Looking for a good change of pace to your regular Xbox Live schedule this weekend? Remember Rockstar is hosting a Grand Theft Auto IV weekend which began Friday, September 26 at 12:01AM EST and runs through to Sunday, September 28 at 11:59PM EST.
The weekend affords gamers the opportunity to school or be schooled by a Rockstar employee in some GTA IV multiplayer madness as well as win a truck-load of prizes just for playing the game. It's play and win in GTA IV this weekend and Rockstar has a ton of treats to go around. A full listing of Rockstar employee gamertags are available after the jump.
Now that GTA IV has been out for enough time to have gamers get a good handle on its workings, one would think that it'd be the time to release good news about the $50 million worth of content that was supposed to lure gamers to the 360 version. Instead, the exclusive DLC episodes will hitting in the first quarter of fiscal year 2009 (which actually begins in 2008). Specifically, the new release window for the DLC is November 1st 2008 to January 31st 2009, and funnily enough that's about all the specifics there is on it. See, this is where there should've been an announcement of good news! And with this fall being as full as any other in the industry just how popular will a GTA IV DLC purchase be then?
Being knee-deep in big news yesterday blinded us to the fact that Rockstar Games has finally updated their Social Club page to include multiplayer stats.
Now, criminal masterminds in Grand Theft Auto IV can hit the website and check out detailed leaderboards and statistis for the each of the 14 basic multiplayer modes.
While some bugs are still being ironed out, the Social Club update is an important step to growning the GTAIV community as it awaits news on the highly anticipated downloadable content, exclusively coming to Xbox Live Marketplace this fall.
Now, go back to car jacking. It's been like 7-seconds since I heard a siren.
More news regarding the sales of GTA IV! Apparently GameStop has exclusively given its sales figures to Newsweek's LevelUp blog. And the figures say that 64% of all copies of GTA IV sold in the first week of sales were sold on the 360. An even two thirds would've made two to one, but these are only the first week's sales, so who knows how things will pan out as time goes by.
We've heard rumors about the shipment sizes of the PS3 versions versus the 360 versions that (if true) could mean that initial shipment sales of the 360 version simply can'tever match the PS3 version until stocks are refilled. While the Gamestop sales are still good news, we'll have to wait for the April NPD for a more concrete take on the game's long term sales.
Ah, sharp-eyed forums posters. Thank you all. Without your tireless efforts the internet's tubes would be quite empty. One of them over on the GTA Forums was messing around with the Rockstar Social Club and found an interesting item, a plane ticket. For Niko. To San Andreas.
While this of course means nothing concrete (it could simply be an homage) it could refer to the DLC, which mas been rumored to resemble entirely new cities. Unfortunately, unlike real-world airplane tickets, there is no departure date for us to pine over. So, San Andreas DLC? Maybe.
Is there really such a thing as a perfect game? Of course not, but they can be good enough to be considered the best there is, and Take Two seems to already know that about GTA IV. According to a post on GamePolitics, the upper levels of Take Two have already laid eyes on reviews of their game and: "to a one, they are perfect scores. My mom couldn't write better reviews." Disregarding the obvious your-mom joke, this means that we definitely have a quality game coming later this month (as if that was in doubt). And it should be interesting to witness the internet fanboy meltdown if any publication dares to give it anything less than a perfect score.
In anticipation for some time now, and even pushed back a bit, the Rockstar Games Social Club is now open for pre-registration. For those not in the know, the Social Club will allow registered players to view leaderboards, track stats, and generally be connected to Rockstar's community. We're glad to see that more developers are giving their community better tools to provide them with content, as well as keeping interest for their game high. If you're going to be playing a lot of GTA IV (who isn't?) you could do worse than heading over there and setting up a profile. Hell, we did that very thing before you even read this!
The long-foreseen flood of GTA IV media has begun and soon there's going to be no way to stop it. Gamestop is even getting into the action, partnering with Rockstar to produce a commercial seemingly designed to to get prospective players to associate GTA IV (and it's collectors edition) with shopping at Gamestop. The commercial is a parody of common travel ads and features a fake celebrity giving a positive voice-over while a video with an ironically negative interpretation of his words is played behind it. The video does its job, showing off the whole vertical slice of the game and being just funny enough to remember. Except for those last seven or eight seconds, which we really just couldn't be bothered to remember.
Looking for all your Grand Theft Auto IV footage in one easy to swallow package? Thankfully this fan mash-up has spliced together all of the original four GTAIV trailers to bring you a five minute taste of what's in store for us on April 29. The completely unofficial trailer is pretty well done and seeing all the GTAIV footage cut together really makes us wish April 29 would hurry up and get here already! Take a look at the footage and let us know how you'll be spending the next 29 days in preparation for the biggest game launch of 2008.
Browsing the electronics section at our local Target we came across a few copies of Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 just chilling behind a glass barrier waiting to be purchased. Not all that newsworthy until we mention that we glanced up and noticed a GTAIV ad making a very bold claim. The same ad and bold claim that you see in the picture above.
Our first response to this GTAIV ad was something along the lines of "HOLY MONKEY ON FIRE! GTAIV IS AVAILABLE NOW! TARGET IS THY SAVIOR! W00T-ACULAR! ZOMG!" Then, in the blink of an eye, our brain decided to actually function, the gears started turning and we came back to reality. GTAIV doesn't release until April 29th. Darn. And after asking a friendly Target employee if they, by a miraculous chance, had a copy of GTAIV (hey, we had to be sure) we were shot down. Silly Target putting up misleading signs a few weeks too early. They should be ashamed. And before you ask or point your pointy fingers, the answer is yes. It is a slow news day.
Well, rather than a single big release, it looks as though the GTA IV achievements are going to get leaked in parts. First there was the reference-filled list of achievement names, now the guys over at xbox360achievements.org have gotten their hands on the point values and requirements for the list. A poster on their forums provided the list and so these descriptions and point values should be taken with a grain of salt. But really, you can look over the list for yourself and see whether or not the descriptions make sense with the names and values. Whatever the case may be, the achievements are spread rather wide and cover everything from mini-games and story progress to more arcade-esque survival challenges. As the release date of April 29th approaches, the hype for this thing just continues to grow and grow, and from a glance at the achievements it looks like this could actually live up its hype.
Full list with descriptions and point values after the break.
The guys over at 360sync were rather excited last night, having found a poster on the Gamespot foums who had a list of GTA IV achievements, but not quite the list in the way that they (or you, or us) would have liked. Seems that the only info right now comes from screenshots of the game's achievement blade, which will tell us the names of the achievements, but not the requirements or the point totals. So as small as that is, we can at least have some real meat for speculation. The whole list is well worth perusing and is (of course) filled with connections and references to everything from Asassin's Creed and Bioshock, to Rockstar's own censorship troubles. You can find the full achievement list after the break, and the screens of the achievement blade in the gallery.
Moments ago Rockstar Games released the final trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV titled, "Good Lord, What Are You Doing?" (aka "Everyone's a Rat"). In typical Rockstar fashion the trailer teases audiences with free-roaming open-world gameplay where Liberty City itself is as much a character as the people who inhabit the mean streets. Set to hit stores on April 29 for the Xbox 360 and PS3, GTAIV is shaping up to be one of the finest games of this generation. Hopefully when the dust settles from the hype when it hits we'll be able to see if it actually is as good everyone expects it to be.
Posted Mar 27th 2008 4:30PM by Dustin Burg
Filed under: News
Seeing that online stat tracking is all the rage among blockbuster titles lately, Grand Theft Auto IV too will feature such an online component with Rockstar's announcement of the Social Club.
Going live on April 15th (plenty of time before GTAIV's release), the Social Club will be a website for GTAIV gamers to analyze, keep track and compare their stats and accomplishments with other Liberty City residents. Xbox Live subscribers will be able to register their gamertags at the Social Club and be able to instantly compare their multiplayer stats with gamers from around the globe. Not only will multiplayer stats be tracked, but Rockstar will post leaderboards for five other accomplishments (listed and described after the break) including a Hall of Fame and 100% Club that's reserved for only gamers who 100% complete what GTAIV has to offer. The first ten to complete the game 100% will even be rewarded with a key to the city. Nice. Hopefully, we all get an official Social Club membership card so we can flaunt it at the local bar or bowling alley.
As the final marketing push for the imminent release of GTA IV spins up to speed, Rockstar is giving out more and more media of the game. The latest is an update to the online snippets of the in-game radio stations. There are now a total of 4 clips online, IF99, a funk station, Vladivostok, an eastern European station, K109, a disco station, and course WKTT. WKTT, which is the station embedded to the right, is an obvious parody of right-wing talk radio, and is definitely worth a listen for those with good senses of humor. The embedded player will cycle through all four stations as each one ends, so you can listen to them all if you like. The GTA IV site itself has spaces for at least eighteen different stations so we're definitely going to be seeing the trademark variety of music present in the past GTA games.
