Mar 22, 2011
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
In 2011, the protagonist of 1980s crime saga Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Tommy Vercetti, would be 55.
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GTA: Vice City 2011 [Patrick Brown Thanks, Morris!]
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In 2011, the protagonist of 1980s crime saga Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Tommy Vercetti, would be 55.
Full image below:
GTA: Vice City 2011 [Patrick Brown Thanks, Morris!]
Grand Theft Auto was once known by the provisional title Race'n'Chase and was planned for release on SEGA Saturn and "Ultra 64" (Nintendo 64).
Race'n'Chase would pack a mode whereby players could be cops and chase chase criminals, hurriedly consulting an accompanying printed map while street names were barked over the radio.
That's according to the original design documents, which have been uploaded to Flickr by Mike Dailly - part of the original DMA GTA team.
"The aim of Race'n'Chase is to produce a fun, addictive and fast multi-player car racing and crashing game which uses a novel graphics method," the design document pledged.
"Players will be able to drive cars and possibly other vehicles such as boats, helicopters, or lorries. Cars can be stolen, raced, collided, crashed (ramraiding?) and have to be navigated about a large map. It will also be possible for players to get our of their car to steal another one. This will mean controlling a vulnerable pedestrian for a short time. Trying to steal a car may result in the alarm being set off which will, of course, attract the police."
Back then there were to be multiple modes: Cannonball Run (a straight race with the option of bots); Demolition Derby (free-roaming smash-'em-up where the last man standing wins, although an alternative version where players would be reincarnated and their successful smashes totted was also mentioned); Bank Robbery (rob a bank and race to a safe point while hotly pursued by police) and Bank Robbery (Cop), where the roles are reversed.
The document promised that "when enough crimes have been completed, the player can move on to a different city". However, "the robber's game is up when he gets killed or is captured by the police".
DMA talked of a "very, very large - multiple screens" playing world, and of how rubbish PCs could reduce detail, making the cityscape look "something like the original Sim City". Those who wanted to run the flashy SVGA mode would need "a very fast processor (e.g. Pentium)".
But be careful, there are pedestrians, and they're "wandering about all of the time". "They can be run over by cars," the document grimly pointed out - pedestrians such as "school children and lollipop lady" and "dogs".
In total, Grand Theft Auto would require code space of 1MB and sound space of 1MB.
Grand Theft Auto was eventually released for PC and PlayStation in 1997 - a delay of over a year, according to the design documents.
The start date was to be 4th April 1995 and the game design completed by 31st May 1995. The first milestone, the engine, would be reached by 3rd July 1995; the second milestone, "Look & Feel", by 2nd October 1995; the third milestone, "1st Play", by 3rd January 1996; and the fourth milestone, Alpha, by 1st April 1996.
The end of the project was scheduled for 1st July 1996.
And the rest, they say, is history.
The 10 years and 11-month-old PlayStation 2 has shot through the 150 million units shipped mark, Sony has announced.
The PS2, which was first sold in March 2000 in Japan, is the best-selling console of all time.
An eye-watering 1.52 billion units of PS2 software have been sold worldwide as of the end of December 2010.
The PS2's best-selling game is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which shifted 17.33 million units. In second place is Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec with 14.89 million. In third is Gran Turismo 4, with 10.76 million sold.
A total of 10,828 games have been created for the console.
Sony said it expects continued demand for the system in Eastern Europe, South East Asia, the Middle East and South America.
I was never really disturbed by the actual Child’s Play movies, because they were rubbish, but for some reason this being the first link in my inbox this morning – informing me that someone has created a Chucky mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – left me feeling a bit queasy.
That is all.
We will never see official LEGO versions of Resident Evil, Modern Warfare, Max Payne, Gears of War, Final Fantasy or Killzone. That being the case, we'll have to make do with Andy Pescovitz's customised renditions instead.
Pescovitz has amassed an impressive collection of figures that he's both painted and in many cases scultped to look like miniature versions of some video game favourites.
There's a selection of some of the better figures here, including those from Halo: Reach and Uncharted 3, with plenty more at the link below.
[pecovam's photostream] [thanks Chris!]
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.
Two years for a little less than two hours: those are the numbers behind The Trashmaster, a feature-length machinima flick made entirely using GTA IV PC and its video tools. Owing a hard-to-miss debt to Scorsese and likely to be pulled from the internet by the Rolling Stones’ copyright lawyers any day now, this veritable labour of love is the flashy, violent tale of a vigilante garbageman, cleaning up whatever (i.e. whoever) the police can’t…
