About a month ago I decided to finally play Max Payne 3, incidentally our "Best Drinking in a Dirty T-Shirt" GOTY. The game prompted me to make a social account with Rockstar, so I did.
This came up when I was picking an avatar for the account—I knew Red Dead was a franchise, but damn! That sure is looking into the future.
A seedy underground of Russian criminals has gotten so brazen it's taken to posting advertisements offering the services of its expert "bank robbers".
These crims, who mostly employ "cyberheists and tax fraud" to lift money from US banks, even go into detail about the kind of things they can offer prospective employers, as listed on the site of security expert Brian Krebs:
We provide convenient service to our partners:
Unique administrative interface – fast response
We will react momentarily to any new task
Adapt every action of a money mule to client's requirements
Timely payments via WebMoney/Liberty Reserve/Western Union, cash conversion with WU/MG
Cashout of tax return, D + P (dump & PIN, cashout of debit cards stolen via skimming)
Receive over mail or expensive merchandise pick up in a store
Mules are available for other interesting transactions
We work only by reference.
Amazing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the background and field these guys are "working" in (and I guess the fact Eastern European crooks gotta stick together?), what do they use as the enormous illustration on the ad? Some Grand Theft Auto IV fan art, of course, by none other than internet-famous Rockstar fan artist Patrick Brown.
Online Service Offers Bank Robbers for Hire [Krebs on Security, via Boing Boing]
We saw the first Grand Theft Auto V trailer recreated in the original San Andreas (GTA: San Andreas, to be exact). Then someone set it in Grand Theft Auto IV. So, with the second trailer's release earlier this week, it's natural we get that one rebuilt inside IV as well. This is by YouTube user underage117.
If you want to compare it to the original, it's embedded below. Or watch them side-by-side here (might want to mute the volume on one.) My suspicion is that this won't stop until Grand Theft Auto V is recreated in Grand Theft Auto IV, which will be a hell of a trick considering its map is, at most, about 1/7th the size of what GTA V's is said to be.
GTA V Trailer #2 remade in GTA IV uploaded by underage117 [h/t Adriaan V.]
Who would go through such a painstaking process to recreate the poses and action of some of Grand Theft Auto V's screenshots, courtesy of Game Informer? RomanBOY123 would, apparently.
He put GTA IV on max settings on his PC (1920x1080 resolution, with HD tree mods) and came up with some amazingly accurate screenshots to match those of GTA V's. Check out one of them above by using the slider the reveal more of each. GTA IV is on the left, while GTA V is on the right.
Be sure to hit the GTA forums to see the rest of them, because they're truly well done.
GTA IV vs GTA V graphics comparision [GTA Forums via Reddit]
This is like some kind of stunt porn from The Fast and the Furious, but it's still impressive to watch a guy get past a cop car and a SWAT roadblock, on a bridge entrance, without a scratch.
I might get the alignment checked after a drive like this, but damn. Fine work. Somewhere an action-movie screenwriter is writing a note to himself.
YouTube video uploaded by ddnewman
The Smoothest Police Evasion in GTA History [Dorkly]
There's this small problem I'm having with Assassin's Creed III. It's nothing to do with the game itself, actually, and everything to do with me. The problem is this:
Assassin's Creed III is turning me into a kind of obnoxious person.
I've developed this running commentary while the game goes on. It has nothing to do with the game's themes, or characters. It's unrelated to the gameplay and more or less completely unconnected to anything meaningful inside the game. It sounds like this:
"I used to work about a block away from there."
"They haven't changed out those cobblestones since 1773 and they're murder on nice shoes."
"That hill is the Back Bay now."
"That river is the Back Bay now. They put the hill in it."
"Lexington Common looks different when it's full of cows."
"A beacon? On Beacon Hill? I didn't see that one coming."
I grew up in and around Boston, making my home well inside of Route 128 from birth until striking out down the coast for New York City shortly before turning 25. While previous Assassin's Creed games have claimed high fidelity in recreating Damascus, Rome, and Istanbul, the basic fact of the matter is that those cities aren't my home. Boston is.
AC3 certainly doesn't represent the Boston or New England of the 21st century, of course. But the late 18th century setting of the game, a scant 230-odd years in the past, retains much more immediacy than the Italian Renaissance or the Crusades. The creatively imagined Boston-that-was is close enough to my Boston-that-is to give me a sense of familiarity both comprehensible and misplaced.
Games occupy this strange place in memory, where we so clearly go places and explore worlds that never actually existed. Experiences like To the Moon explicitly address this dissonance, but it's true of every game. I can remember how to get around a space station as well as I can remember how to get around my local mall, but my body's only been to one of the two. The mall is real; the Citadel is not.
When game spaces represent real-world spaces, the strange sense of memory gets ever-stranger. I moved to Washington, DC the year that Fallout 3 came out. Controversial advertising sprang up through the city's Metro system depicting a post-apocalyptic Capital, but it wasn't until after the game came out that I felt the full weight of investigating my own ruined city.
The general size and scale of the virtual DC is of course a mismatch to the real one—spaces in games were ever thus—but the details are devilishly familiar. In particular, the ruined Metro that provides the Lone Wanderer a route for getting around a city full of toppled buildings, nuclear waste, and super mutants is uncannily, frighteningly similar to the Metro that federal commuters use every day.
At first, while playing Fallout 3, I'd wander through the game comparing its locations to ones I knew from daily life. But after fifty or so hours of Fallout, a funny thing happened. Instead of comparing game-play time to real-world experience, I began to relate the other way around. While waiting to change trains at Metro Center in the mornings, I'd see a bench in the shadows and think, "That's good cover for avoiding the super mutants," or I'd see a door and think, "Didn't I pick that lock yesterday?"
Two Kotaku colleagues not based in New York reflected that the Grand Theft Auto games had inspired similar deja vu in them. They had played the games first, and then visited the city. On visiting, they handily identified and remembered places they hadn't actually been. As someone who lived a block away from Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza the first time she came to the neighborhood around Outlook Park in-game, I could sympathize. On that memorable occasion, I'd blurted aloud, "I can see my house from here!"
I can, of course, visit the real Boston—or New York, or Washington DC—at more or less any time, weather and cost permitting. I don't need to see them in a game in order to explore them to their fullest—and even when I do use a game, it's not the kind I can put in the PS3. Exploring a real space, and digitally navigating an imagined space, are never the same thing.
Sometimes, though... sometimes, when game spaces represent real spaces, the uncanny and the real cross over in a very strange way. Through the games I've played, I remember the cities of my heart as places I've never actually known them to be. The tall ships of Connor's era are long since replaced with ugly motorboats, but the next time I stand on Long Wharf, part of me will remember seeing Haytham sail in on the Providence even so.
It's true that the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV has given birth to some truly inspired mods. But not many of them totally re-paint Liberty City in as spectacular fashion as this one does.
Modder Quechus13 re-skins GTA IV's open world with the iconic, neon stripes of the Tron movies and throws in loads of ramps for leaping up into the darkened skies. Sure is pretty, but I wish that Niko was done up in glowing cyberwarrior gear, too.
Games take us to all manner of fantastical, unlikely places. But as good as video games have gotten at accurately recreating a space-marine shootout or a mountaintop dragon battle, there's one thing developers are still learning how to create: A dance club.
Many games try to create thriving urban environments for players to occupy, and there's nothing that says "thriving" and "urban" like a packed, sweaty dance club. Unfortunately, until very recently, games have been very, very bad at rendering realistic dance clubs.
This scene from Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (a game which I love, I should say) best exemplifies the sort of awkward, embarrassing antics you'd see in early video game dance clubs. There just wasn't enough processing power to make the club as hazy, loud, or crowded-feeling as it needs to be to be convincing. I love dancing at The Asylum, but mostly because it's so endearingly goofy.
There's nothing sadder than an empty dance floor, though, as evidenced by this video from Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's like being at an unpopular kid's Bar Mitzvah.
I remember playing Mass Effect 2, when I first arrived at the Afterlife bar, I was incredibly impressed with how alive it felt. (Now, when I visit, I'm more aware of how empty it is.) Still, it's a pretty good scene, if only in how it builds up to the entrance to the club.
I liked the vibe of The Hive in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The audio may not have been quite right, but it conveyed an icy, cool energy that worked with the game. Don't know how I feel about the random chicks gyrating around the place, but hey, no video game club is perfect.
Rockstar have long understood how dance clubs feel, once again demonstrating their preternatural ability to be ahead of the curve on this sort of thing. Even with its now-primitive graphics, Vice City's Malibu Club is a pretty convincing club:
It paves the way, of course, for the much more convincing clubs in Grand Theft Auto IV and its expansion chapters:
The dance club scene in Max Payne 3 may represent the pinnacle of video games' representations of dance clubs so far:
Nice. The thrumming bass, the way that dialogue instantly gets cut out and muffled, the fact that you can't understand what the hell anyone is saying. There are some shortcuts—see through the smoke and mirrors of the lens filters and fog machines and you can tell that the dancefloor animations are somewhat repetitive and limited—but all the same, this club feels more authentic than any before it.
A huge part of creating a convincing digital dance club is the music and more specifically, the way the music sounds. It can't just be the regular background music that plays during the game—music in a club is thrumming, physical, oppressive. You can't hear anything over it, and as a result everyone is shouting. On top of the pounding bass, there's a high-frequency scream of reverberating voices. It's not an easy thing to get right, making it all the more remarkable when a game does.
I turn it over to you—what are some of your favorite video game clubs? Any classics that are worth mentioning?
When you introduce a video game to an older relative who doesn't play them—a parent or a grandparent—and they realize they've underestimated how detailed, how immersive these things really are, the conversations you have after that really are special. If this hasn't happened for you, ask anyone for whom it has.
Or better yet, just go read Christian Donlan's charming story of exploring Los Angeles with his father in L.A. Noire. The elder Donlan grew up in Los Angeles in the 1940s, and has a vivid recollection of the city in that time—where long gone landmarks were located, how wide the streets were, what sorts of things you'd see in a diner window.
L.A. Noire, a jewel box of a period piece, did profoundly well against his father's memory, whose photographic quality probably comes from his father, a Los Angeles police sergeant. Donlan's granddad had brushes with tabloid fame and deviations into petty graft, adultery and all the other pursuits that make for a good film noir cop. A colorful recounting of his career, including the only time he used his gun, opens the piece.
It's in the sightseeing tour of downtown Los Angeles where the real affirmation comes. Even minor landmarks seemingly there just to hold a city block together present some antecedent for Donlan's father to remark on and marvel at. There are some details gotten wrong—an engine note in one car is off; too many of them have whitewall tires. But the fact his father praised the gloomy quality of lighting on the streets, at night, in the game is rather profound. It reflects a great credit on anyone who worked on this game—for all of its troubled history—for it to get this stamp of authenticity, even 18 months out.
Donlan later asked his dad for a few thoughts on what he had seen. His reply concludes the essay, and it is well worth reading through to the end. But here's a highlight. "This seemed a refreshingly thoughtful—almost intellectual—scenario that I would not have expected in something called a game."
Night and the City [Eurogamer]
You'd think I would be sick of all these weird GTAIV mod videos, but nope. Not when they've got giraffes in them.
Where the rest of the internet is fascinated by either tits or cats, it's the noble giraffe that's closest to our hearts. So videos of giraffes tearing up Liberty City in stolen cars? They are things of wonder.
It's a long video, but stick with it. It gets more wonderful the longer it goes on.
Grand Theft Auto IV - Giraffe (MOD) HD [YouTube, via TDW]
