Reader forsinain42 has put together this beautiful tilt-shift video showing a day in the life of Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City.
Adorable, no? Also makes you appreciate the technical work that went into the game, as it focuses on the things that you may never even realise were even in Liberty City if all you do is drive fast cars and shoot people.
Is L.A. Noire—despite its running, gunning and vehicular cruising—essentially an elaboration on the point-and-click adventure game? Some critics and commenators have suggested that the title has more in common with Monkey Island than Grand Theft Auto IV, with the crucial difference being that L.A. Noire (unlike the adventure games of yesteryear) allows you to advance despite having made blunders.
On the most recent installment of Michael Abbott's Brainy Gamer Podcast, guest Tom Bissell—author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter —suggests L.A. Noire may not even be a game at all, in the conventional sense.
At around the 24:00 mark, Bissell begins:
I see the story as a train—you're on a train, and this train's on a track. And there's very little you can do. You can occasionally throw a switch that maybe shifts like, one track over; but you're going to the same place. You can make tiny micro-adjustments to the story, and that's really all they're giving you. We don't think that this is a video game. It's probably not a video game in the terms that we're thinking of it. In fact, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is by any common definition a better game than L.A. Noire. Is it anywhere as interesting as L.A. Noire? Is it anywhere near as thought-provoking or...did it stick in my head the way that L.A. Noire did? No.
I'm thinking that player agency is so far outside the parameters of what this game wants to do. This game is actually trying to tell a cinematic story within unbudgeable parameters, that you kind of have a weird amount of freedom to explore, but you have very little freedom to determine. Freedom and choice we think as gamers are the same thing. But they're not. They're very different.
...This game is actually sneaking in under the orthodoxies of game design something that's rather more old-fashioned...one of these interactive films they made in the 1990s. This is essentially Night Trap, this game. And because it's got a lot of production value, and terrific performances, and a lot of interesting things happening in it, I think this has revived the tradition that Night Trap very briefly exemplified. And it's actually gone back to something that we all abandoned. That all game designers looked at and shrunk from in horror because it was so horrible the first time out...It's gone back to that and said, you know what, there's actually interesting things to do here. My belief is that this game is a completely new thing, that we don't even have the name for yet.
I'd walked away from Rockstar's last major release with an uncomfortable sense of irresolution. If Red Dead Redemption's John Marston was such a chivalrous, decent sort of guy—calling rancher Bonnie McFarlane "ma'am" and positively dripping with graciousness—how could I then command him to shoot innocent civilians, or slaughter his own horse? The game seemed to struggle with reconciling my agency as a player with Marston's integrity as a character.
L.A. Noire came along as a sort of reply to my Red Dead misgivings—it privileged Cole Phelps's claims as a predefined character over mine as the player operating him. But Bissell's words make me wonder: when the character is more important than the player, is what we have still really a video game?
Brainy Gamer Podcast - Episode 34 [The Brainy Gamer]
Now you can cruise the seedy streets of Grand Theft Auto IV's take on Liberty City from the comfort and safety of your web browser, thanks to the efforts of GTA's most dedicated fans and some 80,000 screen shots.
The folks who run GTA4.net added an impressive new feature to their interactive GTA IV Google Map earlier this month, letting you revisit the boroughs of Liberty City from a Niko's eye view.
"All roads are covered, except for a few on/off-ramps that weren't very interesting," writes Adam from GTA4.net. "There's around 3,000 separate panoramas which were stitched together from almost 80,000 in-game screenshots (captured with a script) and the final set of tiles consist of over a million images."
Zip around town if you'd like, because we're told there are some hidden Easter Eggs scattered throughout the city.
Liberty City Map [GTAIV.net]
I enjoy L.A. Noire. I enjoy it for reasons that have nothing to do with why I enjoyed Grand Theft Auto IV. Despite superficial similarities, two games are barely alike, which I've carefully explained before.
But when I put L.A. Noire in the hands of someone who loves GTA, guess what he tried to do first? He discovered just how different these two games are. Watch.
The Colbert Report tackled the latest innovation in Madden NFL 12 last night, with pseudo-conservative host Stephen Colbert—no stranger to video games—blasting EA Sports' "horrifying new feature" that sidelines Madden players suffering from concussions.
EA calls the new feature "another opportunity to create awareness" about the impact of head injuries on players, but Colbert has (unofficially) put the Madden maker on notice.
"We cannot let real-world consequences invade our mindless video games," Colbert warned during his most recent Threatdown segment. He underscored that opinion by highlighting the removal of mindless from games like Grand Theft Auto IV and his own "teachable moment" from Angry Birds.
Watch a clip of that segment above or see the whole thing at Colbert Nation below.
ThreatDown - Superman, Madden NFL 12 & Glee [Colbert Nation]
The amazing mash up that blended Grand Theft Auto's cinematic violence with Super Mario Bros. lore, The Brothers Mario, has spawned a sequel. This time, in The Brothers Mario 2, the fight goes to Donkey Kong Country.
The Brothers Mario 2: Kong Country pits a more streetwise and strapped Mario, Luigi, Toad and Yoshi against Candy, Cranky, Diddy and Funky in a vicious war for Mushroom Kingdom territorial control. The references are increasingly thick in this sequel, with a few more cameos that aren't worth spoiling here.
The machinima has even spawned a theme song, Rawn's "Do The Mario," which you can actually purchase via iTunes if Nintendo inspired hip-hop is your cup of tea.
Watch the Country Club's latest smart Grand Theft Auto IV machinima and see how many Nintendo gags you can spot.
Brothers Mario 2: Kong Country [YouTube]
Can you handle more than thirteen crazy minutes of Grand Theft Auto IV police chases, with Niko Bellic and his cousin Roman fleeing from cop cars, armored vehicles and police helicopters? Test your machinimatic endurance skills with "Hard Charger: Wide Open."
Written and directed by L.J. Carantan, "Hard Charger" is stuffed with thrills, spills, jumps, stunts and dozens of maimed pedestrians, not to mention cop car carnage that could rival The Blues Brothers. Give it a few minutes, then give it a few minutes more, because things start getting really hairy around the eight minute mark.
GTA IV - HARD CHARGER: WIDE OPEN [YouTube via Reddit]
Video games are meant to be an escape from the real world. Yet sometimes, escape be damned, they do such a good job of depicting real locations that the player can't help but want to pack their bags and go travelling.
Whether that be because a game is set in a painstakingly realistic simulation of an actual place or just nails the "vibe" of a city or country, it doesn't matter. The end result is the same: you kick back for an evening spent with a game and by the end of it you've got the itch to go and see it in the flesh.
Below I've included some of the more notable examples of a game that's given me the travel bug. Strangely enough, rather than convince me to set off and truly explore, they're all places I'd already been and suddenly wanted to return to, the games serving as a reminder of past travels and, I guess, the experiences that went with them.
If you've got more — and I'm positive you do — let us know in the comments below!
Sega's Dreamcast (and Xbox) classic, about a gang of roller-blading kids with a penchant for graffiti, is a love letter to Tokyo youth culture at the turn of the millennium. What it lacks in photo-realism it more than makes up for in serving as a caricature of the mega-city, somehow able to perfectly capture the vibrancy and colour of one of the largest cities in the world.
And those are exactly the reasons I love visiting Tokyo. The stores, the bars, the sense that as dull and boring as my hometown can get, Tokyo will always exist as the exact opposite.
An example: the first time I saw Shibuya in the flesh, I did not think "man, that's a big intersection", or "gee, this is a lot of people". I thought "hey, this is that bus terminal level from Jet Set Radio".
[image]
One of the best things about Italy is that, like few other places on Earth, there is history all around you. Unlike other parts of Europe like, say, France or Germany, much of Northern Italy has remained untouched by the horrors of modern war, meaning the buildings that were there in the 15th century are, in many cases, still there.
This is especially true of Florence, whose landmark features — like the Palazzo Pitti and Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore — are as important (and in as good condition) today as they were in the time of Ezio Auditore. As you'll see in this clip below, courtesy of Gameon.
It's great, then, to run madly through the streets of 15th century Florence in Assassin's Creed II and know that, when you get off a plane and wander those same streets over 500 years later, little will have changed. Just don't go running across the rooftops. It's a little harder in real life.
It may not be a picture-perfect recreation, and the names may have changed to avoid lawsuits, but make no mistake, Grand Theft Auto IV is as New York as video games get.
Anyone who has walked its crowded streets, bought an awful hot dog, been bumped by a rude stranger or wowed by the lights of Time Square will instantly feel that all come rushing back to them when they stroll (or, drive too fast) around Liberty City's grey, drab streets.
That's why GTAIV is such a good travel agent for New York. It doesn't try and "sell" the city, nor does it paint it as some present-day Gomorrah. It's just...a city, and even when it's raining and the people are mad, you don't care, because that's all part of New York's attraction.
That's some of mine, then, but what about you? Did Vice City make Miami look like a safe, pleasant place to visit? Does Gran Turismo 5 get you interested in checking out Picadilly Circus, albeit at a slower pace?
[lead image: Getty]
The PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV can be a funny beast when people start to mess around with it. Take, for example, the game's cars. And what happens when you all but turn off their friction.
As you can see in this new clip below, created by a modder, things go freakin' bananas. It's like a zombie movie out there, mad, uncontrollable things out to kill you on every street corner.
Only these are harder to kill. Oh, unless the cabs. Their demise is only a phone call away.
Grand Theft Auto IV was first released on the Xbox 360 and PS3 in April 2008. The PC version, which is where this clip comes from, was released in December of that year.
To call "The Trashmaster" machinima isn't doing it justice, because while it is indeed based on the art of turning a video game into cinema, it also runs for an astonishing 88 minutes.
While we've seen similar Grand Theft AUto Iv-related projects recently, we've never seen one run for that long, nor have one that took over two years to put together.
Sadly, while it looks great, with lots of moody scenery shots and tastefully-selected scenes, the voice-acting (the product of English being the creator's second language) leaves a lot to be desired. Which is a shame, considering there's constant narration.
Think of it as Heavy Rain with faster cars, though, and you'll do OK.
