Rockstar unveils the first trailer for GRAND THEFT AUTO VI

Rockstar Games have (somewhat ahead of schedule) dropped the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest game in the mega-popular crime/action series.

Thanks to a plethora of leaks over the years, much of the game's premise and story was already known. The game opens with new protagonist Lucia in prison, but apparently about to get out. When released, she reconnects with partner Jason and immediately embarks on/is forced back into a life of crime.

The setting this time is Vice City, Florida (or a GTA-ised version of Florida). Previously appearing in Grand Theft Auto (1997), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (2006), Vice City is loosely based on Miami and is a den of crime, corruption, drugs, glitz and sleaze. With latest-generation tech, Vice City is considerably larger than its previous incarnations and the game expands beyond the city limits to take in offshore islands (including its own version of the Florida Keys) and surrounding countryside.

As expected, the game's satirical streak sees it tackling phenomena like "Florida Man" and alligators wandering into civilised areas and wreaking havoc. The game will also feature street races, speedboats, shoot-outs, robberies and, apparently, an in-game version of TikTok.

Other details remain to be confirmed, such as if both Lucia and Jason are playable or just Lucia. Lucia is already notable as the first female protagonist of a mainline, single-player Grand Theft Auto game since the original, although characters in the original were tiny blobs in the centre of the screen and had no discernible personality, so that's not saying much.

Also, the game looks amazing. The RAGE Engine - Rockstar's inhouse engine they have been using since 2005 - has been upgraded yet again and Grand Theft Auto VI's in-engine graphics look better than most of their competitor's pre-rendered cutscenes. Given that their previous game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) is still one of the best-looking games in existence, and even Grand Theft Auto V (2013) looks incredible after its latest update, GTAVI being a huge improvement over them is quite an achievement. The character animation in particular is phenomenal.

Rockstar are keeping a lot of other details to their chest. There's no indication of how the new game will integrate the uber-lucrative Grand Theft Auto Online, which has generated literally billions of dollars of profit for Rockstar and publisher Take Two since 2013, and a lot of details on the story, characters and factions remain unknown. Rockstar may reveal more information tomorrow (when the trailer was originally supposed to drop).

The trailer confirms that the game is coming out in 2025 (possibly spring 2025, given Take Two's previous marketing spend projections). Platforms are not mentioned, but we can assume that PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S will be the initial launch platforms, either alongside PC or with that version following some months later.

Rockstar shelves GTA4 and RED DEAD REDEMPTION remakes

Various insiders have confirmed that Rockstar Games has shelved all plans for additional remasters of their games following the poor reception to the infamously disastrous Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy Definitive Edition.

Rockstar made their name with the mega-selling Grand Theft Auto franchise, which has now shifted over a quarter of a billion copies globally. The last game in the series, Grand Theft Auto V, was released in 2013 (with several remasters for newer hardware since then). Rockstar's last full game was Red Dead Redemption 2, release in 2018. The company have confirmed they are working on Grand Theft Auto VI, but the game still appears to be a couple of years off at best.

To ensure goodwill and deliver some product in the meantime, the company out remastered versions of Grand Theft Auto III (2001), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) last year. However, the remaster was heavily criticised on release due to a vast number of bugs and poor to non-existent quality control. Some of these problems have since been fixed through updates, but many have not. Rockstar were accused of throwing out a quickie remaster to make money rather than taking their time and showing more respect for their fans.

Rumours have been swirling that Rockstar were also planning remasters of Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) and Red Dead Redemption (2010). Both of these games were built on early versions of Rockstar's RAGE Engine (more recently used for GTA5 and RDR2) and also used much more "modern" control schemes, so remastering them would likely be much easier. Indeed, the PC version of GTA4 has plenty of quality-of-life and graphics/lighting mods available that make it look like a dramatically better game. Remastering them should be far easier than the older games, which had to be ported into a new engine to be even viable.

In addition, Red Dead Redemption was never ported to PC, reportedly due to its source code being in a very poor state and Rockstar considering a port not worth the cost. Remastering the game would allow Rockstar to finally port the game to PC and modern consoles.

Indeed, it's long been speculated that Rockstar had more ambitious plans for the original Red Dead Redemption. Otherwise inexplicably, the entire Red Dead Redemption map can be found in RDR2 (even the bit in Mexico, although you need to use bugs and exploits to cross a river to get there), although there's no quests or mission set down there but there are complete towns and farms, and working trains. It looked like Rockstar were doing groundwork to allow them to make a full RDR1 remake in the RDR2 engine, maybe even as an expansion or DLC for RDR2 (RDR2 is also prequel to RDR1, and has a 10-hour epilogue acting as a bridge into the opening of RDR1's story). For whatever reason - certainly not low sales since RDR2 has sold over 44 million copies to date - they decided not to proceed with such a plan.

Rockstar are reportedly now fully fixed on bringing out Grand Theft Auto VI in the foreseeable future.

Rockstar confirm a new GRAND THEFT AUTO game is on its way

Rockstar Games have confirmed that they are developing a new title in their mega-successful Grand Theft Auto series and work is "well underway" on the project. However, more specific information was not provided.

Rockstar Games - formerly DMA Design - kicked the franchise off with Grand Theft Auto in 1997. A 2D crime game viewed from an overhead perspective, it was hugely successful on PC and the original PlayStation. A similar sequel, Grand Theft Auto 2, was released in 1999, along with expansions to the original game set in London. The franchise went nuclear with the release of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001. Two sequels, each larger and more elaborate than the last, followed with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in 2002 and San Andreas in 2004, the last of which became the biggest-selling ever game on the PlayStation 2 console. The company also expanded the franchise with multiple mobile games.

The series' popularity continued to grow with Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) on the PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360, something of a reboot of the series and the first to use full HD graphics. However, the game attracted criticism for being smaller than San Andreas in size and scope, and for featuring more gritty realism in lieu of the fun mayhem of the earlier games. Rockstar corrected the error with Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013 on the same formats but also featuring substantial upgrades for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game.

Grand Theft Auto V, which also includes the phenomenally successful multiplayer game Grand Theft Auto Online, has become the second-biggest-selling individual video game of all time, with almost 160 million copies sold on multiple platforms. The game has generated over $6 billion in revenue since its release just over eight years ago. The game also attracted significant critical acclaim for perceived improvements to the GTA formula. However, fans have sharply criticised the absence of any sequel, and the perceived disregarding of the single-player campaign part of the franchise by Rockstar in favour of the monetisation of the multiplayer mode. Rockstar confirmed they would be continuing to develop single-player games with the release of the hugely-acclaimed Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018.

Rockstar have, presumably been working on Grand Theft Auto VI since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, with likely over three and maybe closer to four years on the clock on the project. Some reports previously suggested they were only "early in development" on the game in April 2020. However, the franchise publishers, Take-Two, confirmed last year that they are planning a major marketing spend for financial year 2023-24, of the level usually only associated with a Rockstar franchise title. This suggests that GTAVI might still be two years away, and certainly no less than eighteen months.

Even that might be generous: Rockstar announced GTAV with a teaser trailer in late 2011, two years before release, and it sounds like Rockstar are still some time away from even releasing a formal trailer for the game. Certainly don't expect this too soon.

The game's setting and time period will be a source of speculation for fans. It is worth noting that Rockstar usually rotate their games between the fictional cities of Liberty City and Vice City, and the state of San Andreas. The current "HD Era" of the franchise has seen the revisiting of Liberty City (in Grand Theft Auto IV) and San Andreas (in Grand Theft Auto V and Online), so a reasonably popular guess is that GTAVI will be set in Vice City. The likely "VI" part of the title could be used to feed into the word "VICE" in that case. All of the games in the current era of the franchise have been set in the present day, so that will presumably still be the case.

There will be a big difference with the game and its forebears, however. It will be the first game in the series since GTAIII not to be directed by long-term designer Leslie Benzies or written by Dan Houser. Benzies left Rockstar in 2016, and Houser in 2020.

Next-gen GRAND THEFT AUTO V port arriving in November

Rockstar have confirmed they are launching a new version of Grand Theft Auto V - including mega-popular multiplayer component Grand Theft Auto Online - this November.

The new version of the game is launching for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. It's assumed the game's improvements will also make their way over to the PC version of the game, though that's not yet confirmed. The games will have hugely upgraded graphics, lighting and textures, and some other refinements. Rockstar is also launching a stand-alone version of Grand Theft Auto Online as a PS5 exclusive for three months, which will then be available on other platforms in the spring of 2022.

Fans have been anxiously awaiting news of a new Rockstar game. Their last title, Red Dead Redemption 2, will be four years old by the time GTA5's next gen port hits shelves, and Grand Theft Auto V itself will be eight years old. We know Rockstar are working on Grand Theft Auto VI and that parent company Take Two are planning a major, GTA-level release in financial year 2023-24, but it's not yet confirmed what form that will take (and obviously delays are possible).

Grand Theft Auto V is the second biggest-selling video game of all time, with over 140 million copies sold (and closing in rapidly on Minecraft, the current title-holder with 200 million games sold). No doubt the new version will dramatically boost those sales. The next-gen version of the game hits shelves on 11 November 2021.

GRAND THEFT AUTO and RED DEAD REDEMPTION publishers planning a major release in late 2023

Slightly older news now, but Take Two Interactive's 2020 financials confirm that the company has earmarked a massive $90 million marketing spend for financial year 2023-24, indicating the company is planning a high-profile game release in that time period. The favourite money is on Grand Theft Auto VI, although there are several other possibilities.

Take Two Interactive own Rockstar Games, the developers of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises, as well as lower-key franchises like Max Payne, LA Noire, Bully, Midnight Club and Manhunt.

The jewel in the publisher's crown is the open-world action series Grand Theft Auto, which has clocked up over 320 million sales to become the biggest-selling video game series of all time developed in the West (running roughly neck-and-neck with Electronic Arts' FIFA series). Only Nintendo's Mario and Pokémon franchises have definitively sold more games, along with puzzle title Tetris in myriad different formats. Grand Theft Auto V (2013), the latest game in the series, has sold over 140 million copies by itself and last year alone sold over 20 million units, a startling number for a game in its eighth year on sale. In contrast, the biggest-selling game of 2020 appears to be Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which sold over 30 million copies in just over nine months. The biggest-selling open-world game was Cyberpunk 2077, which shifted over 13 million copies in just three weeks.

The long tail on GTAV, driven by its hugely popular multiplayer component, Grand Theft Auto Online, is extremely impressive, and also fortuitous, as the constant release of new content has helped sate demand for a sequel. Instead of directly working on a sequel to the game, Rockstar instead prioritised a game in another franchise, Red Dead Redemption 2, which was released in 2018 to critical acclaim. RDR2 has also enjoyed high sales, with current estimates of just under 40 million copies sold. Although work on a sixth GTA game likely began some time before RDR2 was completed, it was reportedly still only in an "early" state a year ago.

GTAV's marketing budget is estimated at around $50-70 million and somewhat more for RDR2, so a $90 million spend would not be unexpected for Take Two's biggest-ever franchise.

A release from one of Take Two's many other studios is unlikely to warrant that kind of spend. Hanger 13 is rumoured to be working on Mafia IV, also likely an open-world game set in a fictional city, but that series is relatively low-key compared to GTA. Firaxis Games are probably working on XCOM 3 and maybe Civilization VII, but those turn-based strategy games are unlikely to warrant this kind of expenditure. 

An outside possibility is BioShock, a popular first-person action game franchise from the publisher. BioShock 4 has been in development for two years at Cloud Chamber Games and, with the last game in the series released back in 2013, it might be that Take Two want a big marketing spend to let people know the game is coming out. However, with a sale base of around 34 million copies combined from three games, the series again would not warrant that kind of marketing spend.

An outside possibility is that Rockstar are preparing an ambitious remaster of one of their other games, with the original Red Dead Redemption being most likely; much of RDR1's map and assets were remade in the RDR2 iteration of the engine for the sequel, making the task of remounting the game in the new engine much simpler. In addition, RDR1's development was famously complicated and left the game code in a state that made updating or revamping it very difficult, and impossible to port to other formats. However, Rockstar are preparing a major remaster of GTAV for release this year with nothing like the same marketing spend, also making that unlikely.

If Rockstar are not planning to release Grand Theft Auto VI until financial year 2023-24, that puts even a trailer or announcement still a long way off. More news as it is revealed.

Wertzone Classics: Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas

Los Santos, San Andreas, 1992. Carl "CJ" Johnson returns home to Los Santos after spending five years away. His mother has been killed in a shooting and CJ is back for the funeral. It's not long before he gets sucked back into his teenage life of gang violence, though. The Grove Street Families are on the back foot, drugs are wrecking the neighbourhood and corrupt cop Tenpenny has framed CJ as a cop killer, forcing CJ to do illicit jobs for him or wind up in jail. But CJ's not one to take things lying down, and as his strange journey takes him from Los Santos across the entire state, to the hilly city of San Fierro and the desert gambling paradise of Las Venturas, he plans to get even with those who've wronged his family.

After Rockstar delivered the one-two punch of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City in successive years, they could have been forgiven for resting on their laurels a bit, phoning in a third game which took the player around another fictional city and told a rote story of the fall and rise of yet another criminal empire. Instead, they went big. Really big. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) is to its two predecessors as The Lord of the Rings is to The Hobbit: a story so much huger in scope and scale that it's almost mind-boggling that it came from the same creative team.

The previous two games in the series featured a single city. San Andreas features three - each more or less the size of Liberty City from the first game - plus sizeable tracts of land between them. This includes hills, forests, farmland, a large mountain and a desert, not to mention several small towns located along the way.

But the game reveals its gigantic scope slowly. For the first 10-15 hours (almost as long as Grand Theft Auto III in its entirety, if you mainlined the story), the game is tightly focused on events in Los Santos, particularly in and around Grove Street. Riffing hard on Boyz n the Hood (1991) and the rap and gang culture of the district formerly known as South Central Los Angeles, this is a (very relatively) grounded story about the intersection between family, friends and gang loyalty, with rival gangs and the police complicating the life of CJ and his friends. Missions range from relatively hardcore stories of drug addiction to family matters (such as CJ's sister dating a Mexican gang leader, whom CJ initially dislikes but then befriends when he realises he's an honourable guy) to lighter stories about CJ and his friends reluctantly helping a fellow gang member break into the rap game, despite a lack of any discernible musical talent.

The story pivots hard into an unexpected, bloody betrayal, which sees CJ exiled from Los Santos and forced to work for Officer Tenpenny's corrupt cop unit out in the sticks around Mount Chiliad, during which time he befriends an aging hippy named "The Truth" and then a psychotic criminal named Catalina (who previously appeared as the main villain of Grand Theft Auto III). Eventually, he earns the respect of a Yakuza crime lord named Woozie by beating him at racing, which in turn leads CJ to the city of San Fierro (based on San Francisco, complete with a surprisingly-underused Golden Gate Bridge analogue) and the establishment of his own business empire. Further events lead him into the deserts and badlands of north-eastern San Andreas and then the casino city of Las Venturas. But CJ's heart remains in the hood, and eventually he has to go home and take care of business once and for all.

This structure neatly divides the game into four distinct acts, each long enough to almost be a full game in itself and each featuring its own supporting cast of characters. More surprising is that each of the first three acts has its own distinctive tone, becoming wilder and less grounded in turn. If the start of the game is Boyz n the Hood, by the time you get to Las Venturas it's gone full Austin Powers, with CJ roaring through the skies in a jetpack (that he stole from an Area 51 analogue, obviously), stealing alien technology and engaging in melee combat with an oversized dildo. The game handles this tonal variation quite well and even leans into its insanity; CJ explaining his exploits to his incredulous brother Sweet late in the game leads to an amusing tonal reset, which anchors the game back in the grounded urban conflict of the start of the game.

The epic and consistently entertaining story - as bananas and (deliberately) incoherent as it is - is one of the game's aces in the hole, a relief after the more predictable Scarface fanfiction of Vice City and the very loose narrative of Grand Theft Auto III. It's also told through entertaining characters with superb voice acting throughout, particularly rapper Young Malay as CJ, Samuel L. Jackson as Tenpenny, Chris Penn as Pulaski, Peter Fonda as The Truth, David Cross as Zero, Ice-T as Mad Dogg, Danny Dyer as Kent Paul (reprising his role from Vice City), Frank Vincent as Salvatore Leone (reprising his role from Grand Theft Auto III), James Woods as government agent Mike Toreno and Shaun Ryder as washed-up British pop star Maccer. After this game Rockstar would drop their reliance on using actors from TV and film, preferring more established video game actors with less of an ego (reportedly much more of a problem on Vice City than San Andreas, to be fair), but it has to be said that the celebrity voice actors here all do sterling work.

Grove Street, a location so iconic that it reappears in both Grand Theft Auto V and Watch_Dogs 2.

In terms of actual gameplay, it's business as usual, but there's a hell of a lot more of it. You can follow several missions at any one time, as well as the usual battery of repeatable side-missions (paramedic, firefighter, etc). These are augmented by new options, such as burgling houses, engaging in dance and lowrider contests and acting as a pimp or a long-distance lorry driver. You can also play pool, basketball and poker, bet on horse races and slot machines and engage in car, bike and aircraft races. You can also modify vehicles to enhance their attributes for racing, the result of a new car system influenced by Rockstar's race-focused game, Midnight Club. Car physics are massively improved and all the vehicles are now much more fun and realistic to drive. Combat is also hugely improved, with Rockstar taking ideas from the game Manhunt and featuring a much better aiming system, along with a stealth mode (for the first time in the series). There's a much wider array of weapons, and CJ is more versatile in his character movement. He can now climb up and over walls, and can even swim (both Claude and Tommy in the previous games drowned almost instantly if they landed in water), as well as learning unarmed combat moves in three different disciplines. Even more insanely, CJ has a full range of body stats which you can improve by taking CJ to the gym or having him get tattoos. CJ can also eat at restaurants and can even date certain female characters in the game.

The game also adds in a whole new element with gang warfare. After a certain point in the game you can start taking over neighbourhoods in Los Santos from rival gangs, and you can get members of your gang to help you out. The gang warfare mechanic is relatively primitive - defeat three waves of enemies in each district - but it adds a nicely unpredictable element to the game and gives you more control over the game world. In friendly districts you'll be greeted with respect by passers-by and you can call on your homies to help you out; in enemy neighbourhoods you may be shot at on sight.

It's this which is the most remarkable thing about San Andreas: Rockstar both expanded the size and scope of the game outwards, but simultaneously improved the detail and fine texture of the game. You not only have a much bigger world but you also have a huge amount more to do in it, to the point that Grand Theft Auto III - only released three years before this game - now only feels like a prototype of a prototype of what the franchise could be when fully realised.

This mixture of scale and detail has arguably never been bettered than in San Andreas: later games in the series featured much bigger and more realistically-proportioned cities, and obviously vastly superior graphics, better saving options and even better combat, but shied away from the fine detail here. Perhaps stung by a few critics grumbling at CJ having to hit the gym so often (an exaggeration; four visits to the gym at the start of the game will max out CJ's strength, and only a few maintenance visits are needed later on), Rockstar stripped back those options in later games and also reduced the amount of optional side-activities, so you can no longer be a paramedic or firefighter. For that reason, San Andreas is sometimes cited as the zenith of the series in terms of scale and scope, despite its clearly dated looks.

The negatives about San Andreas are surprisingly few. It's dated nowhere near as severely as GTA3 or Vice City: in terms of driving, combat, roleplaying, writing, acting and design, it's a much better game than either of its forebears, and arguably in many respects it's a better game than its successor, Grand Theft Auto IV. The biggest weakness, other than the graphics (and there are a few mods which dramatically improve the visuals), remains the geriatric save system. Having to manually find a safehouse to save between missions can be a pain in the backside, especially during the stretches of the game when you're working in the countryside and safehouses are spread thin, leading to the temptation to do several missions in a row without saving to save time (this, invariably, turns out to be a bad idea). The game also pulls an annoying stunt a few time of replacing whatever favourite weapons or vehicles you've chosen to bring along with you on a mission with its own choices, making your (sometimes expensive) preferences vanish into the aether. The biggest problem is the lack of mid-mission saving: San Andreas has several massive missions divided into multiple stages and running into trouble at any point means a full reload and replay of the entire mission from scratch. This was a big enough complaint at the time that GTA4 - or more accurately, its expansions - finally implemented mid-mission checkpointing.

Some may also bemoan the size of San Andreas's map; I've repeatedly said how big it is, but that's only relative to the constrained map sizes of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City. Almost every open world game released since San Andreas has a much larger map, including Grand Theft Auto V (which also depicts San Andreas, albeit with just one city, Los Santos, and the surrounding countryside). However, San Andreas's map is certainly big enough, and making it bigger wouldn't necessarily make for a better game. Sure, it's silly that it takes maybe 10-15 seconds to drive between the outskirts of Los Santos and Las Venturas when they're supposed to be as far apart as Los Angeles and Las Vegas, but just making it a longer trip between the two cities for the sake of it wouldn't achieve much.

One criticism levelled at the game is more of a feature than a bug for some, I think: the game's sheer size and scope sometimes means that narrative tension is diffused, especially when the main bad guys vanish for a good half of the game's length whilst CJ is pursuing unrelated side-missions. There is a hardcore set of OG GTA fans who believe that Vice City is the better game because of its tight focus on Tommy's misadventures and its ability to use humour without going as completely bonkers as San Andreas. Back on release I think I favoured this viewpoint, but almost twenty years later, it's clear that San Andreas has aged much more gracefully than its forebear, and is a more rewarding game to play, even if it sacrifices focus for scope (and its soundtrack, although still banging, is not quite as accomplished).

The question I asked in the reviews of the previous two games - is San Andreas still worth playing in 2021? - is much more easily and definitively answered here. If you can overcome the blocky graphics and limited save system, then yes, absolutely, San Andreas is still worth a decent investment of anyone's time.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (****½) is the biggest-selling game on the biggest-selling console of all time. It's the game that started to fully realised the potential of the open-world action genre that the previous two games in the series hinted at. An improvement over its predecessors in every department (and over its successor in many areas), it remains an unabashed classic of the genre.

Technical Note: As with the previous two games, I used Qualcom's Definitive Edition modpack to play San Andreas. This fixed some technical issues, updated textures, improved lighting and generally made the game play nice with modern hardware, as well as moderately improving the look of the game without ruining the original aesthetic (a perennial problem with more ambitious San Andreas mods).

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Vice City, Miami, 1986. Tommy Vercetti gets out of jail after doing fifteen years for his criminal gang. They reward him with a flight to Miami and a well-paying job. When the job goes south, Vercetti is left in debt to some angry gangsters and in order to survive, he has to carve his own criminal empire out of the sunshine city.

Vice City started life as an expansion for Grand Theft Auto III, Rockstar Games' enormous 2001 mega-hit. Early during development, the company looked at the enormous and rapid progress they were making and decided to turn it into its own standalone game. Released in 2002 - astonishingly barely a year after the previous title - it won immediate praise for its much greater scope and expanse.

Vice City is superficially identical to its forebear: you control a character, this time the named and voiced Tommy Vercetti, and guide him around a city. The goal is to make money, which Tommy achieves by doing various jobs for shady characters and gangs, as well as furthering the main story. You can get around on foot or by driving cars or sailing boats. There's also a lot of side-activities replicated from the previous game, such as working as a vigilante, a paramedic, a fireman or a taxi driver.

This game takes all these elements and expands them further. You have more vehicles to drive, including the welcome addition of motorbikes, and you can also pilot aircraft. There are helicopters (even a military chopper) and seaplanes available to speedily travel across the city, and a much greater variety of boats. The side-activities are also bolstered by the addition of a pizza delivery errand mission and being able to sell drugs from an ice cream van. There's likewise many more activities for racing (including aerial races and stock car racing). The city is also bigger, with Vice City clocking in at around twice the size of Liberty City, but being much easier to navigate thanks to a better street layout. There's a much vaster roster of weapons to use as well, with weapons now divided into categories.

In one of the game's biggest additions, you can buy up additional property in the form of businesses (including an ice cream company, a car showroom, a taxi rank and a boatyard) and, after completing a few jobs to get them up and running, collect a regular income from them.

These are all nice improvements on the formula, but the most noticeable change is the greater detail everything is presented in. Not just graphically (although the much more colourful backdrop of Vice City is a huge improvement over the grey-ish Liberty City), but in terms of story and character. Rockstar had refined the engine to more convincingly present character movement and conversations, so there's now more elaborate cutscenes before each mission, expanding on the story. Your character having a name and being able to talk immediately makes things more engaging (even if main voice actor Ray Liotta sounds like he's phoning it in about half the time) and relatable, and the game is able to better present your changing relationships with secondary characters like Lance, Kent Paul and Ken Rosenberg. Certainly the story and characterisation is a huge improvement over the very bare-bones narrative in Grand Theft Auto III.

These elements all make for a better, bigger, longer and more engrossing game than its forebear (Vice City clocks in at around 25-26 hours compared to under 20 for its forebear, though that's not counting really time-consuming activities like finding all the secret packages). The game's biggest asset, though, is its soundtrack. The game's radio stations are solid gold, packed with well-chosen tracks from the 1980s and earlier, and for many people there's still few open-world gaming moments to compare to cruising along the beach roads listening to the theme from Miami Vice.

There are problems. The game's shooting is unfortunately mostly the same as GTA3's meaning it's twitchy, over-responsive and it's difficult to be precise without using scoped weapons. Fortunately, combat is fairly forgiving and the AI's shooting is far worse than yours, meaning most fights should still be easily won. GTA3's harsh save system is also still in use: there is no auto-saving, at all, so you have to manually drive to a safehouse between missions to save, and if you die halfway through a really tough mission, tough luck, you have to start from scratch. Fortunately, as with its forebear there are rarely missions that are so long that this is a major problem.

The other problem - which will vary immensely by player - is that it's hard to feel much sympathy with the protagonist. Apart possibly from GTA5's Trevor, Tommy Vercetti is easily the most amoral psychopath of a protagonist the series has ever featured, someone who's quite happy to go and murder innocents to prove his value to a potential client. Tommy is supposed to be a monster (if nothing else does, the Scarface-aping drug kingpin missions make that abundantly clear) and it certainly explains the ultraviolence even the most careful player may find themselves inadvertently unleashing, but he does feel a bit of a cartoon character compared to the protagonists we've had in the series since then.

As with GTA3, the question arises if Vice City is worth playing in 2021. This game is nineteen years old and the open-world action genre has evolved a long way since then. But I'd say yes. It's a colourful action caper with a strong story and it's genuinely impressive to see how it improved on its predecessor in less than a year of development (I suspect more time will have been been spent on Grand Theft Auto VI's fire hydrants alone, when it finally comes out). It's arguably the game in the series - even now - with the best-developed sense of time and place as well.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (****) has aged much better than its predecessor and is an interesting and rich open-world action game, if you can overlook its obviously aged graphics and sometimes clunky game design decisions. The game is available now for PC, Android and Apple devices, and of course in compatibility mode for later generations of X-Box and PlayStation.

Technical Note: As with GTA3, for this replay I used Qualcom's Definitive Edition mod. This mod replaces and updates some textures and makes the game play nice in widescreen with modern resolutions. It also eliminates some old bugs from the game and fixes the multi-monitor problem that plagued its predecessor.

Grand Theft Auto III

Liberty City, 2001. A young man takes part in a bank robbery, is betrayed by his girlfriend and is sent to jail. Escaping from the prison van when another prisoner is busted out, he lays low in the Portland district of the city, doing jobs for the Mafia and building a reputation for getting work done, whilst he plots his revenge.

Released in October 2001, Grand Theft Auto III has been occasionally described as the most important video game ever made. It wasn't the first open-world game - Elite, at least, had that locked down in 1984 - and it wasn't the first game that allowed you to steal cars and commit crimes - see the top-down, 2D Grand Theft Auto (1997), its two expansions and first sequel - but it was the first game that combined the two elements with a 3D viewpoint to create the first open-world action game set in a city, with an eye to accessibility for the masses. Alongside The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, released the following year, GTA3 set the scene for today's dominant genre of video games.

Being - somehow - twenty years old, GTA3 is still somewhat embryonic in its presentation of open-world gameplay and storytelling. The story is minimalist to the point of almost non-existence. There are very, very short cutscenes at the start of the game and before each mission, your character never speaks (making his motivations inscrutable) and doesn't even have a name ("Claude" was a retcon introduced in GTA: San Andreas three years later). This is weird and occasionally confusing, but also refreshing: later GTA and Red Dead Redemption games fell a little bit too much in love with their cutscenes, with it taking longer and longer to actually get into the action. GTA3's brisk pace is refreshing in comparison. You can play the entire game from start to finish in well under 20 hours, less than half of San Andreas or GTA4's playtime and less than a third of Red Dead Redemption 2, although if you decide to hunt down every secret package and stunt jump, without looking online, it might take a bit longer than that.

Liberty City v2.0* feels quite small these days. Not tiny, but definitely on the smaller side of things. This isn't completely a bad thing, and it's certainly possible to learn your way around the entire city by heart, something that is flat-out impossible in modern open world games where the city is gigantic but you never have reason to visit 75% of it. The small size of the city also alleviates some problems in UI and presentation. There isn't a discrete map screen, only your minimap in the corner, and the game only places dots showing the direction to your target, not the optimal route. On occasion you'll be thundering towards your destination with a tight time limit only to realise with horror that it's on the other side of a major river and you have to double back to find a bridge or tunnel. There's also no automated saving, at all, and certainly no automatic saving before missions: if you fail a mission you have to manually drive back to the trigger point. A much smaller city makes all of these problems far less aggravating than if it was as big as cities in later games in the series.

As with most open world games, you have the option of pursuing several goals at once. You usually have one or more missions available and can also jump in a taxi, police car, fire engine or ambulance to make extra money. It is possible to shut down questlines if you are asked in one mission to kill the mission-giver of another, which is realistic but can also be somewhat annoying if you're trying to 100% the game, so you have to be careful to make sure you're not about to make parts of the game's story inaccessible. The game also throws repeatable missions at you, usually racing of one kind or another.

Some missions also require combat, although not as much as you'd think. This is a good thing because combat in the game is weak. Shooting is unsatisfying and the mouse controls are fairly twitchy and sensitive, making precise shooting difficult. Fortunately the game is fairly forgiving about accuracy outside of using things like sniper rifles (and scoped weapons are much easier to use than the standard ones). 

The amount of content for the game was impressive back in 2001, although no great shakes these days. That does lead to a key question: is there any reason to play Grand Theft Auto III in 2021, beyond nostalgia? Certainly from a historic point of view, it's interesting to mess around in for a few hours, and I think people will be surprised to see what a game that's twenty years old was capable of, such as rideable subways and surface trains (which are missing from some of the later games in the series). The car handling is also surprisingly solid, better than some recent games (cough), the soundtrack remains quite decent, the satirical radio humour is (if anything) even more relevant today and what voice acting there is, is excellent.

Grand Theft Auto III (***½) is an important historical artefact of a video game, and has aged better than I was expecting. I wouldn't necessarily to recommend it as anyone's first open-world game today, but perhaps if you're a deeply invested fan of Grand Theft Auto V, it'll be worth going back to check out where series really got going. The game is available now for PC, Android and Apple devices, and of course on PlayStation 2 and X-Box (the original) if you still have one working (or for later consoles via compatibility mode).

Technical Note: For this replay of GTA3 I used Qualcom's "Definitive Edition" mod. This is a simple mod that makes the game work in widescreen at modern resolution and improves textures without changing the original aesthetics or intent of the game. This also removes a few outstanding bugs from the original version of the game (such as the famous one where running down a slope occasionally throws you hundreds of feet through the air, usually with fatal results). Obviously this is only works on the PC version of the game. It should be noted that GTA3 really dislikes multi-monitor setups and you have to disable your secondary monitors before launching the game if you want to play it properly.

* Liberty City v1.0 appears in Grand Theft Auto (1997); Liberty City v3.0 is the primary setting for Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) and its expansions The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony (both 2009). Liberty City v2.0 also appears in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (2006).

Rockstar only "early in development" on GRAND THEFT AUTO VI

During a report on changes in corporate culture at Rockstar Games, Kotaku let slip that the company is early in development on their next game in the Grand Theft Auto series. Obviously, the Internet (or at least Twitter) has responded with dismay at the news, as it has been almost seven years since the previous game in the series was released.

DMA Design released the first game in the series, Grand Theft Auto, in 1997 as a 2D, top-down shooter and racing game. They were taken over by Take Two Interactive and rebranded as Rockstar Games under the leadership of the Houser brohers, Dan and Sam. They hit the big time in 2001 with the release of Grand Theft Auto III, which marked the move of the series into full 3D, with an enormous open-world city to explore and various storylines to get involved in. It was followed by Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), San Andreas (2004), Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) and Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online (both 2013), along with a large number of spin-offs and expansions.

Rockstar have made numerous other games, including Red Dead Redemption (2010), LA Noire (2011), Max Payne 3 (2012) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). However, as an enormous company with multiple studios in multiple countries, it was assumed that work had already been underway for some time on what is presumed to be Grand Theft Auto VI and the game might be ready for release in the next couple of years. This appears not to be the case, due to the workload for Red Dead Redemption 2 being immense and requiring all studios to be all hands on deck for several years, with more than two thousand people having worked on the game.

Grand Theft Auto V is by some metrics the most popular single video game and also the single most popular entertainment media product ever released (barring books), with sales of over 120 million. The game's enormous popularity has been bolstered by the release of remastered editions and a constant stream of new content for Grand Theft Auto Online (which is included with all copies of GTAV). Rockstar's apparently reluctance to work on a sequel in that light is surprising, although fans have noted that their steady monetisation of expansions and new material for GTA Online makes getting a sequel less of a priority.

GTA fans have been joined in solidarity by fans of the Elder Scrolls fantasy roleplaying series from Bethesda Studios. The last single-player game in the series was Skyrim, released in 2011 and selling over 40 million copies since then. An online spin-off was published in 2014 but Bethesda have otherwise focused on other games, shipping Fallout 4 in 2015 and multiplayer shooter Fallout 76 in 2018. They are currently working on a new IP, Starfield, which is expected for release in 2021 or 2022. Some early development work and prototyping has been done on Elder Scrolls VI, but full-time production will not begin until Starfield ships. For that reason, it is unlikely that it will be published this side of 2025.

Work on Grand Theft Auto VI (or whatever it ends up being called) is at least underway, with the game likely targeting a 2024-25 release window at this point.

Dan Houser quits Rockstar Games

In highly surprising news, Rockstar Games co-founder and vice-president Dan Houser has stepped down after spending a year on leave. The news leaked ahead of an investor's call involving Rockstar and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive.

Dan and his brother Sam joined BMG Interactive in 1996 and were instrumental in signing up a game developed by Scottish developers DMA Design called Race 'n' Chase. The game was published in 1997 as Grand Theft Auto and became an instant hit. In 1998 BMG was absorbed by Take Two and the Housers moved to New York, where they founded Rockstar Games as a subsidiary. Rockstar absorbed DMA Design and rebranded it as part of the Rockstar family.

Dan took personal charge of the Grand Theft Auto franchise in 1999 by working on Grand Theft Auto 1969 as a producer/writer and Grand Theft Auto II as a writer. He was instrumental in the decision to go 3D on the franchise and took the lead as head writer and producer on Grand Theft Auto III. Released in 2001 on the PlayStation 2, GTA3 became one of the biggest success stories in gaming history. He subsequently worked as lead writer and producer on Vice City (2002), San Andreas (2004), Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) and Grand Theft Auto V/Grand Theft Auto Online (2013), the last of which is - by some metrics - the single most successful piece of entertainment media ever produced.

Houser also worked on many of Rockstar's other games, including Bully (2006), Red Dead Redemption (2010), L.A. Noire (2011) and Max Payne 3 (2012). His last credit was for Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018).

Houser was seen as an integral and vital part of the Rockstar company and ethos, in particular its focus on dialogue, characterisation and taking an increasing movie-like approach to production values and structure. At the start of almost every Rockstar project, Houser would go off by himself and write a several-hundred-page-long script which nailed down most of the game's story and focus before pre-production had barely begun. Although many other writers would expand on the initial script, Houser's initial work was seen as instrumental in setting up the project.

Houser's departure comes at a time when Rockstar are continuing to bathe in critical acclaim and commercial success from both Grand Theft Auto V (which is continuing to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a month seven years after release) and Red Dead Redemption 2. However, there has also been growing fan discontent over the non-appearance of promised single-player expansions for GTAV, a lack of news about GTAVI and the heavy monetisation focus of the Grand Theft Auto Online experience, leading some to wonder if Take Two are planning an online-only future for the GTA series which would make Houser's position less relevant.

So far Rockstar have not announced a successor, nor is it known what Houser's future plans are. His brother Sam remains in place as President of Rockstar Games.

Daniel Radcliffe stars in BBC drama about GRAND THEFT AUTO

Yes, that headline exists and I am not making it up.

In The Gamechangers Daniel "Harry Potter" Radcliffe is playing Sam Houser of Rockstar Games, one of the guys who took the struggling Grand Theft Auto franchise (after one classic, hit game in 1997 and a so-so sequel in 1999) and, with 2001's GTA3, created the biggest franchise in gaming history (until Call of Duty, anyway).

The game focuses on the clash between Houser and Jack Thompson (played by Bill Paxton of Aliens and Agents of SHIELD fame), an American lawyer who tried to get the games banned for being violent and inspiring real-life crime. Thompson's unsubstantiated claims and general lack of professionalism later (SPOILERS!) led to him being disbarred.

I don't know if it's going to be any good or not - the trailer is bizarre - but the sheer randomness of this project may make it worth checking out. Radcliffe's disturbing facial fungus does make me long for an alternate universe in which he plays a young Trevor from GTA5.

Meanwhile, the project gives Rock Paper Shotgun the excuse to check out Harry Potter/Grand Theft Auto crossover fanfic, which also exists.

The Gamechangers will air on BBC2 on 15 September.

Grand Theft Auto V (PC Version)

Ten years ago, a bank robbery in Yankton went badly wrong. One of the criminals, Trevor Phillips, barely escaped and another, Michael Townley, got away with his freedom only by giving information to a government law-enforcement organisation. In the present day, Michael is living a peaceful live in witness protection in the city of Los Santos, San Andreas. He hooks up with a young criminal, Franklin, and is drawn back into a life of crime. Unfortunately, one of his high-profile escapades attracts Trevor's attention and Michael soon has some awkward questions to answer.

Grand Theft Auto V is a massive, sprawling monster of a game. If the gaming scene has recently seen a surge in cheaper, independent and crowdfunded games relying more on wit and imagination than money, than GTA5 is here to show everyone what can happen when you have a game as expensive as the most costly movies ever made ($250 million and change).

GTA5 is big on everything: insanely good graphics, a huge story taking at least 30 hours to run through - with side-missions and optional activities at least doubling that - and a seemingly never-ending array of vehicles and weapons to unlock. The game also has a big multiplayer component and, on PC, a formidable array of user-created mods and a built-in replay and cinematic editor to create your own movies. This is the ultimate expression of the sandbox game, a game which lets you have fun on its terms but then gives you the freedom to make your own fun with its tools.

Rockstar have clearly listened to criticisms of GTA4. Despite it's impressive graphics and sense of place, the previous game in the series was criticised for its dourness, its grumpy main character and the constrained sense of space and setting compared to its predecessor. The latest title in the series is much bigger, throws three different, contrasting main characters into the mix and embraces a bit more of the zaniness that made previous titles like Vice City and San Andreas so brilliant. It's certainly not a perfect game and manages several major missteps, but it shows Rockstar taking on board the views of fans to craft a stronger game.

In terms of gameplay, almost everything has been given a work-over. Car handling is improved, combat is more satisfying (even if early reports that it was going to be as good as Max Payne 3's were over-stated) and even the often-dodgy handling of aircraft and bikes is better than it has been in previous games. The map is big, but contained and well-designed enough that it never takes too long to get anywhere, even by car. In fact, those used to playing games like Fuel and Just Cause 2 may find the map far too small by comparison, but its detail (everything is hand-crafted, whilst other games rely on procedural generation or vast areas of wasteland to pad everything out) more than makes up for that. The game also has a surprisingly strong array of side-games. If bowling was a little dull in GTA4, the new game makes up for that with some fairly robust tennis and golf games which are a lot more fun and, crucially, no-one rings you up demanding that you go to play with them mid-mission.

The game also has the best soundtrack since San Andreas, if not even the mighty Vice City, with a good mixture of old and new songs and, with the adverts and talk stations, a return for some of the biting satire the series used to be known for but had gotten a little lost in the mix in GTA4. Long-term fans will also enjoy getting to finally meet long-term creepy radio DJ Lazlow in the flesh.

So the soundtrack is great, the visuals are jaw-dropping, the vehicles all handle great and the combat is pretty solid. Unfortunately, the game stumbles somewhat when handling the main story. Rotating between Trevor, Michael and Franklin makes for some memorable moments and the ability to contrast the points of view of the respective characters about what's going on, but it also makes for a fragmented narrative. The storyline also focuses a lot on Trevor and Michael's shared history and problems and Franklin's character growth and development (strong at the beginning) tails off mid-game. It definitely feels like there was more stuff planned for Franklin and then cut: subplots with his ex-girlfriend and an old neighbourhood criminal called Stretch never really get off the ground but later seem to be fairly important. He feels the most under-served of the three characters, which conversely makes him the one it's easiest to actually play as you feel, as his character doesn't get in the way of the gameplay so much. It feels odd to have undercover, taking-it-quietly, family man Michael flip out and start blowing away helicopters, whilst playing Trevor for more than five minutes without going berserk also feels untrue to the character.

The storyline itself is okay, though jammed with so many GTA series staple cliches (government agents, drug gangs, vacuous celebrities, corrupt politicians, ordinary people driven crazy by their superficial lives) that you'll see almost every plot twist coming. That's not to say it isn't fun, but veterans of the series won't find much here that hasn't been seen before. There's also the tone, which occasionally feels too restrained. GTA5 is a much looser, freer game than 4 and one that feels more confident in heading in the direction of unleashing the total craziness that made Vice City and San Andreas fun, but the game then seems to fear it's trying to copy Saint's Row and pulls back on it. This may also explain why there are some serious opportunities for insane carnage but which then never materialise: there's a whole prison and military base which are never used, despite both being mentioned a lot in the story.

Where GTA5 really trips over itself is its humour. The GTA series is known for its satire, and this is a bit sharper than it has been for a while. Selfies, Facebook, Twitter, the global financial crisis, hipsters and internet dating all come in for a bit of a skewering, which is amusing if obvious and a little dated (blame the game's long lead-time in production). However, the game also goes astray in using multiple jokes based around transphobia. The series has aimed to satirised aspects of minority cultures before without tripping into outright 'isms (if running a bit close on occasion), and when it did offend it generally tried to make amends later on (some lame gay-bashing jokes in GTA4 recovered a little by having a nuanced gay main character in The Ballad of Gay Tony expansion). In this case it feels like just a cheap and aimless couple of gags that go nowhere. Despite its reputation, the GTA is actually usually a bit smarter than that.

For a game this sprawling, huge and long, however, such ill-judged moments are very few and far between. For all its embracing of tiresome cliche, GTA5 (****) is well-paced and relentlessly fun to play. It's certainly the first game in the series since San Andreas where it's fun just to load up the game, whack on some tunes and go for a long drive along the ocean freeway whilst gawping at the view. The disconnect between narrative and gameplay that the series has always suffered from is still present and correct, and the humour occasionally becomes offensive for the sake of it rather than having something to say. But the game is enormous, compelling and, on PC at least, gives the player the chance to use its tools to craft their own experiences. The game is available now on PC via Steam.

Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony

Luis Fernando Lopez has escaped from a life of drug-dealing to gain respectable work as a bar manager for Anthony 'Gay Tony' Prince, one of the most famous club-owners in Liberty City. However, Gay Tony's business is not going to plan and he has been forced into some shady deals to keep things afloat. Lopez's skills are called into use to help Tony survive a brewing crime war...and resolve the mystery of some missing diamonds.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is the second of two self-contained expansions to Grand Theft Auto IV and - as of this time of writing - is the most recent entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. As with The Lost and the Damned before it, The Ballad of Gay Tony pursues its own storyline whilst also being a supporting part of the storyline of GTA4. Several missions cross-over with the events of both GTA4 and The Lost of the Damned, so players will finally get the full story to what's been going on in all three titles.

As is standard in the GTA franchise, the game casts you in the role of a guy of dubious morality who must fulfil a series of missions to complete the game. These missions are given to you by various characters, some of whom you help willingly and others more reluctantly. Between missions you can chill out, drive around the city, watch a bit of TV or engage in social activities such as playing golf. Later in the game other activities are unlocked, such as base-jumping from buildings or engaging in multi-vehicle races. You also interact with other characters through your mobile phone, from being able to call in favours (such as having cars or weapons dropped off at your location) to socialising with them in bars or clubs. However, unlike GTA4 where it famously got rather annoying after a while, characters rarely call you to ask you to hang out.

The meat of the game, as always, lies in the missions. Tony has gotten himself into debt with several gangsters, and to help pay them off Luis has to do various jobs with them. In several cases this backfires badly, but Luis does make one genuine friend in the form of the ludicrously OTT Yusuf Amir (voiced with ridiculous enthusiasm by comedian Omid Djalili), the son of a multi-billionaire with a curious predilection for stealing unobtainable vehicles (a tank, a combat helicopter and a subway car, which he plans to turn into a submarine). As the game continues, the self-contained narrative with Luis trying to save Tony's business entwines with the story of the previous games, with the fate of the famous diamonds finally being revealed.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is great fun. After the previous two games were criticised for being, by normal GTA standards, po-faced and restrained, The Ballad of Gay Tony brings back the crazy. The game features missions involving shooting up the harbour with a helicopter and throwing a nasty blogger out of an aircraft and then base-jumping to rescue him before he hits the ground (I guess some of those critical GTA4 reviews hurt Rockstar's feelings). Those who've missed the series' more demented sense of humour will likely welcome the lighter, funnier approach to this game.

Unfortunately, despite being a bit lighter than previous entries to the series, the game is not as successful as The Lost and the Damned in integrating the optional between-missions stuff with the main game storyline. In The Lost and the Damned the gang wars and bike races linked in with the central narrative, but in The Ballad of Gay Tony there is a bit of a disconnect between the base-jumping and multi-vehicle races and the main storyline. More connected are optional sequences where Luis has to manage the club overnight, but these get rather dull and repetitive quite quickly.

As a result, The Ballad of Gay Tony is dependent on its missions to succeed and they are pretty decent, with some great voice acting. The game's biggest success is developing a genuinely warm relationship between Luis - a heterosexual Dominican-American - and the gay Anthony Prince without descending into the cliches the Grand Theft Auto franchise gleefully normally employs. This relationship is explored in some depth and is surprisingly effective. This is in stark contrast to the game's failure to employ any female characters of note in the game, which is a bit more inexplicable.

The Ballad of Gay Tony (***½) is a fun game with some unexpectedly good development of character and relationships. The missions are entertaining, although the optional game elements are a bit less successful this time around. Overall, however, it sees out the Grand Theft Auto IV era in style. The game is available now in a collected package with GTA4 and The Lost and the Damned on PC (UK, USA), X-Box 360 (UK, USA) and PlayStation 3 (UK, USA). Grand Theft Auto V will be released in mid-2013.

Planes and automobiles in GTA5 (no trains yet)

Rockstar have revealed three more screenshots from Grand Theft Auto V.

It looks like push-bikes will be back in the game.

Along with, unsurprisingly, cars. This is the GTA5 version of perennial series favourite, the Cheeta. The 'San Andreas' plates have gotten the Internet worked up, before it was pointed out that Los Santos is still in San Andreas State and would still have San Andreas plates, regardless of how much of the state actually appears in the game.

Also, jet fighters laden with missiles. Something tells me that GTA5 is easing off on its predecessor's slightly more realistic take and might be headed back to the wackiness of San Andreas.

Rockstar have also said they will be releasing more pictures later this week, along with a new trailer in the near future. However, they have still not mooted a possible release date for the game (though May 2013 is widely speculated).

Minor update about GRAND THEFT AUTO V

Rockstar have released a tiny amount of additional information on the upcoming Grand Theft Auto V.

They have released two screenshots. The one above is the more interesting, depicting the sprawling city of Los Santos (apparently the biggest city in a GTA game to date) from what appears to be a commandeered police helicopter. Does the presence of large suspension bridge hint that GTA5's version of Los Santos will be more of an amalgamation of Los Angeles and San Francisco? Possibly. The other screenshot is rather more chilled out:

A release date for GTA5 has not yet been mooted. However, Rockstar are adamant that they're not going to talk about the game too much in the near future. This to me suggests that a 2012 release date is now impossible (compare the amount of attention that Dishonored, not due until October, is now getting in the gaming press) and we will most likely see the game in May 2013. The spring is a more favoured date for Rockstar and is perfectly situated so as to catch the largest amount of attention before Sony and Microsoft wheel out their new consoles at the end of the year.

Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and the Damned

Johnny Klebitz is the vice-president of the Lost, a Liberty City motorbike gang. He's in charge because the club president, Billy Grey, has been in jail on drug charges. Unfortunately, when Billy is released he is quick to assert his leadership, reigniting a gang war with the rival Angels of Death and breaking a truce which Johnny had worked hard to create. As Billy gets out of control, Johnny reluctantly follows his orders and undertakes a life of crime and chaos in the city...until the opportunity to take part in a diamond heist results in a sequence of events that will rock the whole city to its core.

The Lost and the Damned is a self-contained expansion pack to Grand Theft Auto IV. It builds on the setting and events of GTA4, though it's a game in its own right which does not require the original to run. However, the storyline of The Lost and the Damned entwines around that of GTA4, and foreknowledge of GTA4 definitely improves the playing experience.

At first glance, The Lost and the Damned is GTA as normal. You control a morally dubious central character and are given free reign of a huge city in which various tasks can be performed. Most of these tasks revolve around a developing storyline, with missions building on one another to form one long narrative. However, there is nothing to stop you from just cruising around the massive city listening to the radio if you wish. There are also bonus and side-objectives that can be accomplished. In The Lost and the Damned these optional missions enhance the storyline. The Lost are at war with the Angels of Death through most of the game, and at almost any point you can attend a flashpoint where your fellow gang members and a bunch of Angels will face off in combat. This can lead to running gun battles on foot, bike duels or car chases. The other major optional task is taking part in bike races. To ensure the Lost's reputation as daredevil motorbike riders is kept intact, Johnny has to race other bikers and uphold the Lost's street cred. Because these tasks are thematically in keeping with the main game plot, it gives The Lost and the Damned a more cohesive feel than other GTA games, where the optional missions and tasks are sometimes just random bits of mayhem with no connection to the rest of the game.

The game's central storyline is, as is normally the case with Rockstar, well-written and darkly humourous, although not immune to gangster/crime cliches. As normal, Rockstar cheerfully have no hang-ups about swearing, violence or drug-use and, for the first time in the series, resort to shots of full frontal nudity during one cut scene. However, possibly out of a sense of flipping the bird at their critics, this is of a male character and only comes at the end of a lengthy sequence in which the character's nudity has cheesily been hidden by scenery. Whilst not exactly the height of sophisticated comedy (a few other meta-fictional nods in the game at gang cliches or gaming conventions are more amusing), it's a wry nod at the frequent and vocal critics of the series.

The game encourages a degree of roleplaying: Johnny is a biker and is vocally unhappy behind the wheels of a car. This encourages the player to use his bike wherever possible. This is helped by the fact that The Lost and the Damned improves motorcycle handling and physics a lot over the over-sensitive bikes of GTA4 itself. Johnny can stay on his bike through collisions that would have sent Niko flying fifty feet through the air. There are also new mechanics for driving in formation with your gang, calling gangmembers for backup in the middle of firefights (this can be done even in the middle of story missions) and 'levelling up' your gangmates by helping them survive missions. Unfortunately, this latter mechanic is broken by the game's variable AI, which often has your gang-members charging head first into hails of gunfire from prepared enemy positions rather than seeking cover. Still, it's a nice idea and helps differentiate the game in tone and feel from GTA4.

The game takes place mostly on the other side of Liberty from where you started GTA4, and for the most part does a good job of exploring under-used parts of the city from that game. The game also has the entire city open to explore from the start (resulting in a minor continuity error, as early missions take place simultaneously with the opening of GTA4, when the bridges were still closed due to a terrorist threat). There's a general feeling of the game taking the training wheels off and letting you get on with what you want to get on with, moreso than GTA4 itself. You can still play darts or go bowling (or indulge in new activities, such as arm-wrestling your biker buddies), but mercifully no-one rings you up incessantly demanding that you hang out with them. One disappointment is that the racing and gang war sub-games don't play any major impact on the narrative. Given that these optional elements are an opportunity for you to prove your worthiness as a gang leader, it's a shame these elements are not reflected in the storyline (where one plot twist revolves around your trustworthiness and ability to lead coming into question).

Another problem is that The Lost and the Damned is a stand-alone title, but it's plot is somewhat obtuse if you have not played GTA4 ahead of time. There's a whole raft of storyline elements in the game that go nowhere and have no resolution (as they merely highlight events in GTA4 rather than in this game). As a traditional expansion pack (that would require the original game to play) servicing the original game this would make sense, but as a stand-alone story, The Lost and the Damned feels partially incomplete. Its own core narrative - Johnny's relationship with the Lost - does have a definitive arc and conclusion, however, and the game deserves plaudits for going with a remarkably bleak and bitter ending, almost as dark as GTA4's.

The Lost and the Damned (****) is a game that is a lot of fun. It's shorter and more concise than GTA4 itself and benefits from its greater focus and side-objectives that make much more sense within the context of the game. The missions are varied and the traditional black humour stops the game from becoming too po-faced. However, its storyline relies too heavily on GTA4's and it maintains the original game's issue of downplaying the wackiness of earlier GTA games in favour of sometimes dry (though well-acted) character drama. The game is available now in a collected package with GTA4 and The Ballard of Gay Tony on PC (UK, USA), X-Box 360 (UK, USA) and PlayStation 3 (UK, USA).