After disabling the option to buy Grand Theft Auto IV in January, Rockstar now say 2008’s open-world murder simulator will return to sale in March with a few changes. Microsoft’s awful Games For Windows Live technogubbins is being removed because it caused the trouble in the first place, and that’s great news. It seems some folks will also receive the expansions or base game for free too. Unfortunately, Rockstar are also removing GTA IV’s multiplayer mode and will temporarily disable several radio stations. A mixed crimebag.

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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.

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Just in time to launch Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC, Rockstar announced their own game launcher for desktop. Despite having both Grand Theft Auto V and San Andreas available on the new digital storefront, Grand Theft Auto IV is still notably absent. Now it’s been delisted from Steam as well, though it doesn’t actually seem to be related to any grand plans Rockstar have for their own launcher.

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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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As much fun as we have with our virtual bank-heists, car-chases and random muggings, music licensing seems like a far more lucrative racket. Due to expensive, time-limited music licenses expiring, Grand Theft Auto IV developers Rockstar were recently faced with either pulling the game from sale, paying for a license renewal, or removing a good chunk of its famed soundtrack. Today, a small patch rolled out across multiple platforms, removing the now-unlicensed music tracks and it looks like the damage done may be greater than expected.

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Rockstar have confirmed that they need to cut a number of songs from Grand Theft Auto IV due to music licenses expiring, though they will shuffle in new songs to replace at least some. Probably expect a new patch to cut the old and whack in the new. The Russian pop station Vladivostok FM will take the brunt of the cuts, which will also affect GTA 4’s Episodes From Liberty City standalone expansions. Rockstar have needed to do this with GTA before and it’s still weird to cut up old copies of games, but at least this time they’re taping it back together afterwards. (more…)

The modding project creating a tool to import Liberty City from Grand Theft Auto IV into GTA V has, sadly, shut down. It was the work of the team behind unofficial modding tool OpenIV [official site] but, after the fuss which saw the owners of GTA briefly shut down OpenIV with legal threats before making peace, they now say they can’t make it. Such a tool would be against the new Rockstar modding policy, see. But hey, at least OpenIV is back and its development will continue. … [visit site to read more]

Take-Two’s lawyers have allegedly shut down OpenIV, one of the main tools for modding Grand Theft Auto IV and V. The OpenIV team say they’ve received a ‘cease and desist’ letter from The Suits saying that OpenIV lets people bypass security features and modify the game, which violates Take-Two’s rights and must be stopped. And so, the team have announced they’ll stop distributing the tool. I’m sure it’ll still float around the Internet unofficially, but this is a terrible loss. … [visit site to read more]

Nintendo’s new console, the Swapsie, isn’t even out but word has already leaked of a PC port for flagship game Super Mario Odyssey. A new cut of Odyssey’s trailer shows the PC version, which naturally boasts higher-fidelity graphics and — goodness me! — Nintendo have embraced the ‘mature’ nature of PC gaming. When toonman Mario ventures into the real world on PC, he sparks fisticuffs with pedestrians, gets chased by armed police, visits strip clubs, and suffers terrible accidents. Oh, Mario! Sadly, the PC version also renames New Donk City (the best place name in any video game) to Liberty City. Here, wrap your peepers around this trailer: … [visit site to read more]

Decoding is a regular column about the games we love, and the tricks and traditions that make them tick.>

Oh shit, I pressed the wrong button and killed that guy.

It happens to the best of us. You could play Watch Dogs 2 [official site] for days without firing a gun, or causing a fatal traffic accident, or beating someone to death with a billiard ball. Lead character Marcus Holloway doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d leave bodies in his wake, and the ease with which he can become a killer is jarring. Like so many of our protagonists, he walks through life with the safety off and his finger on the trigger.

Open world games, particularly those of the urban variety, have a violence problem, and it’s mechanical rather than philosophical.

… [visit site to read more]