a breakthrough, and half the studio is sat there playing the game’s ‘defend the base’ mode, enjoying the new idea we have brought to this amazing series, we knew we’d made it.

In terms of it being a ‘struggle’ and having only that short period of time to get that feature working – did it put much pressure on the team?
Well on the first game, I admit we worked some long hours. It wasn’t imposed – it was self-inflicted because we wanted to make a big name for ourselves. But the truth is there is only a small difference between working your balls off to make a good game, and working your balls off to make the best game in the world – that extra bit of effort can really pay off. Luckily, Rockstar understands that and recompenses its staff accordingly.

Is that the Rockstar ethos then?
Totally, it’s very much ‘prove yourself, make it count, don’t leave anything on the table – and, by God, you will be looked after if you do that’. When you hear him [Sam Houser] say it, you know it’s from the heart. And we know it’s an attitude that works as Rockstar games do well. I’ve heard some people say Rockstar’s success lies in sales and marketing, and promotion - it’s not just those things: the core is making games that people give a fuck about playing.

Every week we look at the game and ask ourselves ‘is it fun? is it playable?’ it’s a very rinse and repeat approach – the team has to keep replaying it to know the game, make sure it is fun, know what needs to be done to make it even better. The idea is to make a game so good that someone would want to steal it if they couldn’t afford it, not care about milestones.
The worst thing to hear another developer say is ‘Oh, I’m working towards our latest milestone’. Fuck milestones! What you want to care about is the end result; ask if your average consumer, who is only going to be buying a handful of games a year, will want to play it.

Make a game your own, and forget thinking what the guys who signs the milestone cheques thinks, focus on the game and what the person playing it at the end will think. It’s not worth thinking about games development any other way.

I know I’m privileged, and that our team is lucky enough to have the best franchise in the world to riff on, but I think it’s a rule for everyone – I think it’s worked for us given how we’ve used the Stories label to create a subtly different slant on the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

So what’s next for the studio?
We’re currently at 70 guys, but are now growing. Until now we’ve been very focused and quite closed off, rarely interviewing and hiring – we have a very slow hire process, because we look for the right people and want those that fit with the culture and the team. But are expanding: we’re going to take up more space in the office block we are based in. There’s the capacity to have 40 more staff, but I only want to take on about 25 at most.

What about new games?
We’re just finishing off Table Tennis, which is a lovely product to work on – I think it’s really found its home on Wii.

After that we’re going to be branching out further into next-gen – we’ve done original work on an existing franchise, but now we want to work on new IPs, and are looking at what we can do on Xbox 360 and PS3 for original products. But to succeed on those formats you’ve got to put everything into it or step away – we’re already lucky to have a really committed team, so I think from that we will step up to become an established Rockstar studio known for original projects. It’s not over for handheld for us – there’s more coming there – but our new focus will be on the new formats. I’m also very inspired by PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade – it’s currently untapped for us, and is a field the whole world overall has overlooked.

One idea we are talking about that I can’t talk too much about is something we’ve discussed with Sam Houser a lot, and when we talk about the concept – which is just a postage stamp sized idea at the moment, it’s not in production yet – just makes us crack up laughing. It’s an idea that the New York team came up with and which then evolved as we discussed it with them; it’s a short development cycle, just 18 months, and it really excites me. But you know what we’re like – we don’t say anything concrete about a game until a few months before release, so that’s all I can say.

Has that gameplay-focused production method surprised any of those newcomers?
Yes. One of the things we’re trying to teach people is that, yes, next-gen gives you more polys to play with, more processing powers for physics, and it means more staff – if you want it to – but more polygons, better resolution, better physics can’t guarantee good gameplay. Good gameplay comes from the joypad.

One of the things I notice with new staff when they join us is that they feel they have to spend ages sat at their desk adding content, but not playing the game at all. I’m much happier if someone sat at their desk with their feet up replaying a small piece of code over and over for six hours rather than continually working and not playing, because that iterative experience reveals so many things that a polished but untested game can’t show you. For me, the best position for my guys to be is with their hands on a joypad rather than on a keyboard. If they play the game as much as they work, I’m happy as I know that will mean a good game. But none of our new starters ever think like that when they first arrive.

Why do you think that is?
The culture in the industry for too long has been a horrendous ‘Why aren’t you working? Why are you on the internet?’ attitude - but behaving like that stamps out creativity. I think it is an attitude slowly changing, however, because ten years ago the people at the top didn’t play games – now people that play and understanding playing are getting to the top, this is one of the things I really like about Rockstar.

Looking back over the past few years, Leeds has worked on games for the teams at Rockstar North, San Diego, Toronto – you seem to be a bit of a hub for all the other studios. Is that a fair assumption?
Yes, and I think what has put us in that position is our great team, and their ability to develop initial concepts quickly. They’re amazing guys - they got the code from GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas up and running on the PSP in just weeks. It’s phenomenal. As I’ve said, we work hard and fast – the guys like to get code and get it running, without tarting it up, just to prove things are possible, and that’s what’s put us in such a good position. You can polish once the thing is fun.

From that vantage point, and given that the studio has contributed to Rockstar’s slate of 18-rated games, did the recent action over Manhunt 2 effected how Leeds and the other Rockstar studios go about producing their games?
Well, on that point, I’ve got to say I really feel for the London team – they’ve done a cracking job and made a great game.
I like the game for what it is – and I was a big fan of Manhunt before we joined Rockstar, and I was actually a bigger fan of it more than I was of GTA – I like where it placed you in the world and the questions it asked of the world. Manhunt 2 is no different to the first in terms of content, it’s just that times seem to have changed and they’ve changed against this type of game. But if you look at a film like Man Bites Dog, it makes Manhunt look tame in comparison, but that film can be bought by anyone aged 18.

Was there a feeling amongst the Rockstar studios that the company was being singled out?
I don’t think Rockstar specifically has been picked on, but I do think that the wider issue attacks our entire industry. We need to teach people that games are an art form – they are more artistic than film.

I think the games industry should rally behind us, because there will come a time when we’ll all have an idea that’s a little edgy, and we need to have the freedoms to express it.
We are an adult entertainment industry – we may have started out with child-like technology making games solely for a younger audience, but it’s just not like that anymore. It might take legislature a little while to catch up, but if the industry sticks together hopefully we can change people’s attitudes quicker.

www.rockstarleeds.com

Source: Michael French (DevelopMag)

Game GTA Grand Theft Auto IV 4

GTA IV 4 - PS3 or Xbox 360?

Game GTA Grand Theft Auto IV 4

GTA IV 4 - PS3 or Xbox 360?

A big factor in the purchase of electronics is price, and you'll need to spend some cash to be able to play Grand Theft Auto IV when it releases for the PS3 and Xbox 360 early next year. Not only will the Microsoft drop its Xbox 360 price within the next few hours, but you also have the opportunity to get a brand new PlayStation 3 for $349.99. To get this price, you must order the PlayStation 3 at Sony.com and buy it with a Sony card that you must apply and be approved for. Once approved, you get a $150 credit to your Sony card account within 8-12 weeks, thus dropping the current 60GB PS3 price from the already, yet only temporary, dropped $500 price tag down to $350. For a full explanation of this, go here.

Also, as you may have heard, the Xbox 360 premium bundle will now be dropped to $350 (August 8). The elite bundle will now be $450. I do not recommend the core bundle. I own a premium system, and all has worked correctly with it for the past few months. There are hardware problems with many of the Xbox 360's that are currently out in homes across the world, but I'm confident in my warranty that Microsoft recently extended to three years.

Just as a note, I plan on buying a PlayStation 3 if Blu-ray ends up "winning" over HD DVD. Also, I have received many e-mails about what kind of HDTV would be good to buy. People seem to be unsure of what to look for. A lot of different aspects and specifications need to be looked at when buying a HDTV, and trusting in-store employees to get your information is usually not wise. I might do an article on HDTV buying tips in the future, but for now I will tell you that I bought this Samsung television for GTA IV and other entertainment purposes.

By Jordan (GameSpy)

Game GTA Grand Theft Auto IV 4