I have enormous respect (and a fair amount of adoration) for the people who make unofficial patches for ageing games. With each generation of hardware and each new operating system, we lose a few more games, and these dedicated folks are working hard to keep that number as low as possible.

One of these long-running update projects is SilentPatch, a combination patch for Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and San Andreas, three games that share an engine. It updated again just yesterday, and while the change-log isn’t especially huge, some of the tweaks made are quite interesting.

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It may be two Grand Theft Auto generations and 11 years old, but GTA: San Andreas is still very much alive. Its two most popular online multiplayer mods currently have a million or more active players between them one, Multi Theft Auto, had 616,000 players in July (up from just 33k in February 2010), while the other, SA-MP, oscillates between about 15,000 and 50,000 concurrent players. I went to talk to members of both mod communities to find out what keeps them playing.

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Fail Forward is normally a series of videos all about the bits of games which don t quite work and why. But in this special episode, Marsh Davies talks about how the mainstream media tends to discuss games only in terms of their threat or their use – with a particular look at the BBC’s recent Make It Digital season, including programmes like the docudrama The Gamechangers and the science show Horizon.

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On Tuesday night, the BBC aired The Gamechangers, their one-off drama about the making of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and the court cases brought against Rockstar Games by US lawyer Jack Thompson. This seems like rich subject matter, but the results proved a disappointment in nearly every way.

Other people have already written accurate reviews and rounded up what Rockstar and former GTA developers thought of it, so I’m not going to do either of those things. Instead I want to talk about the film’s failure to offer insight – or even to attempt to depict – the game development process. Mostly I’m going to talk about James L. Brooks’ 1987 movie Broadcast News.

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You might have noticed Steam downloading a sizeable update for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas over the weekend and wondered what that was about. A fancy secret tying into GTA V’s return to the west coast, perhaps? Not quite. The patch added support for XInput controllers like the Xbox 360 pad, which is nice, but also removed seventeen songs from various radio stations. No more angsting out and gunning it across Gant Bridge in the wrong lane listening to Killing in the Name, I’m afraid. It breaks old saves for some too, though a mod fixes that up.

… [visit site to read more]

More sites should interview mod-makers, I feel. If one of this week’s picks is anything to go by, they can have some interesting things to say. Modding might not usually be quite as huge a process as making a full-on indie game, but as a modder you face your own unique problems, ones we don’t always get to hear about. Maybe we should take note of that at RPS. Either way, read on for this week’s roundup.
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I was never really disturbed by the actual Child’s Play movies, because they were rubbish, but for some reason this being the first link in my inbox this morning – informing me that someone has created a Chucky mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – left me feeling a bit queasy.

That is all.