Netflix has reportedly spoken with Grand Theft Auto devs Rockstar about releasing a GTA title via the streaming service, according to new reports. The talks occurred as the movie and TV behemoth apparently works to bring “higher-end” titles to their growing catalogue of video games.
]]>The 17-year-old suspected of hacking Rockstar Games and leaking footage of Grand Theft Auto 6 has pled not guilty to the charge of computer misuse. He has reportedly pled guilty to breaching bail conditions however and is now being held in a youth detention centre.
]]>Police in the UK have arrested a 17-year-old in Oxfordshire on suspicion of hacking, and it’s been alleged that it could be connected to the breach at Rockstar Games that led to the recent Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks. Journalist Matthew Keys tweeted that a source has told him that the teenager’s detainment was related to the Rockstar hack and another involving Uber. Keys claimed that the suspect is connected to hacking group Lapsus$, which organises through Telegram channels.
]]>More information about Rockstar’s next Grand Theft Auto game has slipped out of a new report from Bloomberg. Staff at the company spoke about how the cultural changes that have been taking place since former head Dan Houser’s infamous 100-hour working week comments in 2018 have affected the game’s development, with sources saying GTA 6 will apparently have a playable female protagonist for the first time in the series' history. It sounds like we might have quite some time to wait to play it though, so watch the trailer for GTA Online’s new Criminal Enterprises update below to sate your appetite for misdemeanours.
]]>Yes, another Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla DLC has been released. And, again, it’s a tad like the base game. But, not totally, because Ubisoft have remembered to put some sneaking in this one. It still has a pebble-stacking minigame, though. You can’t have it all, I guess.
]]>Rustler has such a great, great concept behind it. It’s Medieval Grand Theft Auto 2. That’s it. That’s the game. I wish I could finish this post there. I wish there was no more for you to read than that. Because the theoretical Rustler which exists inside your head, after reading the phrase "medieval GTA 2", is probably a complete riot of delight. Alas, however. After six months in early access, Rustler is getting its full release on August 31st. And unless it is entirely transformed from the iteration of the game currently available on Steam, you are probably better off playing the version inside your mind.
]]>Rockstar have announced today that, as was previously rumored, they have indeed acquired Ruffian Games, makers of Crackdown 2 and helping hands on Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Ruffian is getting less ruff, adopting the new corporate family name Rockstar Dundee. Both say they look forward to working together on future projects, though they've not said yet just what those will be.
]]>It seems that Rockstar Games, the makers of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, have snapped up Ruffian Games. The Dundee studio are known for making Crackdown 2, and most recently helped out with Halo: The Master Chief Collection. While neither Rockstar nor Ruffian have announced anything publicly, records filed with Companies House say that Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive now own at least a majority stake in Ruffian. Apparently they're now renamed to Rockstar Dundee, and I'm disappointed they didn't give a nod to Rockstar North's office down south in Edinburgh by taking the name Rockstar Norther.
]]>After 21 years as a Rockstar Games big cheese, Dan Houser will leave the company in March. He's co-written almost every Rockstar game since 1999, including Grand Theft Auto from London through to V, Bully, Max Payne 3, and the Red Dead Redemptions. That's made him a big influence on the tone of Rockstar's games. I wonder how that might change once he's moved on. Where he's going and what he'll do next, we don't know. He can probably afford to eat pizza while watching Heat on loop the rest of his life, to be honest.
]]>Joseph DeLappe is no stranger to using games to make big political points, and his newest art project is just as upsetting as its description sounds: using real gun violence data, a self-playing version of GTA V will run for one year (between 4th of Julys) and will visually display the accurate number of homicides involving guns each day. This is all streamed on Twitch for your enjoyment (?) education (?) anger. Hopefully, it can serve as a call to arms, or whatever exactly the opposite of that is called.
]]>Most games that put you into the shoes of the bad guys are about reveling in evil, gleefully causing havoc and destruction like a toddler who's got into the stationary box. Obsidian's RPG Tyranny [official site] is different.
“I find a lot of fiction that centers around good versus evil tends to be unsatisfying, as evil always exists as a strawman for the ill-prepared underdogs to beat up with the power of naïve violence and good intentions,” says Matt MacLean, narrative designer for Tyranny. “I think video games often try too hard to make sure you don’t relate to your victims, and so villains are made unrelentingly villainous, and allies are made into some combination of saccharine hangers-on or tear-jerker red-shirts waiting to be killed in order to shock you into thinking death means serious storytelling.”
But how did it all work out, and what new cruelties will the upcoming expansion expose us to?
]]>Before Grand Theft Auto became a slightly-overwhelming bizarro vision of the American Dream, it was a chaotic, meaningless romp from the top-down. Geneshift [official site] seems to want to recreate that chaos. But with up to 32 people and a big old skill tree. I don’t know if that’s a mad idea or a brilliant idea, but it’s definitely something. You can see it in action down there.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Y'know, the original one. Before 3D. Before Rockstar. Before the world changed.
]]>It's yer regular round-up of what shifted the most copies on Steam over the previous week. Last week, Total Warhammer was dark master of all it surveyed, but a bug-eyed old friend has displaced it after just one week...
]]>Even as I begin the long process of writing about all of the games I saw and the people I spoke to at GDC, I've found a new distraction. The San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam is a live feed of a modded GTA V [official site] that "creates and follows a deer wandering through the fictional state of San Andreas". The deer "is autonomous and will wander and respond to it's surroundings, interacting with the existing GTA V artifical intelligence". Over the weekend, the deer wandered through a gunfight between two gangs, caused a traffic jam during rush hour and evaded the police. This is the best version of GTA V.
]]>I've been reorganising my house lately, which has meant making decisions about what books, DVDs and CDs to keep and which to bin. This is because I'm out of space, but also because I've been lugging the same collection from rented accommodation to rented accommodation for years and most of it doesn't get touched in the months or years between moves.
This also of course means I'm making decisions about a lot of PC games. For example, the first Grand Theft Auto. Should it stay or should it go?
]]>The BBC have released a teaser trailer for The Gamechangers, their Grand Theft Auto docudrama. It's got Daniel Radcliffe as co-founder and president of Rockstar Games, Sam Houser, and Bill Paxton as (now disbarred) lawyer, Jack Thompson.
]]>Our Graham was the one to post about the BBC making a "factual drama" about the Grand Theft Auto series and Jack Thompson's crusade against video games, perhaps because I could only frame my response as a series of contorted facial expressions. But no, really, they are doing it, and it'll star Daniel Radcliffe and Bill Paxton. Well, if they don't get shut down.
Take Two Interactive, the owners of GTA makers Rockstar Games, have filed a lawsuit against the BBC for trademark infringement. See, they're none too pleased that they haven't been consulted.
]]>Grand Theft Auto is many things to many people but I've usually found a way to enjoy each new entry as a sedate urban exploration game. I like stopping at red lights and honking my horn at dangerous drivers. I like listening to people talking on their mobile phones and I love that accidents occasionally happen while I'm trundling by. With its brand new first-person perspective option, GTA V may be one of the great immersive sims, packed with emergent moments both mundane and magnificent.
]]>The BBC are producing a drama about the making of Grand Theft Auto. Announced as part of the BBC's Make It Digital campaign, which also donates computers to schools, the project is described as a 90-minute, one-off drama that "will center on the minds behind its creation." So Dave Jones running about Dundee then, talking about his days at the watch factory. I would watch this show.
]]>Ever wondered what Los Santos, the setting of Grand Theft Auto V, would look like if you stripped out the game's textures, replacing them with shades of black and grey?
Wonder no longer, because artist Kim Laughton has done just that. More images below the fold.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I've fallen for Grand Theft Auto IV a dozen times in a dozen different ways. Only the first period of time spent with it was concerned with making headway through the miserable singleplayer missions, and that ended with the bleakness and grind became too great. Every other re-visit since then has been far more fun and uplifting.
]]>Michael Dailly created Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings in his time at DMA Design, and is now Head of Development at YoYo Games, the company responsible for entry-level game creation tool Game Maker. To help illustrate the power of Game Maker: Studio, the modern version of that tool, he's doing something cool. As reported by USGamer, he's re-building the world of Grand Theft Auto 1 in it, in 3D.
]]>For every Rockstar game since Vice City, the promotional screenshots have been rendered on a PC that only God herself could own, post-processed by a version of Photoshop from the 24th century and employed camera angles that you could only play the game from for 2.7 seconds before driving into a wall. It's oddly reassuring to see that rich tradition continues with the latest round of screenshots from the little-shown Grand Theft Auto 5. Click for embiggenation of all of these.
Behold! A snazzy-looking bicycle as ridden by a man wearing the most heavily anti-aliased lycra trousers you've ever seen!
]]>Hello. I am not Alec Meer. He's in charge of this, not me. But Alec is on holiday on Cybertron for a week, so I'm going to have a go. Charts, right? Like they used to have for pop music, but with games instead? I think I can do this.
]]>Edit: Gamersgate pack now reduced to £4.99, matching Steam.
]]>Cripes - how would you like the complete Grand Theft Auto series for under £9? There are two ways to do this. You can get yourself a balaclava and steal them from a shop, but it's high-risk, and some would argue morally questionable. Or you could hand over that much money to Gamers Gate, where they're selling GTA 1, GTA 2, GTA III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, GTA IV, and GTA Episodes From Liberty City, for actually 1p less than that balaclava at £8.74. Bear in mind that GTAs 1 and 2 are already free, but that's still one heck of a lot of automobile crime without the broken glass and prison sentence. (Thanks to Michael Rose for the tweeted tip.)
]]>Mike Dailly, one of the key men behind Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, has just posted the design documents for the original GTA on his Flickr pages. Race'n'Chase, as it was originally intended to be called, began life on the 25th January 1995 in a design doc authored by K. R. Hamilton. The version posted is 1.05, from 22nd March, explaining how the multiplayer racing game would perhaps also feature a cops and robbers mode. And it makes for excellent reading.
]]>With only coincidental timing, this week I wrote about the original Grand Theft Auto for Eurogamer - Dave Jones' game that spawned the empire that led to his creating APB. Does the top-down 1997 original stand the cruel passage of time? Is it still controversial? I write:
]]>Kieron and I have been expanding our minds and destroying our livers at the annual Develop conference in Brighton, Blighty for the last couple of the days. One of the highlights of the show so far has been David Braben, he of Elite fame, and Dave Jones, he of APB and GTA1 fame and their 'designer mash-up.' The concept - they play each other's most iconic game, and provide retrospective commentary about their time making these two goliaths of gaming history. Some ramblomatic highlights below...
]]>The so often excellent Game Politics makes a rather astute point in light of New York governor, Eliot Spitzer's recent resignation. The disgraced politician made a swift exit after being rumbled by the FBI as part of a prostitution ring. This would be the same politician, as GP points out, that said this in 2006:
"Like all parents, I know it is increasingly difficult to protect our children from negative influences… we have learned that when self-regulation fails, government must step in… we must do more to protect our children from excessive sex and violence in the media… Media content has gotten more graphic, more violent and more sex-based… Currently, nothing under New York State law prohibits a fourteen-year old from walking into a video store and buying… a game like ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ which rewards a player for stealing cars and beating people up. Children can even simulate having sex with a prostitute…"
Oops!
]]>When you're browsing news, trying to stay abreast of the developments in the world of PC Games, you're looking for something to stop you dead in your tracks. Something unexpected, that demands an immediate response. Escape From Paradise City managed to do so in a way which no game since Devastation has done so. I can only gawp and blink and run to Wordpress to blog a story.
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