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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Welcome to another week of Five of the Best, a series celebrating the lovely incidental details in games we tend to overlook. So far we've celebrated hands, potions, dinosaurs, shops and health-pick-ups - an eclectic and specific bunch! The sprinkles of charm games are tastier for. Here's another five for your Friday lunchtime. Today...

Maps! Lovely old maps where be dragons. The spellbinding tease before a story. Maps promising ornate cities, bushy forests and bumpy mountains. Maps with dark caves, smouldering volcanoes and strange beasties. Maps of great adventure and excitement yet to be had.

The first map I really remember was The Hobbit. I'm sure it's the same for many of you. That simple map drawn by a dwarf. That simple map followed by dwarves and hobbit and wizard, there and back again. It's not the fanciest map - it's not as detailed and sprawling as The Lord of the Rings' map - but it had all the mystery and intrigue it needed to glue my eyes to it, to wonder when - if - we'd ever get to the end, to Smaug.

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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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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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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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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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GTA is well known for its jokes and spoofs, but this week it would appear someone has beaten Rockstar at its own game by falsely advertising the next installment in the GTA series.

Over the past few days, GTA Online players have seen messages supposedly advertising GTA6 appear on the side of their screens. On the surface, the announcements appeared to be fairly legitimate: they used a font similar to the official Rockstar branding, and even included a link to Rockstar's website.

Unsurprisingly, this was enough to hoodwink many players, who were ecstatic at the news of a new GTA game and rushed to Twitter to express their excitement.

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