We reported on San Andreas coming to Japan back in November, now we're a few days late here, but you can blame that on the fact we don't know anyone who speaks Japanese, and the fact there was no press release in the Western world. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released in stores across Japan last week, on Thursday, 25th January to be precise, that's according to the official Japanese GTASA site itself. Rather surprisingly it seems to be doing quite well considering how previous iterations didn't prove to be particularly popular among the Japanese - German gaming site GameFront.de reported last Friday that first day sales figures show around 200,000 copies were shifted.

The official Japanese GTASA site has been carrying a few news updates in the past month, mainly to announce Capcom's promotional events and parties for the game, in addition to wallpapers and the official trailer release. There's no need to start digging around the Japanese site looking for new content though - the wallpapers and trailer are the exact same ones we were presented with 2 and a half years ago, albeit with Japanese subtitles.

The game is rated Z by CERO, the Japanese equivalent to the ESRB. This is the highest rating a game can achieve in Japan and is equal to the AO rating seen on American games, and basically means the game should only be played by persons aged 18 and older.

Link to official 'announcement': GTASA.jp (On the News page - in Japanese)

Well it's been a while since I have made any mods for GTA and lately I have not been too sure that there would ever be any more. I have been working as tech support for a major car and home audio company, playing a lot of Runescape, FFXI online and I also like messing around in Second Life as well as everyday family life with my wife and my 2 kids. Even with all these things that tend to come before my modding and modelling I still think about you all everyday. So finally I have put away a little time and made all of you a nice little mod that I like to call The Granite Maul. The idea for the granite maul came from Runescape and the lame model of an ugly granite maul which is in that game. I decided that since I could not modify the one in Runescape to make it better that I would just make one from scratch for San Andreas. To all the staff at TGTAP and to fans all over the world sorry for just disappearing.