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Chris

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Posts posted by Chris

  1. Yeah I dunno about that, if something happened in real life I'm pretty sure we'd have heard about it.

    In my opinion there's a couple of things it could be. First is that the messages they post on Twitter are going to tie into a backstory for something in the game, second is that they are simply just random tweets that are typical of what such a cult might talk about, just done to make the parody seem more real.

  2. Yeah those rolling clouds caught my attention right away when I realised this was game footage, we also see a new character which lends further credence to the fact this could play more of a role in game than it has done in the past.

     

    I don't think Rockstar cares about the fact they could get sued, not even sure that's possible anyway, otherwise no parodies would exist of any content at all. Also it's not seeking to do any harm to Scientology or Scientologists themselves, it's just making fun of the whole thing.

    lso I'm fairly certain it makes fun of religions in general. The world being 157 years old for example, probably making fun of some Christians who believe the world is only 6000 years old and greatly exaggerating that.

     

    Overall it's a pretty funny parody and exactly what I'd expect from R*

  3. After a few months of quiet, the Epsilon Program Twitter started posting again over the last couple of days, and yesterday talked about a screensaver being released. This has led to Rockstar releasing a screensaver today which you can see a preview of and download below. The screensaver appears to show in-game scenery and some new character art.
     

     

    The Goals and the Pledge of Epsilon will continue to be revealed in due time.

    Install the Epsilon Program screensaver.

    The Epsilon Program does not exist in just one time or place. We invite you to visit one of our enlightenment centers.
    Directions will be provided in one week's time.

    The Epsilon Program is an obvious scam cult and a fictional parody of the real life cult known as the Church of Scientology, as well as a elements seen in a number of religions. The program was first seen as a teaser site for GTA: San Andreas and was referenced in later games including GTA IV. It may be worth noting that the real Church of Scientology is based in Los Angeles where GTA V is also set, so how much Epsilon will feature in the game remains to be seen, but it could play a bigger role than it has done in the past. We speculate this simply due to the game's focus on money - something that both real life Scientology and in-game Epsilon both attract easily.

  4.  

    GamerSpawn last night live streamed a 45 minute documentary on the history of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and the video of this is now available to watch as and when you want. For those who might not have heard of them before, GamerSpawn's YouTube channel racked up a substantial number of fans a couple of years ago after creating two great documentaries on the history of the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises, the latter of which I felt was particularly good having been a huge CoD fan myself since the first game was released back in 2003.

     

    Back on topic, GamerSpawn's latest documentary focuses on Grand Theft Auto. This well narrated film is an enjoyable watch and will surely bring back a lot of good memories for those of you who have played all the games. For those who are perhaps newer fans to the series you will find it particularly insightful, and if you haven't played some of the earlier games I would certainly recommend getting hold of them. While many of you may know everything there is to know about Rockstar and GTA, there are plenty who won't, and if you're one of those people, be sure to give this a watch - you'll learn a few interesting things about the company and the games.

     

    Of course, covering the history of Grand Theft Auto isn't a new thing, and no doubt many of you will have read articles over the years which tend to come out during periods between releases. If you enjoyed watching this, GameTrailers' Grand Theft Auto Retrospective was also particularly notable, and we'd recommend watching that too if you have the time.

  5. Rockstar has released two new artworks tonight, featuring Michael and Franklin. In Rockstar's own words:

    Presenting two new artwork releases, both glimpsed in our recently revealed official Grand Theft Auto V cover. This Cash and Carry pair of illustrations depicts Michael and Franklin getting things done – by sea, or by land.

    Of course many other modes of transport will also be available to accommodate your travel needs across Los Santos and Blaine County on September 17th...

    Click the images below to see the full versions or head over to our GTA V Artwork page to see more. Lots of different resolutions can be grabbed via Rockstar Downloads.
     

    v_franklin_bike_chase_th.jpg v_michael_jetski_th.jpg

  6. In honour of the recent releases of Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories on the PlayStation Network, Rockstar have released high-res digital versions of the original printed maps that came with retail copies of the games. This follows on from a similar move they made last December with high-res GTA trilogy maps after the arrival of GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas on PSN. Click the thumbnails below to see them in full size.

     

    gtalcsmap_th.jpg gtavcsmap_th.jpg

     

    Link: Rockstar Newswire

  7. actual_1365155364.jpg

     

    Rockstar have updated the Kubrick collection on the Rockstar Warehouse with the addition of a San Andreas box set released for the first time today. The Vice City set has also been re-released in special 10th Anniversary Edition packaging, with the original sets having sold out a long time ago. Additionally, the GTA III set is still available, with only 200 sets remaining out of the initial 3000 that were made.
     
    Check out the pictures below for descriptions and links to the individual sets.
     

    actual_1365155390.jpg

    Super rare and highly sought-after amongst both GTA fans and Kubricks collectors, you can now score the San Andreas Kubrick Box Set directly from Rockstar Warehouse. Featuring Carl “CJ” Johnson, Officer Tenpenny, Big Smoke, Ryder, and straight from “The Mothership,” The Truth.

    actual_1365155413.jpg

     

    Having sold out long ago, the Vice City Kubrick Box Set is now back in stock in a special reissue celebrating the game's recent 10th anniversary. In special Anniversary themed packaging as seen above, the set includes Tommy Vercetti, Candi Suxx, Lance Vance, Ricardo Diaz, and that bonkers ambulance chaser, Ken Rosenberg.

    actual_1365155430.jpg

    You can also pick up the previously released Grand Theft Auto 3 Kubrick Box Set featuring 8-Ball, Claude, Donald Love, Misty and Salvatore Leone. Only 3,000 units were ever released worldwide and we're down to less than 200 pieces currently remaining available at the Warehouse so get 'em while you can.

     

    To celebrate this update, you'll receive a 15% discount off your entire order if you purchase any Kubrick set, Rockstar will also throw in a Rockstar Keychain while supplies last. You'll need to order by 12th April to take advantage of this offer.

  8. actual_1364479461.jpg

     
    As announced last week, today marks the release of Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories on the PSN Store, completing Rockstar Games' PS2 Classics collection on the PS3 - at least for the Grand Theft Auto franchise (other classic Rockstar titles are apparently forthcoming). Both games were originally released exclusively for the Sony PSP in 2005 and 2006 respectively, but were ported to the PS2 the following years.
     

    From the dark, seedy and bustling streets of Liberty City's concrete jungle to the glamorous and hedonistic metropolis of Vice City in the 1980s. Two towns, each brimming with limitless delights and degradation, where anything can happen...

    If you missed one of these two Stories when they first came out, or are ready to revisit Toni Cipriani's '98 rise to glory and Victor Vance's '84 tale of Vice - you can now pull them down digitally to your PS3.

     
    PlayStation Store Links: 
    Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (USA / Europe) - $9.99 / €9.99 / £7.99
    Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (USA / Europe) - $9.99 / €9.99 / £7.99

  9. Rockstar originally told us they would be revealing the box art for Grand Theft Auto V by the end of January, but unfortunately it was pushed back following the announcement that the game would be delayed until September. But judging by this mural being painted up in New York, it's safe to say it'll be revealed fairly soon...

     

    gtav-boxart-ny-1_th.jpg

    gtav-boxart-ny-2_th.jpg

    gtav-boxart-ny-3_th.jpg

     

    Pictures courtesy of Redditor kotgfyad.

  10. We're back!

    First off, we're sorry about the lengthy downtime we suffered during the past week. For the most part it was completely beyond our control. We did unfortunately suffer some data loss, some of which was simply due to corruption. Now if you continue reading I'll explain what happened, or just skip to the end if you don't care and just want to know wtf is up with the site right now.

    Back in the February we suffered some downtime, over 24 hours in fact. Scanning the system logs we were able to pinpoint this to an issue with one of the hard drives, but it was difficult to determine which one (we have 4 in a RAID 10 array) when the tools we have available were reporting them all as healthy! Fast-forward to last week, one of the hard drives decided to completely fail on us. Those of you who know about RAID will know that a single hard drive in the array failing is not a problem, so we simply asked the server techs to replace it for us. No big deal. As I was submitting the support ticket, I was running tests on the other 3 hard drives to check they were ok - turns out they weren't. A drive in the second pair was also failing, and as the test finished running, it did fail. This brought the server into a read-only state, we rebooted to allow the techs to replace the first bad disk. This was done, but we had to wait practically a whole day for it to finish filesystem checks and rebuild itself into the array.

    The bad news got worse after that and long story short, the OS had become corrupted and we were unable to get the server to boot up. Combine this problem with incredibly slow support staff and you see where this is heading...

    In the days that followed, they eventually replaced the second failed disk for us, and within another couple of days they finally got it into rescue mode and were able to get the server back online (today).

    Unfortunately this was when I discovered quite a lot of file integrity loss, corrupted files everywhere. After working all night to get the server back into a workable state, we realised that unfortunately our database system was completely fucked, for lack of a better phrase. Worse still, our on-site nightly backups were mostly lost. The most recent off-site backups we had were over 2 weeks old, but these had to do.

    What I've done is restored a database backup from 13th March. Anything that happened since then has been lost. As for files and uploads, we believe most of this is ok, but chances are there's some missing files we aren't aware of. Please let me know (in this topic) if you are experiencing errors or other weirdness on the forums or anywhere else on the website.

    While no one is to blame (except myself for not having more recent backups available) for what happened, we feel the support staff made us wait unreasonably long times to both replace the failed hardware and recover the system for us. Downtime was almost inevitable with these kinds of failures, but it certainly should not have been this long. For this reason, we will be transferring TGTAP (and our other sites) to a new server within the next couple of weeks. We don't expect there to be any downtime while this happens, though the forums will be turned offline for approx 15 mins to ensure we have successfully migrated the data.

    That's all.

    • Like 2
  11. Reminds me of Italy's Lamborghini Gallardo police car which they crashed, although I think that was just for show and not actually part of their pursuit force.

     

    lamborghini-police-car-italy-lamborghini

     

     

    An-Italian-police-Lamborg-001.jpg

    lamborghini-gallardo-polizia-crash-01.jp

     

    While searching for pics of that I found one in a UK police livery too. Not sure why this exists.

     

    lambo+police+car.jpg

  12. The sense of entitlement some people have is astounding. These people seem to want to know EVERYTHING about the game before it comes out and if they don't get that information they start crying their eyes out.

     

    Rockstar delete literally thousands of comments too, so you're only seeing a sample of the feedback they get. I don't bother commenting on newswire posts, everything gets buried anyway. The only responses people see are those short before and after they make their own post.

     

    Personally, I couldn't give a fuck. I'm glad they've delayed it. Hopefully these "fans" fuck off and find some other game to complain about instead of trying to ruin it for the rest of us. On a more practical note, it gives Rockstar more time to make the game better, it also gives me time to get shit done before I have to start working overtime on this site.

  13. Yeah they said it would be able to stream PS1, 2 and 3 games. Which implies no software/hardware emulation in the console itself unfortunately. I still have my actual PS2 for playing old PS1/2 games anyway so I don't care so much, plus I don't play them often enough. However it does suck that it's not backwards compatible. Oh well.

    • Like 1
  14. Not GTA V. GTA VI will definitely be on these next gen consoles though.

    I think GTA V has been too long in development for them to have had any time to dedicate to it. Also the original release date was long before the PS4 would have been out, and even the current release date is before the PS4, so no, we won't see GTA V on it.

     

    Just added more info to the original post for anyone who missed the conference stream.

  15. Well, it was announced a few hours ago. I'll add details on it later in this post. But what are your thoughts so far?

     

    The system itself wasn't actually show, although the controller was, a more refined version of the current DualShock 3 controller and with an added touchpad.

     

    Specs:

    krFVrtE.png

    8GB of RAM - PS3 only had 512MB so although it sounds weak it's a pretty massive jump if you think about what devs will be able to do with it.

     

    Kotaku has a concise round-up of all the things announced in case you missed the conference stream.

     

     

    Personally, some of the stuff seemed gimmicky, other stuff seemed pretty cool. In terms of games, most I wasn't interested in, but Killzone 4 (I love that franchise) and WATCH_DOGS both looked awesome. Can't wait to see more of Watch Dogs actually. Also, Capcom's Deep Down looks pretty awesome, I thought the lighting, shadows, and reflections in particular looked very good.

     

    One thing I really did like was the suspend/resume feature. You can just power off the console while in a game and when you come back you power it back on and you're instantly back in the game again, no waiting for stuff to load, that's cool.

     

    Streaming games to the Vita seems cool although I don't have one. If they give that ability to phones and tablets that could be a BIG thing.

     

    All the social stuff I'm not that fussed about. Although the video streaming/sharing seems useful. Being able to let an online friend take control and help you in a game if you're stuck is a nifty little thing too.

    • Like 1
  16. Never heard of that site before so I wouldn't use them as a source of information. The system requirements will just be their guesses, but as Tuner said they're going to be bullshit. The console release is 6 months away, PC release likely to be at least 12, it's too soon to even guess really. They're obviously going to be higher than GTA IV's though, and probably closer to Max Payne 3's.

     

    They don't list any cheat codes on their site so I'm not sure what you're asking about those, but it's pretty obvious R* will include cheats similar to those seen in IV. GTA would be weird without cheats.

    • Like 1
  17. There are no restrictions on your account so yes this is a bug. Are you getting any error messages when attempting to do any the actions you mentioned? And do you remember what your rep was before?

     

    Tuner, no one messed with your account. You were restricted for a period of time, and aside from changing your signature to a can of tuna, nothing was messed with.

     

     

    EDIT: amazingdude I can see you have 41 reputation point entries in the database so I'm not sure how you've ended up with it saying 0. I'll run the recaching and rebuilding tools in a bit and it should hopefully fix those issues.

    I'll look into the other issues after that's done.

     

    In the meantime if anyone else is having similar problems please post them here.

  18. Having games on Blu-ray isn't about graphics. The GPU determines how good the graphics can be. The point of Blu-ray media is that you can fit fucking massive amounts of data on them, 10 times more than a DVD anyway. This is why games like LA Noire and Max Payne 3 fit on a single disc for PS3 players, while Xbox 360 players have 2 or 3. That's the benefit of Blu-ray.

     

    The specs I was referring to was the things you mentioned (Blu-ray, Windows 8 OS, required internet) as those are still things that haven't been confirmed and was allegedly completely made up by the guy who "leaked" them... it's irrelevant anyway until MS/Sony actually release official specs.

    • Like 1
  19. You might be right actually, Xbox has been stylised in quite a few different ways. It's all caps on the product itself, but seems to be Xbox on the website and in any official texts now.

     

    What's wrong with Blu-ray support though? It's pretty logical they'd support that as the physical media, since HDDVD is now defunct. I don't see how this is either a good or a bad point. It's just something they had to do really. You can't fit big games on DVDs any more.

     

    Required internet is stupid yes. Windows 8 style OS... not sure on that. If it's like the PC version then yeah bad move, if it's modified to suit gamepad/Kinect use then maybe that will be ok.

     

    BTW, the "leaked" 720 specs were supposedly part of an experiment into how gaming media reported stories without fact-checking anything, not sure if that was true or yet but if so we don't really know anything about it.

    • Like 1
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