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

I’ve fallen for Grand Theft Auto IV a dozen times in a dozen different ways. Only the first period of time spent with it was concerned with making headway through the miserable singleplayer missions, and that ended with the bleakness and grind became too great. Every other re-visit since then has been far more fun and uplifting.

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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.

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Michael Dailly created Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings in his time at DMA Design, and is now Head of Development at YoYo Games, the company responsible for entry-level game creation tool Game Maker. To help illustrate the power of Game Maker: Studio, the modern version of that tool, he’s doing something cool. As reported by USGamer, he’s re-building the world of Grand Theft Auto 1 in it, in 3D. (more…)

Hello. I am not Alec Meer. He’s in charge of this, not me. But Alec is on holiday on Cybertron for a week, so I’m going to have a go. Charts, right? Like they used to have for pop music, but with games instead? I think I can do this.

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Edit: Gamersgate pack now reduced to £4.99, matching Steam.

Gamers Gate came unto the people and did say, “dost thou desire a grand dose of vehicular theft at a price pleasing to these times of economic hardship?” And the people didst sayeth ‘yea’ and ‘that sounds like quite a good idea, I am broke’. But now, for this weekend only, Steam has pronounced that it shall be the Don of sales, capiche? Gamersgate asked for what now seems the astronomical sum of £8.74. Steam says £4.99. That’s GTA, GTA 2, GTA III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas and GTA IV along with its episodic content. The series spans the invention of the Roman numeral and> the colon. (Thanks once again to Michael Rose for tweeting this.>)

Cripes – how would you like the complete Grand Theft Auto series for under £9? There are two ways to do this. You can get yourself a balaclava and steal them from a shop, but it’s high-risk, and some would argue morally questionable. Or you could hand over that much money to Gamers Gate, where they’re selling GTA 1, GTA 2, GTA III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, GTA IV, and GTA Episodes From Liberty City, for actually 1p less than that balaclava at £8.74. Bear in mind that GTAs 1 and 2 are already free, but that’s still one heck of a lot of automobile crime without the broken glass and prison sentence. (Thanks to Michael Rose for the tweeted tip.)>

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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Let’s face it – the next GTA game, rumours of which currently have consoleland all a-flutter, ever arriving on PC is pretty unlikely. Red Dead Redemption never made it this way (something I rue enormously), there’s no news of LA Noire doing it either, and Rockstar probably weren’t super-happy about the scathing reaction to the belated, bloatware-afflicted PC version of GTA IV. Bah. Bah, I said.

Still, we can at least have things the console fun-toys cannot: such as the series’ neon-lit finest hour, Vice City, recreated in the rather meatier GTA IV engine.
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Mike Dailly, one of the key men behind Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, has just posted the design documents for the original GTA on his Flickr pages. Race’n'Chase, as it was originally intended to be called, began life on the 25th January 1995 in a design doc authored by K. R. Hamilton. The version posted is 1.05, from 22nd March, explaining how the multiplayer racing game would perhaps also feature a cops and robbers mode. And it makes for excellent reading.

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