The mod scene around Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV continues to impress and amuse. Sonic The Hedgehog and the Portal robots were cool, but Mickey Mouse? We're veering into the realm of social commentary. Or we're veering into an alternate world where Kingdom Hearts = Disney + Rockstar.
The mod was created by YouTube user Indirivacua, who also made the Sonic one. Get the Mickey mod here.
Here's a second look.
GTA IV Mod: Mickey Mouse [Created by me]+Link [YouTube]
Wouldn't it be awesome to be Batman? I mean, without all of the angst, perhaps. And without the years of training. And the constant threat of bodily harm. And the... hmm. Okay, you know what? Forget being Batman. I just want the cool parts of being Batman. The Batmobile and the suit and the jumping and, most especially, the not getting caught.
One Redditor felt the same way. And after an excursion to see The Dark Knight Rises, he came home feeling that Arkham City wasn't quite doing it for him. He needed something a little more... San Andreas. And lo, the newest Batman-themed mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was born. As the poster explains:
I kinda got obsessed with it over the last week and collected heaps of different Batman mods from all over the internet. It was hard, because most of the projects are dead and the links were all down, but I ended up putting together a pretty fully featured pack, using a mod called "The Dark Knight Begins" as a base.
There are way worse ways to be Batman. And should you happen to have grabbed San Andreas at any point, you can be Batman too. Or you can browse through the full gallery of Batman's annotated adventures in Gotham San Andreas.
The only Batman simulator I'll ever need [Reddit]
Later this week, Grand Theft Auto III is being released on the PlayStation Network. It's going to be hard to get very excited about it when you look how well this little project is coming along.
GTA III Rage is an attempt to recreate Grand Theft Auto III using Grand Theft Auto IV's newer, fancier engine. We first took a look at the fan project back in March, but the team have since released this trailer, which does a pretty good job of showing you it's the same old city, only now it's got helicopters.
Promise, last one. We've had our fun. From R2-D2 (to his Skyrim-themed friend) to the Portal 2 multiplayer robots, we can only take so much of seeing cartoon or comic-relief characters going on a mass-murder rampage in Liberty City. For Sonic the Hedgehog—even if he looks like a little more like a blue Shadow the Hedgehog—we'll make an exception.
Because really, if someone asked if you wanted to see Sonic force-push a dozen Prius taxis three blocks, and then whip out a submachine gun and spray everyone with lead, you'd probably say yes. From Taltigolt, the guy who brought you all the rest.
You talk about love at first sight. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City had me at its opening credit screens: the LOAD "*",8,1, multicolored flashing logo and rudimentary MIDI theme took me straight back to 1986, and all the days I spent parked in front of my Commodore 64. When I showed it to my brother—not a gamer, but a C64 lifer—he flipped out.
YouTube 1980s nostalgia mavens Mijami Hiroz have now flipped the script and animated the game's final mission, "Keep Your Friends Close," in the style of a Commodore 64 de-make. Rockstar Games discovered the video yesterday and favorited it, even.
This slow-paced video, with text-only dialogue, is strangely engrossing—for those who have completed the game, I suppose. So that means there's a big spoiler alert here. But then, nearly 10 years after the game's freaking release, the statute of limitations has to have expired on that by now.
Weird that this brings back 10-year-old memories of 18-year-old memories. It's fun to remember all the same.
Found on YouTube: Vice City on Commodore 64? [Rockstar Newswire]
This montage of Portal 2's ATLAS and P-body raising hell in Liberty City comes to you from the same guy who commissioned the insane death-dealing R2-D2 mod for Grand Theft Auto IV. It is outstanding. Just sit back and enjoy.
Grand Theft Auto IV protagonist Niko Bellic has some hard choices to make in his Liberty City adventure. Well, you have to make the choices for him.
But what would Niko have done?
That's what a fan of Rockstar Games' 2008 epic asked the company in a recent Q&A on Rockstar's website. With enough spoiler filibustering out of the way, let's get to what they said.
SPOILER ALERT - "Kill or spare Ivan Bytchkov? Kill or spare Cherise Glover? Kill Playboy X or Dwayne Forge? Kill or spare Clarance Little? Kill Francis McReary or Derrick McReary? Kill or spare Darko Brevic?
Take the deal or get revenge? I know what I'd do but I wanna know what [Niko] would do. You designed him so you know him better than I do." – Mike Sean Clifton
Rockstar: That's a very interesting question. The choices that you make in Grand Theft Auto IV while in the shoes of Niko Bellic are completely down to personal preference. Your conscience and curiosity help Niko to make decisions throughout the game, so we really don't have a straight and true path for how the Niko ‘character' would react in life or death situations – it's all down to the individual who plays him, and our hope was to have a fairly even split in all of the choices, so they seemed like real dilemmas. In terms of outcomes (something Niko would not know at the time) there is a ‘best pathway' which is the sort of thing we reveal when we do a tips post, but that is from a pure game design / mechanics perspective as some choices give you more advantages than others, not from the choices Niko might make at the time. Those are up to you.
I killed Playboy. I can't remember what I did with the other choices. What do I think Niko would have done? Not had a care in the world. That guy was a cold-blooded killer and not much fun at comedy clubs.
Asked & Answered: Max Payne 3 and Grand Theft Auto V [Rockstar Games official site]
Then, he seemed to realize that he needed new wheels and carjacked another vehicle. Police apprehended him shortly thereafter—game over. That's what you get for not checking your Wanted Level!
Drunk Man Hijacks Two Cars, Does Not Get Far [Beijing Cream]
Rockstar games slyly released two new screenshots for Grand Theft Auto V today, tucking them within an engaging Q&A posted on the development studio's official site.
You want more?
It's not clear when we're getting more. Here's what Rockstar says [emphasis added by Kotaku]:
"What is going on with GTAV?" – received via Mouthoff
We are very busy working on the game! Everything is going well, but the game is a huge project. We should have more information and some new assets for you soon.
"Why don't you give us more news?" – received via Mouthoff
As we have said before, we have often had long gaps between asset releases on previous games and will continue to do so in the future. We are sorry if you find this frustrating, but please understand, we don't do this because we ‘don't care about our fans' 'don't respect our fans' 'hate GTA fans etc' – precisely the opposite! We do it because we want to make sure we only release 100% correct information, and because we want to keep plenty back for the actual game release so there are still lots of surprises when you play it. The only things we care about are that you enjoy the experience of actually playing the game and that we release accurate information. We just have not been in a position to show more of the game than the trailer and will not be for a while yet. We did, however, manage to sneak a quick screenshot out for you… it's not much, but we thought it was pretty fun.
....We will try and get some more screens for you soon and then another trailer when we are ready.
UPDATE: One more tidbit from Rockstar's Q&A confirms what the game's first trailer implied. We'll be flying planes in GTA V. In response to a question about the omission of planes from GTA IV, Rockstar said: "... we simply could not make an environment big enough for planes to work properly. Fear not, they are returning in what is our biggest open world game to date."
Asked & Answered: Max Payne 3 and Grand Theft Auto V [Official Rockstar Games website]
I've seen it far too many times. A video game character leaps from the top of a staircase, flying through the air, guns blazing. One enemy drops to the ground, then two, then three! Behind him, a grenade explodes, laying waste to the spot where he was just standing.
Bullets whizz through the air, metal-jacketed death buzzing past like so many hornets. By the time he hits the ground, everyone in the room is dead. He stands up, dusts himself off, and without a word... just keeps on truckin'.
Dude. Not even a word about the fucking amazing stunt you just pulled off?
Sometimes I want to grab video game characters and shake them.
Video game characters rarely seem like they're having a good time. They never seem overly impressed by the incredible odds they're overcoming, the amazing battles they're singlehandedly winning, the ridiculously difficult acrobatics they perform so regularly.
Max Payne, Marcus Fenix, Lara Croft, Rico Rodriguez, the GTA heroes… they rarely if ever seem all that stoked about the incredible moves they execute on a regular, sometimes minute-by-minute basis. Would it kill them to seem at least a little bit impressed by their own badassery?
The scene I described up top was more or less a scene from Max Payne 3, a game in which constant, insane action sequences are always followed by Max brooding to himself about how much of a fuckup he is.
A friend and I were having a laugh the other day over a scene that happens near the middle of the game. Max is sneaking up on some goons in a parking garage, at which point his voice-over sarcastically mocks his "trademark grace" as he knocks over a barrel and gets noticed. Immediately after doing that, he proceeds to do the most hilariously graceful and amazing thing I've ever seen, shooting a valve, grabbing a chain that then HAPPENS to start pulling him up to the ceiling because he shot the random valve, and then mowing down like eight dudes in slow-mo on two separate levels of the garage before landing... and going about his grumpy, hungover day.
If he had ended that sequence with the voiceover, "Okay, maybe I'm not so graceless," I would have been on the floor laughing. Instead, it was just gritty business as usual.
I'm not asking for a constant string of meta-commentary or anything. But would it kill video game characters to just occasionally mention how completely rad the thing they just did was? One of the most fun things in a video game, particularly a cinematic action game, is that sense of "Oh holy eff, I just DID THAT." And yet the characters never share that with us, they grimace and frown, they smell the fart and go on with their lives.
When a character in a game does respond to what just happened, it feels disproportionately refreshing, like a sip of water in a desert. At the end of the amazing collapsing building segment of Uncharted 2, Nathan Drake laughs and says, "We were almost in that!" More recently, in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, there's an early scene when an insanely powerful airdrop wipes out a horde of advancing soldiers, and the soldier I was controlling wryly muttered, "Well… that worked."
The fact that I laughed at that (pretty dumb) line indicates how much I want someone to acknowledge what's happening on screen. Why don't more games do this kind of thing? Is it simply that the events of a game are so outlandish that writers fear that acknowledging their awesomeness would serve to make them seem silly? I don't think it would. These kinds of video games are supposed to be awesome. It's okay to have some fun with it.
Look, I know. "Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions." In movies, on TV - this kind of stuff happens all the time. A cool badass character does something badass, and by definition he has to act all cool about it. It's what we expect of our cool badasses!
But there are moments, great moments, when that cool veneer cracks—think Neo saying "Woah" or "I know Kung Fu" in The Matrix. In the (fantastic) Disney film Tangled, there is a hysterical scene in which the character Flynn winds up in a sword-fight with Maximus, who is... a horse.
"You should know that this is the strangest thing I've ever done!" Flynn enthusiastically shouts as he parries the attacks of a sword-wielding horse. Ha! That gag and the lines from The Matrix are so great because for a few brief moments, we the audience are let in on the joke. The writers take a moment to tell us that it's okay to be super jazzed about all the awesome stuff happening on screen. I'd love to see more games do that.
I mean, if I single-handedly wiped out an entire platoon of alien soldiers, then hopped onto the side of one of their tanks, fought my way to the cockpit and piloted the thing off a cliff before leaping in slow-mo to safety at the last possible second, I think I'd do what any rational, red-blooded human would do: Look around frantically and shout, "TELL me someone saw that shit!"
Then I'd probably call my mom.
"Mom, you will not believe what I just did. Okay wait, let me back up. There's something you should know about me: Turns out, I AM AWESOME."