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.

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A new Grand Theft Auto 5 [official site] mod will add the whole flipping city from GTA 4, the developers of GTA modding tool OpenIV have announced. Liberty City will be added to GTA 5’s world, rather than replacing it, appearing just across the sea. Crumbs! Given Rockstar are seemingly more interested in expanding 5’s multiplayer than its singleplayer, it’ll certainly be nice to have a huge new world to play in with GTA V’s toys. … [visit site to read more]

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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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

I wouldn’t call Grand Theft Auto: Vice City [official site] the best GTA game, but I might say it’s my favourite. Between the eerie deadness of GTA 3 and the sprawl of San Andreas sat a tidy little game about ’80s Miami bathed in neon and dusted with cocaine. It was a crude sketch of future plans for the series, done on the back of a copy of Scarface>‘s script, but its roughness left gaps that the atmosphere nicely filled.

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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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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.

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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.

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Races have consistently been my least favourite activity and mission style in Grand Theft Auto games, but here I am downloading Grand Theft Auto III so I can play a mod dedicated to the blighters. Liberty City Nights’ creator amibitiously describes it as “the best racing mod GTA III ever saw,” which also implies “the least horrible racing GTA III ever saw,” but that’s not why I’m interested. See, I’m interested in mods which try to recreate or crib from games and series which are no longer made, and Liberty City Nights is after the neon night racing of EA’s Need for Speed Underground subseries.

… [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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