Yesterday saw the opening of pre-registration for the Rockstar Social Club, and despite some technical issues, the launch was mostly a success; thousands of gamers quickly swooped in to secure their Social Club membership within less than an hour of the Social Club going live. Also occuring yesterday was Take Two's annual (albeit brief) shareholders meeting, in which an announcement from Take Two confirmed that Grand Theft Auto IV has "gone gold" with production in full swing.
Today also has its fair share of GTA IV perks. Lazlow Jones -- a lead writer, radio host, and long-time fan favourite who has been responsible for much of the dialogue and content found within most Grand Theft Auto titles -- appeared on the Opie and Anthony show earlier today to discuss his role in the development of Grand Theft Auto IV. While he touches on much of what we already know, he also goes into more detail on subjects that haven't received as much blatant coverage (including the downloadable content for Xbox and Rockstar North's inevitable "one month vacation" after GTA IV's release).
Here's a summary of some of the info that Lazlow covered on the show:
* There are over 100 radio commercials in the game.
* Announcements on the subway system will randomly alert you of spontaneous police harassment, security checks and searches.
* The faux-beer brand "Piswasser" takes a jab at Budweiser, including a radio commercial sung by Anthony himself.
* GTA IV's in-game internet is ridiculously extensive, featuring spoofs of liberal and conservative news sources with coverage of your in-game antics, as well as spoofs popular blogs and websites (craigslist, for example). Irritating pop-up banner ads also make an appearance.
* Niko can hook up with a wide range of girls via dating websites.
* Injuries mean much more in GTA IV. When Niko gets shot in the leg, for example, he'll begin to bleed and limp.
* Recording sessions for dialogue and in-game audio went on for ten hours a day, five days a week. The entire process took weeks to finish.
* Rockstar employees have been working overtime and well into the weekends to complete the game.
* Between the Xbox 360 version of the game and the PS3 version, Lazlow admits that he prefers the 360 version thanks to the downloadable content; new missions, new characters, new comedy, etc.
If you want to listen to the show, a couple of clips from the Lazlow interview have been posted on YouTube (Part 1, Part 2). The full episode is also available through Audible.com for $2.50 USD. Thanks to Planet Grand Theft Auto for the heads up (and subsequently "Vanilla Shake" for sending in a synopsis of the interview). You can, as always, discuss this latest news on our forum.
To add to this influx of good news, we've also added four new(-ish) screenshots to our gallery. Don't be surprised if these images seem familiar; you may have spotted low-res versions of these images in recent print publications.
The movies that we watch, the games that we play... they just wouldn't be the same if it wasn't for the audio. The Grand Theft Auto series is no exception; the ambiance of the city is as important to Grand Theft Auto as the Imperial March is to Star Wars. GTA IV aims to maintain this healthy balance of audio and visual, and on that note, I'm happy to say that GamesRadar has just recently posted a multi-page Audio Q&A for Grand Theft Auto IV.
The Q&A includes Matthew Smith, Craig Conner and Will Morton, all of whom are senior employees with the Rockstar North audio team. Some quotes that we found particularly interesting:
* "Stand in the street and you’ll hear three different radio stations at any one time coming from passing vehicles, all sounding appropriately tinny or boomy, depending on the type of vehicle and whether its doors are open, its windows broken, etc."
* "It was our aim that you could place the player in a random position on the map, shut your eyes and listen, and be able to tell where you are, and what time of day it is, and I think we’ve achieved that pretty well."
* "For multiplayer, we balance [the sound of gunfire] so that guns only really sound dangerously beefy when they’re at a distance you can be hit from, so it’s intuitive what’s threatening and what’s someone else’s private war."
* "It’s difficult to quantify how many speaking parts there are, but at our last count there were over 740 unique voices in the game. There are over 80,000 individual lines of dialogue, more than 7000 of which are Niko’s lines. If you were to listen to each line back to back, it would take over 29 hours. Also, these figures don’t take the radio, TV, and mo-capped cut-scene dialogue into consideration."
* "We also decided to make the pedestrian dialogue more realistic in GTA4. As an example, peds in previous games would walk around and randomly chat to themselves if they weren’t doing much else. In real life, people (generally!) don’t go around talking to themselves, so we dropped this behavior from GTA4. However, we realized that the random chat of old GTA games was a good way for the player to pick-up on what sort of personality a ped has, so we created the cell-phone conversations in GTA4 as one realistic way of portraying personality."
German magazine Games Aktuell is the latest magazine to review Grand Theft Auto IV. Here is their verdict:
* Graphics: 9/10
The gigantic size of the city makes you forget the few graphical imperfections of the game.
* Sound: 10/10
Best GTA soundtrack ever, and probably the most compelling feature in the game.
* Controls: 8/10
Far from perfect but a big step from the previous GTA games.
* Multiplayer: 9/10
Great concept and innovative integration with the single-player mode.
* Gameplay: 10/10
We can't score it 11/10...
* Conclusion:
GTA4 is by far the best action game ever created.
