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GTA IV Trailer - Ten things you didn't see





The internet was grinded to a halt last night by the arrival of the first massive trailer of this year's biggest game, the legendary fourth instalment of Grand Theft Auto. Hit this link and download it now, in case you've just woken up.

After pushing our office hours to the very limit and wrestling with old Captain Bandwidth to get at the biggest video size possible, we've dissected to the GTA IV trailer thoroughly and picked out all of its little secrets you may have missed the first time around.

So magnifying glass in hand, here's what we've discovered...


It's Liberty City!

Despite internet reports claiming otherwise, GTA IV is indeed set (at least partially) in Liberty City - or more likely Liberty State, the area beyond Liberty City. If you're still not convinced, you can see the words 'Liberty City' plastered on a docked tanker in the trailer, a ferry and of course there's also a glimpse of the 'LCPD' patrolling the GTA IV streets.

As you can see from the comparison screenshots at the bottom of the page, the layout of GTA IV's Liberty City seems to resemble we remember from the PS2 - though obviously there's a whole lot of extra detail washed onto the streets.

As for what's beyond the walls of the famous GTA III locale, the trailer confirms GTA versions of the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty and a fun park including rollercoaster, which were all missing from the PS2 instalment.

The time setting

While there's already plenty of debate over what time setting the next game takes place in, there are plenty of cues in the trailer to suggest a modern day setting for GTA IV.

The vehicles in the trailer all look pretty 2007 to us - including a BMW look-a-like and a sports car that has a very post-2000 design. There are also plenty of advertisements plastered around Liberty City that also cropped-up in the 90s-set GTA III, including Burger Shot and Cluckin' Bell.


Is that really the main Character?

The narrator in the trailer is a Russian character whose background seems to revolve around murder, smuggling and erm, selling people. The internet is already shouting from the electronic rooftops that this Eastern European chap will be the main protagonist in GTA IV, but really the trailer confirms nothing of the sort.

What it does confirms is that the story will somehow bring Eastern Europeans into the equations, which leads us to wonder what's happened to the Leone kingpins from GTA III.


Hit the water

Multiple-viewings make the GTA IV trailer's emphasis on water-based travel even more apparent; there are shots of bridges, ferry ports, a dock and some of the prettiest water effects we've seen to date in a sandbox game.

A realistically floating buoy 16 seconds in seems to suggest dynamic water physics for the fourth instalment, and of course you can see the gorgeous refraction effects later on in the trailer. A spot of boating for GTA IV seems a near-cert then, but - for as much as we hope - we just can't see jet-skiing going down in the Liberty City harbour.

Cast Your RAGE

As has always been heavily assumed, the next GTA ditches Renderware to make use of the graphically-spectacular Table Tennis RAGE engine (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine).

The confirmation comes from a Rockstar representative who told Gamespot: "We can confirm that all footage in the trailer was captured directly from 720p gameplay running real time in our Rage engine on a next-gen gaming console."

And the engine seems to be working well for the series - as you can see from the trailer tech-wise GTA IV is looking very impressive.


Super Pedestrian

We're expecting lots of advancements in how realistically the inhabitants of Liberty City live and work, but already there are a number of improvements on show in the short teaser.

At the beginning of the video you can see that the driver of the blue sports car is adjusting his rear-view mirror - a very nice touch indeed that we would never have seen working on the PS2. The pedestrians on the streets also have fully-modelled faces and carry groceries and books, which certainly adds a more realistic vibe to surroundings that the aimlessly-walking residents in GTA III.

The funny is back!

Oldschool movie buffs will recognize the spoof reference in the GTA IV trailer straight away; the music is from Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, a dialogue-less documentary film from the early eighties that mixed landscape footage with a rolling soundtrack. The music, in case your wondering, is a piece from minimalist composer Philip Glass, who created the music for Koyaanisqatsi.

Further proving that GTA hasn't lost it's trademark humour are the plethora of fake adverts available for glimpse in the video, including upcoming TV show "America's Next Top Hooker" and "Sprunk", a beverage we probably won't picking up on the next trip round Tesco.

You can checkout the Koyaanisqatsi trailer here. Anyone for a cool glass of "Piswasser"?


Visit Vice City!

Keen-eyed viewers with seriously-ninja Photoshop skills will notice an interesting in-game ad five seconds into the trailer. On the top left of the shot just above the wall is a sign that says "Visit Vice City - $300", leading many internet forums to explode with messages of "OMG!!11 MULTIPLE CITIEZ IN GTAIV!1"

So yeah, we might be getting a tiny bit ahead of ourselves taking this tiniest of glimpses as evidence that GTA IV will contain multiple, country-wide locals, but what would be more next-gen than a trip to all three cities that we've explored so vigorously on PS2? Having said that, would Vice City even look like Vice City in a modern day setting?


Doc Oc attacks!

Another one for the eagle-eyed among us is the brief glimpse of a cable car travelling behind a bridge 30 seconds in to the trailer, leading us to fantasise over the Spider-Man-style mischief we could have jumping around fighting an imaginary Doctor Octopus.

Having said that, we're hoping Spidey's influence stretches all over GTA IV; we just can't look at that massive Crysler building without planning a Crackdown-style route up to the top, and it would be an absolute crime if we can't base-jump from one of those skyscrapers.

Clever birds

Going from the trailer, we can see that the birds and pigeons in GTA IV are detailed and have some sort of behaviour system going on - which should please virtual game hunters everywhere.

In one scene you can see a seagull flying underneath a bridge, and in another we get a glimpse of two pigeons sitting on a statue. Will we be able to chase those dirty flying-rats through the streets? Pick them out of the skies with high-calibre rifles? At this point we'd bet money on it. (CVG doesn't condone the harming of pigeons).

For me, its simple...

When this drops...Whatever next generation platform has the best version is the one that I"m getting...PS3, XBox...Don't matter...

This is easily the best game ever made...I still play all three, and when I found the GTA pack in Wal-Mart for $30, I was beyond excited...It means that much to me that I will plunk down the cash to see this shit in action...

Oh, the trailer link:
http://www.rockstargames.com/IV/trailer_splash.html

You should try 'Crackdown' it's fucking kick ass!

The Road to Ruin: How Grand Theft Auto Hit the Skids




œThere are repercussions for the choices you make, said Sam Houser, cofounder and president of Rockstar Games. It was October 2002, and I had been granted a rare interview with the gang behind the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto game franchise: Sam, his younger brother Dan, and their childhood friend Terry Donovan. We were sitting in Rockstar's stylish New York City office as Sam explained that concerns about the violence in his games were unfounded because GTA had a moral system hard-coded into it. Certain actions ” like hit-and-runs and drive-bys ” will increase the player's œwanted level. œIf you go around offing people, you™ll see the police, he said.

Grand Theft Auto and its progeny ” nearly a dozen sequels and spinoffs, including this fall™s GTA IV ” let players live out their fantasies. But few videogame fantasies match the real-life adventures of Rockstar Games. Almost a decade ago, a gang of young prep-school-educated Brits invaded New York with a then-outrageous dream: to make video-games hip. They would elevate a medium built on Mario and Pok©mon into something defiantly grown-up ” games that would earn a place on shelves between Scarface and Licensed to Ill.

The lads at Rockstar Games scored. With more than 50 million units sold, Grand Theft Auto titles have pulled in a billion dollars in revenue. Along the way, the execs achieved the street cred and bad-boy rep of real rock stars. But then, like Tony Montana face-down in a pile of blow, they hit the skids.

The trouble began five years ago, when Rockstar™s embattled parent company, Take-Two Interactive, came under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since then, there have been charges of shady accounting and backdated stock options. Last October, Ryan Brant, cofounder and onetime CEO of Take-Two, resigned. Four months later, he pleaded guilty to falsifying business records and agreed to pay more than $7 million in penalties, bringing his lifetime Take-Two hit to almost $11 million. He™ll be sentenced in August, and his departure was emblematic of a company that has seen three CEOs and two CFOs leave since 2001.

For all the financial irregularities and management shuffles, though, a few lines of code written into one of Rockstar™s games would cause even bigger headaches. Last June, Take-Two announced it had received a grand jury subpoena from Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau seeking, among other things, documents œrelating to the knowledge of the Company™s officers and directors regarding the creation, inclusion and programming of hidden scenes (commonly referred to as ˜Hot Coffee™). Hot Coffee is an explicit sex minigame buried in the source code of Rockstar™s 2004 title Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Numerous lawsuits have also been filed over the scene.

The irony is thick: The company that defined virtual criminality is now associated with the real thing. Rockstar and Take-Two executives declined to answer questions for this article, but their rich and troubled story is revealed by official documents and former employees. It seems the blokes forgot that in life, as in Grand Theft Auto, there are repercussions for the choices you make.

INTRO LEVEL

Dan and Sam Houser had dreamed of rock stardom since they were school kids in London. Their dad, Wally, was co-owner of a jazz nightclub, and in the early ™80s the brothers developed an obsession with the hip hop scene across the pond in New York. They would race home after a day of cutting up at St. Paul™s School to throw on records, sneak smokes, and dream.

Sam and Dan, now 35 and 33, idolized not only the rappers and the DJs but also producer Rick Rubin of Def Jam Recordings. A scruffy white college geek turned impresario, he had somehow insinuated himself into hip hop culture, working with the biggest acts, injecting his own sound, and making millions on his own terms. œPeople like that inspire me so massively, Sam Houser told me back in 2002. His 18th birthday present was a trip to New York, where he bought a pair of Air Jordans and a leather jacket.

The Housers weren™t the only wannabe rock stars at St. Paul™s. The father of their pal and classmate Terry Donovan directed the iconic video for the Robert Palmer song œSimply Irresistible, and Terry DJ™d at techno clubs.

Looking to break into the music industry, the youths all took jobs at BMG Music in London. Sam and Dan worked on lame in-house concert videos. Donovan was a self-described œA&R chap who signed fledgling bands to sublabels. When BMG launched an interactive division in 1993, the three friends jumped at the chance to work there, even though the Housers™ previous exposure to game design was fiddling around on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and the extent of Donovan™s coding experience was getting his computer to write TERRY IS COOL.

The videogame industry works like the record industry: Labels put out CDs created by bands, and publishers put out software created by developers. Titles that do well pay for the flops. BMG Interactive released several games in the mid-1990s, but its big break came when it received a pitch from a developer in Scotland for a game called Race and Chase. The graphics were primitive, with an overhead point of view that looked like you were pushing toy Hot Wheels cars through a maze. But the game™s urban environment teemed with mobsters and thugs, and gameplay centered around boosting cars, rubbing out enemies, and rising through the underworld. For the young Brits weaned on Run DMC and The Warriors, it was a revelation. œHere was a game that was commenting on the world, Dan said to me that day nearly five years ago. Race and Chase was signed and renamed Grand Theft Auto.

The gameplay was surprisingly unconstrained. The only limitation was your œwanted level: Cause enough mayhem and a cop™s face would appear on a meter at the top of the screen. Police cars would give chase if they spotted you. Commit more egregious crimes and your wanted level increased. Now an in-game APB was put out on you. At wanted level three, police would begin to set up roadblocks. If you got busted, you got carted off to jail and your weapons were confiscated. But that was the extent of the limits. œThe problem with other games is that when you hit a point that™s frustrating, you can™t get past it, Sam Houser told me. œIn Grand Theft Auto, when you hit a point that™s tough, just go do something else. That™s fucking great!

In 1998, BMG™s games division was bought by Take-Two Interactive, a scrappy publisher in New York. It seemed like a good match. Take-Two had been launched in 1993 by a 21-year-old named Ryan Brant. Like Donovan and the Housers, he was born into a media family. His father, Peter Brant, owned magazines like Interview and Art in America, cofounded the Greenwich Polo Club ¦ and had spent time in jail for tax evasion. Take-Two™s games, such as Ripper and Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, had adult subject matter, cinematic pretensions, and a deliberate, if ham-handed, edginess. But they were poorly received.

That™s where Donovan and the Housers came in. The Londoners had attitude, style, and what Dan Houser later called a œculturally relevant, detail-obsessed approach to game-making. They moved their core team to New York and assumed the name Rockstar Games. (The group of coders and designers in Scotland was eventually acquired by Take-Two and renamed Rockstar North.) The name hinted at their ambitions. œWe admired record labels, obviously, and clothing companies, which were obsessed with details and with an integrity between design, product, and marketing, Dan told the Design Museum of London in 2003. Rockstar wouldn™t just sell games ” it would sell a lifestyle.

I've also heard that Crackdown was good...I'll get a chance to play it on 360 later on in the week...But GTA is the king to me...Each game has been twice as good as the next, and contrary to what some say, if you have a considerable amount of skill and knowledge, the game will still not get boring...

I think the hotcoffee shit was unwarranted, relatively easy to unlock on PC, but you had to hack the shit to play it on PS2 and the likes...They weren't nude, more like dry humping...In a game where you can stealth mode and stab a dude in the fucking neck, getting a little head and some sex seemed mild...I unlocked it to see what all the fuss was about, and was immediately disappointed....

Can't wait till this game drops. The GTA games have to be some of my fav games.

http://www.gta4.net/news/index.php


QUOTE* The protagonist's name is Niko Bellic - an Eastern European immigrant who has come to Liberty City to live the "American Dream." The game is set in Liberty City in 2007, but it is bigger than the Liberty City we saw in GTA III.

* The GTA 4 equivalent of the Statue of Liberty is called the Statue of Happiness, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) is known as BOABO (Beneath the Offramp of the Algonquin Bridge Overpass).


* In Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar have recreated 4 of the 5 boroughs in New York, as well as part of New Jersey. Broker is the GTA IV equivalent of Brooklyn, Manhattan is now called Algonquin, Queens is now Dukes, the Bronx is Bohan, and New Jersey is Alderney. The map is smaller than San Andreas, but considerably more detailed. No countryside or desert, we are led to believe.

* Pedestrians are far more realistic in GTAIV than in previous GTA games - they sit on benches, smoke cigarettes, read books and generally act like any real pedestrian would in the middle of a street.

* The screenshots in the preview are not representative of the final quality of the graphics, Rockstar insist. The game will only look better as the release draws closer..

* Niko was persuaded to move to Liberty City by his cousin Roman, who claimed to be living a wonderful life there with two beautiful women, fifteen sports cars, and lots of money etc, but he was infact telling a lie in order to hide his own failures. Roman is the only person you know in Liberty City at the beginning of the game, and he becomes one of your major connections at the start. Niko is a tough character whereas Roman is friendly. Roman is heavily in debt and a lot of people are after him - he needs Niko's support. They are constantly bickering.

* The demo (which was played on Xbox 360) begins with Bellic standing inside of the taxi depot, which Roman operates in the borough of Broker in a converted industrial garage. Roman works at a cluttered desk in a shabby environment, and at this point the graphical improvements are extremely evident. Bellic walks to a brownstone house in Broker, where he pushes open the door and pulls out a pistol. The living room however, is not occupied. He then moves onto the kitchen, which he also finds to be empty. He pushes his way through the back door and smashes the window of a red four-door car using his elbow. The broken glass falls onto the street and onto the seat of the car, as Bellic unlocks it from the inside. He hotwires the car and sets off to his next destination. The camera angle behind the car is closer to the vehicle than in previous GTA titles, which enables more detail on the car to be seen. After selecting a radio station, Bellic navigates to a section of the BOABO arriving at a dockside with a terrific view of the city skyline. Pigeons can be heard in the sky, and waves can be heard rustling in the water. Bellic then pulls out his cellphone which has options for Phonebook, Messages, Organizer and Camera on it's LCD screen. He selects Phonebook, and he is then presented with another set of options: City Contact, Docks Friend, and Cab Contact. After a brief conversation he informs the reciever to meet him at the docks.

* As Bellic walks, you can feel the weight behind each step he makes. Variations in the terrain cause realistic changes in the walking animation. The physics have also improved and character movements are more realistic.

* In previous GTA games you were like a slave because you had to constantly take orders from people when doing missions. There is still an element of that in Grand Theft Auto 4, but you can also choose how you want to spend your time, for example "I want to hang out with him and her. I want to hang out with this guy because he always has fun things to do." Call him up and maybe you can hang with him. Maybe he'll answer. You have a lot of choice over what you want to do.

* In GTA 4, Rockstar is giving its players more freedom, more choice, and more sense of control over their destiny - the structure of GTA4's storyline is quite different to it's predecessors as it can be told in a number of different ways. You can talk to people in person, by cell phones, and there are a bunch of other ways of giving the player information. In general it's a different experience, with new ways of interacting with the characters and the game world.

* Rockstar consulted crime experts and ex-policemen when making the game, and they learned that being a criminal is a lot harder these days than it was during the 80s and 90s (for example) and they have tried to reflect this in the game. This means you can expect to see a lot of people getting arrested - the police are a heavy presence in Liberty City.

* There are no planes in GTA IV because there is only one city, and Rockstar want the game to seem realistic. That means there will be no rollerblades, no unicycles, probably no jetpacks and indeed no planes. Rockstar are giving choice and variety which feels right for the character. However there will be motorbikes.

* Rockstar North is approaching the recruitment of voice actors in a different way. This means that we will probably hear less familiar voices in GTA 4, as R* are looking for voices which suit the attitude of the characters, and are not just looking for big names. A similar approach is being done with the soundtrack - Rockstar are looking for great music which works with the 2007 Liberty City.

* After an initial load sequence, the game will never load again. Not even during exterior-interior transitions (and vice versa).

* Both versions of the game (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) will likely be identical, but the Xbox 360 version will have exclusive downloadable episodic [sizeable] content. Rockstar have now spent over 3 years developing the game, and Dan Houser compares the leap from GTA III to GTA IV, to the leap from GTA to GTA III.

* GTA IV will have multiplayer, but it's not going to be a massively multiplayer online game, says Dan Houser. They are trying to make something that is interesting, fun, progressive and which goes along nicely with the single-player game.


http://www.gtaforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=348&t=273801

New Trailer...!

http://www.rockstargames.com/IV/trailer_splash.html

All three? Don't you mean all five, Ty?

Besides, Crackdown was created by the dude who invented the first. It is absolutely royal explosive action, and crazy fun when you are lit. Imagine being the law enforcing lovechild of the punisher and the incredible hulk in an open ended city bigger than New York controlled by gangs...

As for best console for this game, hands down, xbox360.

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/news-features ... 072007.htm

Let me repeat that sentence for you:

In addition to the exclusive content for Xbox 360, GTA IV will feature a multiplayer mode on Xbox LIVE that will match the drama and intensity of Niko’s solo mission. That’s all we’re allowed to reveal at this stage…

so, c'mon Ty, let's go to town,.. that is unless you afraid I will jack yo shite!

Anyone on xbox live (360 only), hit me up on NewAeonMagician,
Right now for multiplayer I got shadowrun, overlord, crackdown, and Tenchu Z, and a lot of stuff on arcade, and little time to play the storylines,

SO -
I ROCK MEGAMAN 2!!!