Rockstar Games have just released the second official trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV!

Grab it from the official site, Yahoo! or YouTube while you can. Direct links to the trailer files including the HD version can be found on our trailers page.

The trailer shows more gameplay and animation; including speech, driving and weapons fire - the characters also appear to have fingers for the first time. Some of the new effects include Niko holding onto the back of a truck, and hanging from the skids of a helicopter. Also, some of the trees in the trailer appear to be brown, another indicator that seasons will play a part. Reflections can also be seen, including in a wing mirror.

Several references to previous GTA games can be seen, including a Binco clothes shop and graffiti of El Burro. A remodelled Stallion can also be seen being driven in the trailer.

All footage in this trailer is captured in real-time on a next generation gaming console, so it is a true indicator of what playing GTA IV will be like. It is running on R.A.G.E. (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine) using Euphoria - a fully procedural animation package created by NaturalMotion. As we found out yesterday, the song in this trailer is by New York City based band The Boggs and is titled "Arm In Arm (Shy Child Remix)"

A transcription of the trailer is available on Grand Theft Wiki. You can also discuss this trailer in our forums. A total of 50 screen captures have been uploaded, see them here.

Stay tuned!

Microsoft have let loose the GTA IV theme and picture pack for Xbox 360 owners. Good news is that both are completely free to download!

Just go to your Marketplace blade -> New Arrivals -> Grand Theft Auto IV ... and there they are.

I don't have my capture card set up, but I just snapped a few photos of what they look like, apologies for the poor quality but see my flickr photostream for:

picture pack, guide button, xbox live blade, games blade, media blade and system blade.

In another preview from Yahoo, the music which will be in today's release of trailer number two was revealed to be "Arm In Arm (Shy Child Remix)" by New York City-based band The Boggs.

The idea was to show a real street-level view of Rockstar's version of the city with a band that belongs there. To that effect, you'll be seeing even more licensed music from all genres and time periods, since the soundtrack team is no longer confined to a specific decade.

The preview also talks about how the passage of time might affect the game, and the trailer indicates this in subtle ways.

We'll find out more about this when the trailer is released at 12:00 EDT today, that's 5PM in the UK.

UPDATE: I would imagine for many of you this is the first time you've heard of this band. They appear to be an Indie / Experimental band and you can hear a few of their songs on their MySpace and Virb profiles. Both have the song "Arm In Arm", albeit a different remix, but this is the sort of thing you can expect to hear in the trailer.

Rockstar have updated the official site with two brand new screenshots of Grand Theft Auto IV. Check them out below.

Link: GTA4 Screenshots, official site

Microsoft sent out a press release earlier confirming a couple of things. Firstly, The second GTA IV trailer, "Looking for that special someone", will be available on the Xbox Live Marketplace tomorrow, shortly after it's debut on RockstarGames.com and Yahoo! Xbox 360 owners will of course be able to download this free of charge.

Secondly, Microsoft also added that they would be offering an exclusive GTA IV theme for 360 owners to download, as well as gamer pictures.

To celebrate the release of the second trailer, Xbox 360™ gamers will be able to download exclusive Grand Theft Auto IV theme and gamer pics from Xbox LIVE® Marketplace.

It was not mentioned if these will be free of charge or not, however, based on many other games, it is likely there will be a small charge for them. We'll let you know if we get more info on this.

So far, Yahoo's GTA IV content which they hyped up has been pretty abysmal. Today they redeemed themselves with the interview they promised with Dan Houser, Vice President of Creative at Rockstar Games. Now there's unfortunately no new GTA IV info divulged, although there are a couple of interesting points that are brought up. When talking about why Niko has come to America, and how Roman has lied to him, Houser added:

Niko claims to have left Europe simply for the adventure of America, but he is also looking for someone... and running away from some recent mistakes.

Obviously this someone is anonymous to us all at the moment, but perhaps tomorrow, things will be different, when this character will (presumably) be revealed in the second trailer, "Looking for that special someone".

Stay tuned for more info!

Link: Dan Houser interview @ Yahoo!

Rockstar have released some great high res images of what you'll be getting in the special edition of Grand Theft Auto IV. I don't need to say any more, just click the thumbnails below.

I guess all true GTA fans will be buying this.

Thanks MishoM.

The SA:MP Team have fixed some minor bugs with in-game weather and have released v0.2.1 of their multiplayer client. I've updated the file page so you can (re)download SA-MP from here.

Link: SA-MP.com

The latest podcast from the 1UP team has confirmed that GTA IV will have 3 trailers, which comes as absolutely no surprise as the majority of the previous GTA games also had 3 trailers. The podcast has John Davison talking about what he saw in an updated demo of GTA IV when he visited R* in New York recently. He said that the demo still remains focused on Broker, which is the same area previewed in earlier demos, however it's been updated slightly. GTAForums user Rob has embedded the podcast into this YouTube video below so you can easily listen to it:

Link: 1UP Yours

Thanks Gycu and Rob.

A press release sent out by Yahoo! last night caused a bit of confusion as it claimed to being premièring the second GTA IV trailer on Thursday. We now know this is not the case, as both Rockstar and Yahoo! will have the trailer at exactly the same time. Hopefully this will ease the pressure on Rockstar's servers and enable us all to actually see the trailer as soon as it's up this time.

Also in the press release was word of exclusive content for Yahoo! beginning June 22nd (today). Nothing has yet appeared on their site, the following quote from the press release shows their announcement:

Rockstar Games and Yahoo! Games will launch the world-premiere trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV in high-definition.

As the first official full trailer release for the game, fans get an exclusive peek at action-packed game footage from Grand Theft Auto IV.

Leading up to the trailer premiere, Yahoo! will celebrate Grand Theft Auto IV with special content including an interview with the creators behind one of the most popular video games of all time and exclusive screenshots from the forthcoming game.

Get exclusive Grand Theft Auto IV content all week beginning on June 22, 2007

Supposedly the content actually starts on Monday (June 25th), but hopefully we'll be getting a few goodies from Yahoo!, perhaps some new info, screenshots and such.

You can check out the site at GrandTheftAuto.Yahoo.com, be sure to keep checking back here as we'll update you whenever new information is posted.

Thanks Charger and Adriaan.

Rockstar have confirmed the exact time for the release of the second GTA IV trailer "Looking for that special someone" in their latest broadcast. It will be going live at 12:00PM EDT. That's going to be 5PM in the UK, 6PM for most of Europe, and 2AM in most of Australia, of course your time zone may vary.

So, get ready for the Internet to explode once again as every single GTA fan in the world attempts to download the trailer at the same time.

Good news for those of you who play San Andreas Multiplayer, or SA:MP as it's better known. The team have released version 0.2 of their popular multiplayer mod, after having had quite a few beta tests over the last few months.

This version fixes various bugs and adds a number of new features. For example, sniper rifles and rocket launchers are now synched, there's now tanks and trams too, plus many more improvements which you'll find for yourself.

You can download SA:MP v0.2 from our own mirror here. Or you can visit the SA-MP website for more downloads including server files.

In related news, we're hoping to roll out our new downloads database system within the next couple of months some time, or maybe even before then. You can read about that in this topic on our forums.

Link: SA-MP.com

If you're wondering why it seems that only the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV is getting downloadable content, the reason is possibly because Microsoft have paid a whopping fifty million dollars for it.

Stock analysis website SeekingAlpha have referenced last weeks press release from Take-Two regarding it's financial results and a conference call in relation to that, where it is revealed that the million "Deferred revenue" figure is actually coming from Microsoft, who will pay Take-Two million for one downloadable episode in March '08 and the other million later on in fiscal '08 for the second episode. We can assume from this that these are likely to be the dates when we will actually receive the content, although it's not certain.

It's a long article to read in full but this is the quote which confirms the above:

as it relates to the deferred revenue chunk associated with the episodic content on X-Box 360, you can see that million of that moved into short-term deferred. Could you give us any sense of when that’s going to hit the P&L? Will we see million at one time and then the second 25 or will it be a slow bleed?

The first 25 is for the first episodic content package that’s supposed to go out and that is in March of '08. That’s why it moved into current because it’s in the next 12 months. The second 25 will be for the second episodic, the episode, and that will be later in fiscal '08.

This screenshot below shows part of the financial results with the deferred revenue figure being talked about above: (in '000s)

What we're trying to work out is where exactly Microsoft are getting their money back and profiting from this. Clearly they are doing this to help sell consoles as well as copies of the game, but even then, not everybody is going to buy the content, and assuming it will be priced at 800 points (that's ) - 5 million people would have to download the content just for Microsoft to break even. The actual price is not yet known and it's very possible that it will cost more than this.

Speculation on this subject began back in September 2006 when Microsoft first announced that the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV would receive episodic content. Recently, in the past week, many gaming sites have picked up on this again, after Take-Two released their financial results for the second quarter. The press release simply stated that episodic content would arrive on the Xbox 360 sometime during 2008, with no mention of the PS3.

Today, a Take-Two spokesperson has confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that the episodic content planned for Grand Theft Auto IV will be exclusively released for the Xbox 360.

a company representative has told GI.biz, "The Grand Theft Auto IV episodic content is exclusive to Xbox 360."

This comes as yet another huge blow to the PlayStation 3, which is doing appallingly compared to its rivals, the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The second Grand Theft Auto IV trailer will be hitting the Internet on June 28th!

It will be titled "Looking for that special someone". The splash page on the official website has now been updated to reflect this new trailer's arrival. Also included in the email from the R* mailing list was one new artwork which you can view in full by clicking the thumbnail to the right.

Expect another round of widespread server crashes in 17 days!

Link: Official GTA IV Website

Lesser known gaming website Kikizo has come up with an incredibly detailed preview of GTA IV which they published recently, seems like we completely missed it. Like all the other previews we've seen recently in magazines and on the Internet, Kikizo received the same demo, however they picked up on a lot more of the intricate details that we missed out on. I've highlighted a few points of interest from the article below, some we may have covered already, but perhaps not in so much certainty or with clarification from Rockstar.

• According to Rockstar, the AI, physics, character models, textures, pedestrian dialogue and music are all still in development and placeholder to some extent - but "it all looked pretty damn smart". One pedestrian quote Kikizo picked up on was "Do you know in Italy they get three hours for lunch?!"
  
• Clarification on the size of Liberty City is brought up, Rockstar's Hamish Brown told Kikizo: "On the one hand you've got horizon views, on the other you've got many layers of a city built upwards towards the sky. It's definitely the biggest single city we've ever done. That city isn't going to be the size of San Andreas, because that would be absurd, but if you take into account the level of verticality of the city, the number of buildings you can go into, and the level of detail in those buildings, then you're talking about a game that is similar to San Andreas in terms of scope."
  
• Some people have claimed that the game will take 100 hours to complete, Rockstar also commented on this saying "We honestly don't actually know at the moment, how many missions and how long it's going to take to complete the game, but there's an awfully large number of things to do - probably more than ever before - we can safely say that."
  
• While Niko was driving a car, Kikizo noted that "A great piece of funky jazz music (Fela Kuti - Sorrow Tears & Blood) played on the bassy car stereo" which really added to the vibe.
  
• Whether or not this will end up in the final game is not known, Rockstar aren't able to confirm what licensed and unlicensed music there will be, only that it will span decades and cover numerous genres.
  

You may have read on a number of gaming websites over the past week or so, news that a financial analyst has suggested that Rockstar should delay the release of Grand Theft Auto IV by up to two weeks so that it is not so close to the release of Microsoft's Halo 3 (due for release in late September). According to this Kikizo article, they contacted Rockstar for comment who then contradicted the by confirming that GTA IV is indeed on schedule for release in late October - you can now breathe a sigh of relief.

I would definitely suggest you read the Kikizo preview in full as it is very detailed and exactly what the hardcore fans like yourselves want to read.

Thanks to J.Combs for sending this in.