Well, this is the last post of 2004, a strange year really. The GTA Place staff would like to wish you all a Happy New Year!

See you in 2005!

The GTA Place would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas, and we hope you are all enjoying the festive season. Hopefully you all got what you wished for, we welcome you to wish others a happy Christmas in this thread.

2004 has been a great year for the GTA series, with the release of San Andreas on the Playstation 2, and GTA Advance for Gameboy Advance. It was great bringing you all the latest news and screenshots.

Looking to the future, the year 2005 will surely be a great year too, we will have the release of San Andreas on Xbox and PC. Which will be awesome with all the mod makers creating some great stuff for the game.

Thank you for all your support over the last year, it's been fantastic, this will probably be one of the last posts this year. We hope we can provide you with all the latest news much faster throughout 2005.

Thank you!

You are probably all aware that quite some time ago Rockstar made the original GTA optimized and downloadable from their website, well now they have done it with GTA2. That's right, more details below.

Yes, GTA2. The 2nd proper installment in the Grand Theft Auto lineage, originally released in 1999. The one that introduced the concept of multiple rival gangs vying for your attention and criminal work-for-hire.

The Yakuza, Scientists, Looneys, Rednecks, Zaibatsu, Russian mob and Hare Krishnas. Gouranga!

This late 20th century top-down classic is now available to you all in the form of a 350MB downloadable .zip, courtesy of Rockstar Games.

So this is your Christmas present from Rockstar Games. Head on over to the Rockstar Classics page and fill in the form and follow the instructions in order to download it, I will be downloading my copy in a minute. Obviously you'll need a broadband connection or faster to download this as it's over 350MB!

Rockstar today announced on the official site they are holding a contest where the top prize is one of 5 San Andreas BMX's. Runners up will also receive a load of San Andreas. As usual though this is only open to residents of the United States and those who are over 18 years of age or have parental consent. Good luck to anyone who enters!

Contest: San Andreas BMX Contest

You probably haven't seen Switch around a lot since he left GTAGaming, but as he moved here he also got a new job in real life so he is now busy with that, so he probably wont be around until San Andreas is out on PC, where he will most likely be making mods for that.

Anyway since leaving GTAGaming Switch has made 3 mods, one of them, the San Andreas Bomber is already in our database but the other two he never got round to adding, but today I have added them for you to download, first of all we have the San Andreas Parachute:

Enjoy the mods, here are the links to the downloads:

San Andreas Bomber, San Andreas Parachute and RC UFO Raider

Some new cheats have been found and released and we have now updated our cheats page with these, there's quite a few, 12 in fact, and some very cool ones too.

Here are the new cheats, you can view the whole lot on the Cheats page.

Mega Jump:

(CJ can now jump incredibly high)

Up, Up, Triangle, Triangle, Up, Up, Left, Right, Square, R2, R2

Mega Bunny Hop on bike:

Triangle, Square, Circle, Circle, Square, Circle,Circle, L1, L2, L2, R1, R2

Spawn Parachute:

Left, Right, L1, L2, R1, R2, R2, Up, Down, Right, L1

Spawn Monster:

Right, Up, R1, R1, R1, Down, Triangle, Triangle, X, Circle, L1, L1

Spawn Stuntplane:

Circle, Up, L1, L2, Down, R1, L1, L1, Left, Left, X, Triangle

Spawn Quad:

Left, Left, Down, Down, Up, Up, Square, Circle, Triangle, R1, R2

Spawn Hydra:

Triangle, Triangle, Square, Circle, X, L1, L1, Down, Up

Spawn Vortex:

Triangle, Triangle, Square, Circle, X, L1, L2, Down, Down

Tank-like Vehicle:

(Makes the car your driving like the Rhino, destroys anything it touches)

L1, L2, L2, Up, Down, Down, Up, R1, R2, R2

Maximum Fat:

Triangle, Up, Up, Left, Right, Square, Circle, Down

Maximum Muscle:

Triangle, Up, Up, Left, Right, Square, Circle, Left

Beach Party:

(Bikini babes/beach people everywhere, CJ in shorts and flipflops)

Up, Up, Down, Down, Square, Circle, L1, R1, Triangle, Down

GTA San Andreas XBOX and PC version release dates have been confirmed by Take2 in their latest press release.

New York, NY December 16, 2004 - Rockstar Games, the world-renowned publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), is pleased to announce that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is making its way to the Xbox® video game system from Microsoft. Developed by world-class designers Rockstar North, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the Xbox® and PC will be in stores in North America on June 7th, 2005 and in Europe on June 10th, 2005.

Just to reiterate, the proposed release dates for San Andreas on XBox and PC are:

North America: June 7th, 2005

Europe: June 10th, 2005

Now please stop sending us emails about release dates, they are above and I will put this in the announcements box later for convenience.

In another press release posted at the same time it mentions of Rockstar making a few games for the Sony PSP, could GTA be one of these? No titles are confirmed so we'll just have to wait.

Additional products planned for fiscal 2005 from Rockstar include a new console title based on a proven brand from Rockstar's internal studios, titles based on two of Rockstar's premier brands for Sony's highly anticipated PlayStation®Portable platform (PSP™) and the release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in Japan.

Link: Take2 Press Releases - PC and XBox release, Financial Results

SpikeTV have awarded San Andreas the Game Of The Year Award. In addition to this it one two other awards, "Best Action Game" and "Best Performance by Human Male" (Samuel L. Jackson).

Congratulations to Rockstar and the whole Grand Theft Auto franchise which has proved to be an unmitigated success.

ABC13.com have reported on a rather amusing story entitled "Robbers scared off by Playstation game get jail time". In Santa Fe a group of criminals were about to burglarize a home whilst pointing a gun at the three kids when they heard audio from a Grand Theft Auto videogame and thought the police actually had them surrounded.

The children happened to be playing a video game called Grand Theft Auto at the time. The game has dozens of random police scanner messages, which blare out calls such as "This is the police! You’re surrounded!" Believe it or not, Wilson says the burglars heard that message and thought police were outside the door waiting for them.

Now it's when you hear funny stories like this you realise just why America is stereotyped as being a 'dumb nation' by other countries.

And hey we'll probably see this on America's Dumbest Criminals

You can read the full article here

Also sorry if the site wasn't working for you in the last few hours or so but I wasn't around to do anything about it.

Just a reminder that the 8CD box set containing most of the songs from San Andreas was released a couple of days ago throughout Europe and released yesterday across America. Links to Amazon are above if you would like to order yourself or someone else a copy in time for Christmas.

Jacob asked me if we could host his Halo mods last week and I've only just got round to adding them so sorry bout that Jacob

Anyway they're all pretty good, especially if you play Halo, I'm sure you'll enjoy them.

Enjoy, there were also a couple of other downloads I added.