There's a lot of evil in Liberty City. And, therefore, a lot of victims that need avenging. It's a good thing, then that Junior Almeida's Ghost Rider mod turns Niko Bellic into Marvel Comics' flaming skull-headed, demonic anti-hero.

Is the best thing about having Niko Bellic become the latest host for Zarathos the fiery trail he leaves in his wake? Or is it the way that cars go flying when the Hellcycle gets up to top speed? No, it's probably the firebreathing. Best way to get sinners to repent.

(Thanks, tipster Gareth)

The last numerical installment of Rockstar's open-world crime franchise has proven to be a goldmine of really awesome mods on PC. We've seen everything from giant megaladon sharks to Transformers to the Back to the Future DeLorean in Liberty City.

And there have been self-referential mods, too, with a GTA IV to GTA III conversion seen in July. The mod above continues that trend and travels even further back in time, replicating the top-down view of 1999's Grand Theft Auto 2 inside the RAGE engine that powers GTA IV. The switch from top-down to the game's normal camera is a nice feature. Work on this mod has reportedly stopped, though. That's too bad. It would've been a nice way to enjoy nostalgia and franchise evolution in one fell swoop.

Footage of GTA 2 powered by GTA IV's RAGE engine [Strategy Informer]

Brendan McNamara's most recent game had players exploring the seamy underbelly of an impressive, gleaming recreation of 1940s Los Angeles with L.A. Noire. The first glimpse at his next game—being produced with director George Miller's film production firm KMM Interactive—the grime is all out in the open.

Despite the fact that McNamara's Team Bondi was supposedly absorbed into KMM, the dev studio's website shows off what appears to be the first image from Whore of the Orient. The title is being described as being developed for next-generation consoles and PC. The page also has the Warner Brothers logo on it, likely due to the fact that they've distributed KMM projects like the Happy Feet 2 movies and video games.

Last year, Kotaku's own Luke Plunkett speculated that the game would be set in an early 20th Century Shanghai, since the project's title came from that city's infamous nickname. The description on the Team Bondi site follows:

Shanghai, 1936. Whore of the Orient. Paris of the East. The most corrupt and decadent city on the planet, where anything can be had or done for the right price. Plaything of Western powers who greedily exploit the Chinese masses. Boiling pot of Chinese nationalism, with the Kuomintang ruthlessly trying to suppress Communism and the labour movement. Home to the International Police Force, a group of Western cops hopelessly trying to keep the lid on and keep the peace.

From the development team who brought you L.A. Noire and The Getaway, along with the Academy Award winning film production team of Kennedy Miller Mitchell comes a completely new and original IP being developed for next generation games consoles and PC.

The Getaway, famous for its photo-realistic look, strong narrative and uncompromising gameplay style, sold over 4 million units on the PlayStation 2. The release of L.A. Noire set the quality bar even higher selling over 5 million units. L.A. Noire was critically heralded as a breakthrough for interactive storytelling and was the first game ever to be invited to be shown at New York's world renowned Tribeca Film Festival. L.A. Noire has gone on to become the UK's fastest selling original IP - a title previously held by The Getaway - and a worldwide number one hit. Using award winning animation technology to capture every actor's facial performance in astonishing detail, L.A. Noire combined breathtaking action with true detective work to deliver an unprecedented interactive experience.

You could be forgiven for wondering what all the hubbub is about Sleeping Dogs. "Just another open-world crime game," you might think. "Been there, done that, yawn."

I've seen a few commenters ask why writers at Kotaku keep talking about this game—the simple answer for that is that we write about what we're playing, and several of us are playing Sleeping Dogs. That fact alone says a lot about how much fun the game is.

But of course, yes, Sleeping Dogs really is a GTA clone. It was supposed to be a new installment in the True Crime series, but the name got changed when Activision dropped the game and Square Enix took over. But as much as Sleeping Dogs is "just another GTA clone," it also brings a number of its own smart touches to the formula. The results are, in several respects, superior to the game that inspired it.

Here are five ways that Sleeping Dogs improves upon Grand Theft Auto.

It Doesn't Take Place In America

Every Grand Theft Auto game since GTA III has taken place in America. And hey, that's cool—I like America fine, I live here. But I'm also kind of sick of playing games that take place here, and have begun to yearn to explore someplace new. One of the great triumphs of Red Dead Redemption was that it put me in a part of America that felt totally fresh (and yeah, also that it took place in Mexico, too). When we heard rumors that GTA V would take place in London, or Sydney, I was really excited—please, let me play an open-world game in another country!

Turns out GTA V will return to Los Angeles (aka Los Santos), which is fine. But I'm still glad that exploring Sleeping Dogs' version of Hong Kong is slaking my wanderlust. When I first started playing the game, I remarked as to how much I was enjoying being forced to drive on the left, but really, that's just emblematic of what I really enjoy about the game—I enjoy how it takes me to another place. I love the all-Chinese cast, I love that I'm not playing a half-American, or an American who has relocated, or anything like that. Heck, I wish the game had an option to play in Cantonese with English subtitles. The location, cast and vibe all capture the films that Sleeping Dogs is emulating (films which Evan has helpfully catalogued for you here), and gives me that wonderful "stranger in a strange land" feeling that the best games conjure.

It's Not Gun-Crazy

Sleeping Dogs may have all of the same combat features as GTA IV, but it implements them much differently. You won't fire a gun at all for the first third of the story or so, and even after that, gun encounters are specific and almost instanced. There are very few encounters in the world that can be undertaken with a gun—instead, you'll be brawling your way through most of the encounters using the game's robust and enjoyable Kung Fu fighting system. It's something like a more slow-paced version of Arkham City's fisticuffs, and it's got a decent amount of depth and is satisfying. (It's a bit too easy to spam some moves, but hey, it's still a good challenge, brutal and fun to watch.)

The best thing about the lack of guns is that even though I've put 14 hours into the game, it has yet to devolve into the constant chase/shootout/shootout/chase/shootout that GTA IV did at around the same point. There are a few basic gameplay types—driving/shooting, chasing on foot, fist-fighting, shootouts—but they're shaken up and varied to a refreshing degree. The lack of handgun segments also helps the story along, as Wei doesn't feel like quite the psycho killer that Niko did. (He does rack up quite a body count, but at least he's not shooting hundreds of guys every half hour.) It also helps the cutscenes where someone waves a gun around or shoots someone feel more weighty and believable.

You Play An Undercover Cop

Every GTA game casts you as the same kind of guy—a likable criminal who is trying to change his ways but can't quite get out clean. Okay, fine—that's a workable archetype, and its proven successful in the past. That said, the protagonist of Sleeping Dogs is an undercover cop—deep undercover. TOO deep. The funny thing here is that it's anything but a fresh story—this story has been told dozens of times over, and every beat feels familiar. But it's never quite been told in a game like this before, and certainly not in a GTA-style game. I'm not a sociopathic killer, I'm a cop who is losing sight of which side he's on. It's a big change, and makes me more invested in the story.

Speaking of that...

The Story Is Much More Focused

Sleeping Dogs is, perhaps, a more modest game than Grand Theft Auto IV. I say "perhaps" because while it is certainly more modest in terms of scope and scale, it somehow feels more ambitious in its storytelling, if only because of the great focus with which Wei Shen's story unfolds. The first four or five hours of Grand Theft Auto IV remain my favorite part of that game, but by the second act, things had devolved into a lot of (fun, but repetitive) action-game histrionics. Sleeping Dogs has kept its story on a tighter leash (no pun intended), and in so doing has kept things tense and interesting for a far longer time. I'm at the 60% mark in the story, and it still feels like I'm in those opening hours of GTA IV.

Numerous Small, Empowering Touches

All this stuff about story and setting is great, but the most important thing is that Sleeping Dogs is also generally more fun to play than GTA IV was. That's because the game is designed around a bedrock of great design touches that iterate on the template that Rockstar set out back in 2008. I've played a ton of GTA IV, and so, clearly, have the folks at United Front who worked on Sleeping Dogs. Little touches like:

• By pressing "X" you can lunge your car to the side or front, damaging pursuing vehicles.
• Some gun-based events trigger slow-mo, letting you do a Max-Payne-style takedown. Further evidence that bullet-time is one part of Max Payne 3 that Rockstar should put in GTA V.
• Right from the get-go, it's possible to store cars anywhere in the city, making it easier to get around in style.
• You can do a move while driving where you leap from your car onto the car next to you, performing an "action-hijack." It's great, and useful.
• When you're talking on your cell phone, you can get into a car and start driving without hanging up. (SMALL BUT CRUCIAL.)
• Waypoints are marked on your mini-map but also in the world, helping you move one step closer to eliminating that troublesome mini-map entirely.
• You can toggle through objectives using the left thumbstick, making it much easier to mess around and decide what you want to do next.

It's important to note that every one of these improvements came from Grand Theft Auto IV—without that game to set a precedent, it's doubtful that Sleeping Dogs would have improved upon it. What's more, there are plenty of ways that Sleeping Dogs falls short of its inspiration—motorcycles are a bummer, animations can be stilted, AI freakouts happen a little too often, and the physics engine is floaty and a bit spastic. The "face" respect system is an interesting idea with a flubbed execution. All the same, United Front should be proud of what they've accomplished—they truly have improved on one of the best and most successful game franchises of all time, and they've done it with style (and with a really good PC version, too).

The ball is now in Rockstar's court to not only improve on GTA IV, but to outdo the improvements made in Sleeping Dogs (and indeed, Saints Row The Third, Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire). I'm not a betting man, but I have a feeling GTA V might just make all of those games look like iterative speed-bumps on the road to the next big thing. Here's hoping they pull it off.

And hey, in the meantime, have you heard of this game Sleeping Dogs? It's pretty good…

Video games need more "Call Me Ishmael."

That quote is one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature. Sure, its popularity is owed largely to being the first sentence in Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick. But that introduction is also memorable because you're learning about an important character from the very second you start reading.

Earlier this year, Max Payne 3 did the same trick, letting players know about Max's nihilistic wit and gallows humor before they ever fired a bullet or did a slo-mo dodge. If you never played a Max Payne game before, you still knew for the most part what kind of game you were getting in terms of mechanics. But the journey was about who you were playing as, which wasn't neccessarily something you could learn about just from shooting dudes.

I was reading an issue of Mark Waid's excellent run of Marvel Comics' Daredevil when I stopped to think about how great first-person narration is as a storytelling tool. One that games should use more of.

Look, let's acknowledge that games unfurl their experiences in different ways than books or other media. Games can deliver story through interaction rather than scripting. But, the ones that want to tell tales have a great under-used tool in voiceover narration. Most video games struggle with telling you about their characters. They stop the thing you've shown up to do—solve tricky puzzles, shoot lots of alien invaders, explore vast landscapes—to roll out a cutscene where you finally get to see emotions play out on the front of a character's face. That's usually where you get to hear about what's motivating a hero or a party member. And these moments usually bring the play of a game to a dead stop. No wonder people skip through them.

That's why the narration of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time or Bastion (which, granted, isn't first-person) works so wonderfully. You can still be bounding around a crumbling castle or hacking away at a random enemy while getting fed information about the protagonist and the world. Even Metroid: Other M—controversial as its version of Samus Aran was for some people—let you into that character's head in a way by virtue of narration that previous games hadn't. In fact, I've found that narration heightens the action with a personality-driven filter. I cared more about getting Max past a wave of enemies than, say, Master Chief because I'd had his voice and his pain ringing through my head before the shots rang out.

First-person narration gets used a lot in detective fiction and its very existence imparts a subliminal knowledge that the lead character makes it through okay. You're hearing the tale told after the smoke clears. Where that might rob some of the tension from the proceedings in a book or movie, you're the one that has to navigate to resolution in a video game. That character's voice becomes a catalyst for closure.

So, more narration, please. After all, if I'm going to spend 10, 20, 100 hours with a character, I better feel like I know him or her.

Taking a page from LA Noire's case notes, Rockstar's Max Payne 3 will on August 28 be adding something called "Noir Mode", which is a tidy term for "playing the game in black & white".

It fits with the game's noir overtones, I guess, but given so much of Max Payne 3 is spent in the ridiculously over-saturated Rio, it seems almost a crime to rob your eyes of the city's lush colour palette.

The New Jersey sections, though? Well, they're just about perfect for it.

Holy crap look out! There's a huge freaking shark roaming the Liberty City Bay. It hasn't attacked anyone yet, but it seems like it's only a matter of time, right?

In light of our recent list of the best sharks in video games (and also the one from Banjo Kazooie) comes this mod from JMoorfoot4 that allows players to pilot a massive killer shark around the bay. It seems like a boat mod, so it doesn't have working jaws, but if and when it ever develops the ability to bite... it will merit inclusion on the "best video game sharks" list for next year.

(Via ZZCOOL)

This Sunday at 4am, five teenage members of a motorcycle gang attacked an inebriated man, reports The Korea Herald. Seoul police think that the teens were copying a scene from Grand Theft Auto IV.

The 31 year-old drunk man was sitting on the curb in southern Seoul when the gang assaulted him. Authorities filed for arrest warrants for two of the five teens; the other three are already in police custody.

As The Korea Herald points out, GTA IV has vehicles, including motorcycle bikes, as well as guns. None of the teens had firearms.

GTA, of course, is a favorite boogeyman to pin crimes on. The Korea Herald does not go into detail as to why authorities think this attack was an attempt to "copy" a GTA IV scene—you know, the one in which a group of young punks attack a drunk guy sitting on the curb. Surely you remember that mission? No?

Teens assault man, ‘copying' video game [The Korea Herald]

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For Neo, moving faster than bullets was a matter of realizing the Matrix's rules could be bent. For most of our video game heroes, bullet time is a popular mechanic that has appeared on titles like Max Payne, Red Dead Redemption, Vanquish and more.

It's not possible to slow down time and perform amazing feats—not yet, anyway. Still, most of us have probably experienced that feeling of time slowing down. We know it as the result of a severe adrenaline rush. It's the closest we have to approaching bullet time in real life, and arguably what bullet time is based on. And there's a reason it happens.

Our adrenaline starts pumping when we're in danger, or when we're scared. What follows is that more information is committed to memory by the brain (the amygdala to be specific) in an effort to help us keep safe. This memory overload makes our recollections seem richer and denser than they actually were.

It's an illusion that tricks your brain into thinking that the more memory it has of an event, the longer it took to pan out. Time slows down for you, only it doesn't in reality.

When we get older, time seems to fly. This is based on a similar phenomenon to the one drawn above. We store more memories from childhood because every experience is fresh, and there's more information to soak up. Experiences we have when we're older are at risk of being lost in the fray, because we've racked up so many similar-looking ones already. This is why childhood seems to take forever and adulthood seems to zip by.

Giving us false memories, deceiving us into thinking time moves slower (or faster!) than it actually does: the brain is pretty crazy amazing, eh?

While most Grand Theft Auto IV mods do little more than add a stupid character to the game or mess with the visuals, this mod - called Desert Storm - does something way more drastic.

It covers the city in sand. Like, it buries the entire city in the stuff. In a very Spec Ops/Dubai kind of way.

You'd be forgiven for thinking it's just a cosmetic effect, but no. Stick with the video above long enough and you'll see people driving all over the stuff.

If you want to try Desert Storm out, you can grab it below.

Desert Storm [GTA4 Mods]