Grand Theft Auto IV Trailer


Five of the Best is a weekly series about the small details we rush past when we're playing but which shape a game in our memory for years to come. Details like the way a character jumps or the title screen you load into, or the potions you use and maps you refer back to. We've talked about so many in our Five of the Best series so far. But there are always more.


Five of the Best works like this. Various Eurogamer writers will share their memories in the article and then you - probably outraged we didn't include the thing you're thinking of - can share the thing you're thinking of in the comments below. Your collective memory has never failed to amaze us - don't let that stop now!

Today's Five of the Best is...

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Grand Theft Auto IV: The Complete Edition

Late last week, sharp-eyed internet surveyors noticed that Grand Theft Auto 4 had suddenly, without warning, been delisted from Steam. With no official explanation, fans were left to speculate on the reason for the move, but now Rockstar has spoken, pointing the blame finger squarely in the direction of Microsoft's now-defunct Games for Windows Live.

In a statement provided to USgamer, Rockstar explained it was forced to suspend sales of GTA4 on Steam simply because it's now "no longer possible to generate the additional keys needed to continue selling the current version of the game", given that Microsoft has officially ended support for the Games for Windows Live platform baked into the title.

Although this means Grand Theft Auto 4 is unavailable for purchase on Steam at present (standalone expansion Episodes from Liberty City is unaffected), Rockstar says it's "looking at other options for distributing GTA4 for PC".

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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Joining the likes of Blizzard and Ubisoft, Rockstar has created its own games launcher allowing players to access its PC games from one place, regardless of what digital store you bought them from.

The Rockstar Game Launcher is available to download right now, and also lets fans buy games directly from the developer via its shop.

For a limited time, as an incentive to install the launcher, you can claim a free copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas when you download it, which will be permanently added to your Social Club account's library.

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Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

GTA Vice City cheat codes are central to anyone playing the neon-tinged, '80s-set crimeathon who wants to skip straight to the action, granting you the ability to do everything from changing your character skin to spawning weapons and changing the weather.

At this point GTA Vice City is available on a range of platforms, so below you'll find our list of all GTA Vice City cheats on PC, PS2, PS3, Xbox and mobile - plus an explanation of how to enter cheats in Vice City - so you can wreak havoc in Rockstars version of miami wherever you're playing.

On this page:

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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency channel has returned to the world of video games for the first time in a couple of years with the release of Queer Tropes, a new three-part miniseries.

This trio of episodes sees host Carolyn Petit examine the ways video games have portrayed queer and trans characters over the years.

As you might expect, there are plenty of awful examples from the past which portray LGBTQ characters in a negative light because of their sexuality or identity - and use queer stereotypes as a shorthand for a character which the player is designed to feel repulsed by, feared, or laughed at.

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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

There is a familiar pattern to media coverage whenever Rockstar publishes a game. There is talk about how the developer has used its newest game to iterate upon and redefine the open world genre. There are almost always articles on how various Hollywood films influenced Rockstar's development process. And there are at least one or two polemics that attack the developer for transgressing established norms about what can and cannot be done in video games. This last type of essay inevitably concludes that video games are bad, and lead to an increase in interpersonal violence as well as the downfall of civilisation.

What's interesting about this pattern of coverage is how often it overlooks Rockstar's own development and publishing habits, most notably the company's steady development and publication of games set in the past. Indeed, if we were to remove the typical narrative surrounding Rockstar games related to game mechanics, cinema and satire, we might instead see Rockstar as a publisher of historical games on par with Firaxis (Civilization), Paradox (Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis), or Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed). It's now commonplace to see articles, podcasts and videos criticising those publishers' appropriation of the past, but Rockstar remains remarkably unscathed even though the company has developed and published a series of games that, taken together, chronicle modern American history. These games include Red Dead Redemption 2 (set in 1899), Red Dead Redemption (1911), L.A. Noire (1947), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (1986) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (1992).

Whenever one attempts to analyse the history in historical fiction they'll always run into the hand-waving argument that "it's fiction, not history". This defense has been used by Red Dead Redemption 2 lead writer Dan Houser, who stated recently: "[the game] may be a work of historical fiction, but it's not a work of history.". Yet we know popular historical fiction often plays an outsized influence on the way the public remembers historical figures or important time periods. Consider, for instance, the impact of Shakespeare's plays on the reputations of Cleopatra and Richard III. Or the importance of Saving Private Ryan to public commemorations of D-Day. To take an example from my own life, I've probably had more conversations with students on the influence of Blackadder Goes Forth on our memory of the First World War than I've had on the actual history of the First World War (although that probably says something more about the quality of my teaching than anything else). The truth is better than fiction, but it's often the fiction we remember the best.

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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

One of the things I love most about old school games are their cheat codes. I have fond memories of spamming "motherlode" into the Sims to make it rain simoleons - while codes in other games gave you invincibility, new characters and even (somewhat infamously) unlockable blood and gore.

GTA San Andreas was no exception to the rule, and the game is stuffed full of classic cheat codes allowing players to mess around. When you wouldn't want to activate these, however, is right in the middle of a world-record pace speedrun, which is exactly what happened to LelReset.

During an attempt to break his own world record for GTA San Andreas any% (finishing the game with any level of completion), LelReset accidentally triggered a cheat code which brought a helicopter crashing down on his run. The code, called OHDUDE, spawns a hunter helicopter when used. Although the code is typically activated by typing the name, codes in GTA San Andreas can be triggered through pressing certain other WASD combinations, which is likely what happened to LelReset.

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Grand Theft Auto III


Rockstar has revealed why Grand Theft Auto 3 had a silent protagonist - ten years after the ground-breaking open world gangster game launched.


GTA 3's infamous protagonist, Claude, kept his mouth shut throughout the entire game. Rockstar said this was mostly because it had other things to worry about during development, and "this did not seem like a major issue".


"It may now seem obvious that people should all talk in games, but this was not necessarily the case in 2001, certainly not in an open world game," wrote the studio on Rockstar Newswire.


"We were making up a lot of procedures as we went along, and we decided that the NPCs (Non Playable Characters) should talk and we would have to figure out how to make them talk (using motion captured cutscenes, something that had never really been done before, at least not on the scale we were doing it).


"So we decided that the game's protagonist would not talk, partly to aid people identifying with him, but mostly because we had so many other problems to solve and this did not seem like a major issue."


Rockstar introduced a talking lead character for Grand Theft Auto Vice City, its 2002 follow-up. In that game you play Tommy Vercetti (voiced by Ray Liotta), a member of the Liberty City mafia.


"We started to discuss introducing a talking lead character when working on Vice City, but it was a lot of work," Rockstar said.


"While the structure of GTA3 may seem obvious or natural now, and the use of cutscenes made in the game's engine that look and feel like the game may seem simple and easy, it really was not the case back in 2001 when we had to figure out all of these things for the first time.


"Oh and in San Andreas, CJ calls Claude a mute because he does not talk and CJ finds this unnerving."


This week Rockstar launched Grand Theft Auto 3: 10 Year Anniversary Edition for iOS and Android devices. Grand Theft Auto 5 is expected to launch next year.

Grand Theft Auto III


Grand Theft Auto 3: 10th Anniversary Edition arrives on the App Store and Android Marketplace on 15th December, Rockstar Games has announced.


Priced at your local equivalent of $4.99, it's the same game you played back in 2001, updated with touch screen controls. See the screens below for a better idea of how it looks.


As detailed on Rockstar's official site, it's compatible with the following devices:

  • Apple iOS Devices: iPad 1 & 2, iPhone 4 & 4S, iPod touch 4th Generation
  • Android Phones: HTC Rezound, LG Optimus 2x, Motorola Atrix 4G, Motorola Droid X2, Motorola Photon 4G, Samsung Galaxy R, T-Mobile G2x
  • Android Tablets: Acer Iconia, Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Dell Streak 7, LG Optimus Pad, Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1, Sony Tablet S, Toshiba Thrive


"Grand Theft Auto III showed us the potential of open world games," commented Rockstar founder Sam Houser back in October.


"It helped set the vision for the company, and we have been expanding on those possibilities with every game ever since."


Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell awarded the open world crime epic a perfect 10/10 upon its original launch.


"GTA3 is a luscious, sprawling epic of a game and one of the most complete experiences I have ever encountered," read his Grand Theft Auto 3 review.

Grand Theft Auto III


Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar has revealed how the September 11 attacks changed GTA3, which launched just weeks after the terrorist atrocities.


Alterations were made to distance the game's fictionalised Liberty City setting from New York City, and a mission that mentioned terrorists was also trimmed.


"As far as I recall, we changed the colour of the cop cars so they weren't identical to NYPD, we altered the flight path of a plane so that it didn't look like it was flying into or behind a skyscraper, and we removed one mission as it made a reference to terrorists," Rockstar exec Dan Houser told Edge (via CVG).


A few lines of pedestrian dialogue and talk radio were also cut, while the US game box cover was redesigned.


The alterations were less dramatic than initial rumours suggested, Houser explained. "That's a little bit of a misconception [that changes were significant]," he said. "Some people believe we removed an entire strand of missions because they found some reference in the code to a character called Darkel, but he had been cut months before [release] and the missions were never completed."


Due to be launched on 3rd October 2001, GTA3 was pushed back three weeks while Rockstar combed through the game's code.


"Most of the delay in releasing the game, which was only a couple of weeks, was a product of the fact that our office in New York was pretty close to Ground Zero and so any work that had to be done there was made impossible for a period," Houser added.


"The mood in the office... It was very upsetting, very unnerving and overwhelming. It was the same for us as it was for anybody. But we also felt we'd come this close to making this great game and that despite these problems, just as despite the problems of Take Two, it was our duty to finish it."

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