Out of the millions of people eligible for a refund of GTA San Andreas after the Hot Coffee scandal, less than 3000 people have come forward to collect their money.

After disabled, inaccessible sex scenes were found to be able to be reactivated by a third-party modification a couple of years ago, this resulted in public outrage, widespread condemnation and a handful of lawsuits being thrown at Rockstar's parent company Take Two. In 2007 they agreed to exchange any v1 copy of GTA San Andreas for a 'fixed' v2, or offer a refund of if they have proof that they purchased v1.

Now months later, only 2,676 people have claimed their refund, in spite of millions of individuals having the right to a payout. Take Two were shocked at that result, and the plaintiffs' lawyer is "disappointed", and doesn't understand why people don't care. This has prompted people to claim that the case was blown out of proportion, and shouldn't have been brought to court at all.

So it turns out that people perhaps are more tolerant of sexual content after all, or realised the effort you had to go through to access the content. Perhaps the all that controversy, outrage and hysteria was just some lawyers trying to cash in on the most successful game franchise ever.

Source: NYTimes

Rockstar Games has released patches today for Grand Theft Auto IV for both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game. These patches fix the issues they have identified for each system, specifically multiplayer connectivity issues including freezes during certain modes, continuation when players leave matches, and bugs within races and race lobbies.

1. Fixed an issue where players were unable to enter or exit vehicles in GTA Race.
   
2. Fixed an issue where scripted vehicles were causing games to unexpectedly crash.
   
3. Improved reliability and frequency of PS3™ online leaderboard updates.
   
4. Fixed a rare hang some players encountered when moving from a Race or GTA Race lobby into gameplay.
   
5. Fixed a hang that would occur when players were switching teams during the countdown in the lobby.
   
6. Fixed an issue where players were able to get ridiculously high scores from Cops 'n Crooks matches.
   
7. Changed GTA Race and Race so that the last player remaining always receives a reward of 0.
   
8. Fixed an issue where spectating players would prevent the game from finishing.
   
9. Fixed an issue where players were unable to spectate in Round 2 of Cops 'n Crooks games.
   
10. Changed countdown timer in lobby so that it no longer resets when new players join a game.
    
11. Changed the kick option so that kicked players are no longer brought back to single player.
    

You'll be prompted to download the patch next time you're signed into Xbox Live or the PSN and start up GTA IV.

Related Link: GTAIV Patches @ R* Social Club

As news is obviously pretty slow in the GTA universe for the moment, while many of you hope and pray for a PC release announcement from Rockstar Games, we're going to being making occasional news posts about interesting creations made by members of the community.

Today we received this great realistic rendering of Niko Bellic created by pixeloo, a DeviantArt user, click the thumbnail below to see the high res version. The image was, according to his blog post, made for Official Playstation Magazine UK and can be seen in the current issue.

pixeloo has gained quite a lot of attention for his "untooned" images, if you haven't seen any of his other work be sure to check out his DeviantArt gallery (the Stewie Griffin, Mario and Homer renditions are pretty good, if a little creepy).

Thanks to Alfred for emailing about this, and also bigjim for posting on our forums.

GamesRadar have recreated the famous introduction scene from The Naked Gun using Grand Theft Auto IV, and the result is pretty good, check out the embedded video below to see it. And for the people who've clearly never seen a good comedy before, the original is below that.

And for anyone who wouldn't know The Naked Gun even if Leslie Neilsen popped up and smacked them in the face, here's the original opening sequence in all its glory...

Take Two have today released their Second Quarter Fiscal 2008 Financial Results, revealing that they've already managed to sell over 8.5 million copies of Grand Theft Auto IV since it's release just over a month ago. Along with all the stats and other data was a small statement saying that "in order to provide a better balance in Take-Two's release schedule", the first episodic content for Grand Theft Auto IV has been pushed back and will now be released during the first quarter of Take Two's Fiscal 2009 year - that means somewhere between November 1st 2008 and January 31st 2009 - still allowing for a possible Christmas release.