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.

TRON Stunt City Map Mod

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]

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]