Chris

Because we just got done playing multiplayer, like 5am NYC time, lol.

Probably not as I've played it for quite a few hours now and it's so awesome. Lives up to all the hype. I definitely want to go through single player mode first though before becoming addicted to multiplayer for months and months.

Oh hi, seems none of the staff leaked this out, but I thought now I may as well just say it anyway. Yeah I haven't been on in the past couple of days because I've been busy along with other webmasters from the premier GTA fansites playing GTA IV and such. Hope everyone is keeping the forums good and proper in my absense. I'm sure you all have many questions but I won't spoil stuff for you. Played single player for 8 hours yesterday and multiplayer for between 8-12 hours today. Done a bunch of touristy stuff too. Hotel is cool, using the penthouse suite for all the GTA playing and shit. It's awesome meeting all the other webmasters too. I'll be back Thursday morning UK time and will be posting a full diary/story of everything I/we got up to in NYC. R* are awesome and definitely know how to treat their biggest fans with all expenses paid trips like this. Fucking love it. I'll let you all discuss your jealousy and hate for me now!

Well, people in Central America could just go for either West or East USA since the time difference isn't so drastic. Whatever you prefer really. I'm guessing any matches played are likely to be done in the evening. So go with West if you prefer playing earlier in the day, or East if later in the day.

German magazine Games Aktuell have reviewed Grand Theft Auto IV and given their verdict on the game. The review is actually based on their preview sessions at R* earlier and not on the final retail version of the game, though they still include the review screenshots (seen in OXM and OPM). 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. Thanks for the heads up Scott.

I spoke to Psy a few days ago after reading that his site has started a large clan via their forums. The way they seem to be doing it at the moment is by having two large clans (Xbox 360 and PS3), basically just splitting it into 4 timezones as to when matches will be played. I'm not sure if they'll always do it this way, or even how we'll do it. Allowing members set up their own clans is something we're willing to do. But it depends what you all want really. To play against members of this forum, or other forums, both would be great. Having said all of that. I still went ahead and agreed that we should get some matches going between fansites. GTA4.tv launched their clan website today (I'm not sure we'll do anything similar, but it'll depend on how big or regular this becomes), and Psy even listed us on the fixtures page! Anyway, as you can see from their clan site, they already have a LOT of members, though to be fair their forums are a lot bigger than ours. In another difference, majority of our members came here originally for downloads, and as such, play PC versions rather than consoles, so despite our medium sized member database, we still don't have a large pool of multiplaying console player-member-people. So, the point of this topic is to get a list of gamertags/psn ids and timezones, and we'll see how we can organise something out of it. There's a likely possibility we'll also have staff matches too, depending on if I can get them all online, as some of them have neither console yet So, post your console, gamertag/psn, and timezone (put yourself in one of the following generalised categories) GMT-8 = West Coast USA/Canada GMT-5 = East Coast USA/Canada GMT0/+1/+2 = All of Europe GMT+10 = Australasia So I'll start with myself: 360 - ChrisJP88 - GMT0 Also, if you've posted in the gamertag topic it would be a good idea to add a few people off their so we can all use the invite feature for actually playing the games, if PS3 has a similar feature then also do it.

GamesRadar have managed to get themselves an audio Q&A with Matthew Smith, Craig Conner and Will Morton, three senior members of the Rockstar North Audio team. The article talks about the ambient sounds in the game, pedestrian dialogue and the soundtrack of the game. There article is a pretty interesting read, here are some notable quotes from it: Most of the time what you hear is really happening - what’s so great about GTA IV from an audio team’s perspective is that you hardly ever need to fake anything – the world’s so rich and so busy, that if you make individual things sound right, the whole ambience pretty much just appears by itself. Gunfire is a good example of how complex videogame audio has become; a single gunshot typically consists of around 10 individual components, whose volume and placement we control independently with distance, to create a bright, wide, punchy sound up-close, and a more reverberant, muffled sound at a distance. For multiplayer, we balance this 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. The DJS have far more AI than previous titles. They know what time of day it is, what the weather is like and what’s going on in LC. They've even done their research on their playlists, some of their own tracks appears on them. In fact all the DJS are either famous singers or musicians (or both.) They have plenty to say about their chosen genre of music as they've lived it, loved it, or are living it. The article also contains a number of brand new screenshots. You can see them over at GamesRadar.

I've just noticed that myself actually. I think I may have accidentally overwritten some code that checks if you're logged in, I'll have a look in a bit. EDIT: Fixed now.

Yes he did. He's also impersonating illspirit, who does not live in Mauritius as this member does. Impersonation of respected members of the community is a bannable offence. Change your display name in 24 hours or you will be banned, and at least credit whoever made this topic on GTAforums.

Yes you're right. Moving to GTA IV multiplayer. I don't really know a 'funny' name that would be Italian, or what exactly you mean by that. But Wikipedia has a list of famous Sicilian mafia peoples, choose one of their surnames or something... perhaps change it a little bit and there you go.

Just pre-registration... looks like a few games are coming soon though. And if you're over 18 you've automatically been entered into that competition. We'll of course update with any further developments.

I'm assuming we enter them when the site opens properly. I thought we would have had to enter them on registration but obviously not.

As everyone knows, the lower your user ID the bigger your penis That's an awesome artwork though, there's quite a bit of new stuff there.

What's everyone's member #? I got #10537... I mean did they start from 10000 or something, it's literally just opened, I registered within like 5 minutes.

You can now pre-register for the Rockstar Social Club using your Xbox Live gamertag and/or PlayStation Network ID. The Social Club will fully open once GTA IV is released, and will provide all kinds of statistics on your game progress. There are even prizes for those who complete the game the fastest. See our original news story for all the details. The website states that early adopters who pre-register before April 29th will be rewarded by being automatically entered to win a special once-in-a-lifetime prize for true GTA fans: your portrait custom drawn by Rockstar Games in the signature style of Grand Theft Auto IV's illustrations. You'll need to be aged 18 or over, and reside in one of the following countries: United States, Germany, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom. For more details head to the sweepstakes page. Link: Rockstar Games Social Club

Ignore Jeremy, he's been taken care of Anyone else dicking around on the forums like this will also be taken care of. Don't be a dick. Back on topic please.

The full version of the TV advertisement for GTA IV we posted about yesterday is now on the official Xbox site. A number of the scenes shown were not in yesterday's video. Link: Xbox.com

Niko will be countryless as Claude (GTA3 Guy) was nameless. Though I'm still saying Serbia if there is indeed a specific country mentioned as his home.

Official PlayStation Magazine UK is the latest magazine to review Grand Theft Auto IV. The review includes a selection of screenshots, mostly the same as the OXM preview, but there are a couple of new ones as well. Like OXM, they awarded GTA IV a perfect 10 out of 10. Below is a summary of new/interesting points in the article, some of which you may consider spoilers, although nothing major is revealed: One of the reasons Niko goes to Liberty City is to track down the man who betrayed his old army unit. Cars don't catch fire after a bit of damage any more. There are several points at which you need to make life or death decisions between prominent characters. Comedy clubs feature real comedians. "Michelle" is the first girl that Niko hooks up with. Dimitiri Rascalov is Mikhail Faustin's right hand man. Another use of the phone include "calling a target to make him come to the window and into Niko's sniper sight." There is a museum called the Libertonian museum, which features dinosaur fossils and exploding vases. Environments such as these have been created specifically for shootouts. The name of every radio station is revealed: Electro Choc (dance) Fusion FM IF99 - International Funk (funk) Integrity 2.0 (speech, hosted by Lazlow) Jazz Nation Radio 108.5 (jazz) K109 The Studio (disco) Liberty City Hardcore (punk/hardcore) Liberty Rock Radio 97.8 (classic rock) Massive B Soundsystem 96.9 (dance hall) PLR - Public Liberty Radio (call-in speech) Radio Broker (rock) San Juan Sounds (latin) The Beat 102.7 (contemporary hip-hop) The Classics 104.1 (old-skool hip-hop) The Journey (Ambient) The Vibe 98.8 (soul) Tuff Gong Radio (reggae/dub) Vladivostok FM (eastern european) WKTT - We Know The Truth (right wing talk radio) Thanks to GTA4.net for the heads-up.

Actually, they never usually update the actual page itself, see the past ones: http://www.rockstargames.com/grandtheftauto3/contest/ - this was the only one they actually announced winners on the page http://www.rockstargames.com/vicecity/contest/ http://www.rockstargames.com/sanandreas/contest/ http://www.rockstargames.com/libertycitystories/contest/ And there was no contest for VCS. But yeah, can't remember how long it is before they announce winners, but I'd say at least a few weeks.

Well if you know you can get it in a store on the day then I guess you don't really need to preorder. 3 weeks is a massive exaggeration though, I don't think anywhere would have delays of that long. If anything I think it would just be a few days, maybe a week max. But yeah, only UK retailers are reporting low stocks right now, you're not in the UK so I guess you're fine.

An advert on Irish TV shows some new GTA IV footage, unfortunately all we have for now is a poor quality mobile phone recording a decent version is now online. Credit to several GTAForums members for uploading this.

If I remember the press release correctly (can't find it right now) this was supposed to come out on Thursday, which is probably why you couldn't find it anywhere else. Is it worth the £5? Any info in it that isn't covered by all the other 'history of GTA' articles?

They may have changed a model/texture and not updated one or the other or something. Things like this get fixed at the very end of the development cycle, at least I hope so anyway.

Yeah, I'm just trying to work out why it's coloured like that. Look at GTAGaming, their shot shows the HUD in the normal colour :/