GTA To Appear On Xbox and Gamecube In 2004

AvantLegion writes "According to this IGN article (which, in turn, is cited from Yahoo! via the Investor's Business Daily), the Grand Theft Auto series will debut on Xbox and GameCube in 2004. A month after the next GTA game is released on PS2 (thus completing Rockstar's exclusive contract with Sony), the Xbox and Gamecube versions of Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City are supposed to hit the streets. No one is safe."

Comments

Progress?

[ChaoticChaos]

I love gaming, but the GTA line of games go wayyyyyyyyyy too far for me.

Taking a Golfer's club and beating him to death with it? Using a prostitute for health?

It's sad that gaming has descended into the most degrading human activities possible. Kids play these games by the boatload. Sad.

When I was growing up, I was playing Donkey Kong and maneuvering around some barrels. Now kids are getting their knob shined from some $5 slut.

This is progress?

Will GTA4 include realistically rendered STDs?????

Re:Progress?

[quandrum]

Actually, the funny thing about the prostitution in the game, I never knew about it till the news media told me. It's not required and, honestly, not very obvious.

As for the violence, that's the norm in games, movies, tv, books, music.... our culture.

Re:Progress?

[mapmaker]

Back when you were playing Donkey Kong, adults were playing Leisure Suit Larry. There have always been games targeted to adults that are not suitable for children. This is not new.

The GTA series of games (3 and up, anyway) is for adults. They have an M rating. They are not for children. When my nephews visit me, they are not permitted to play my GTA games. We rent a Spyro the Dragon game or something like that if they want to play a video game.

If more kids are playing adult-oriented games today than they did in the past, that represents a deterioration of our society's parenting skills. It is not a deterioration of the gaming industry.

Re:Progress?

[ChaoticChaos]

1) This is not a computer game. This is a console game. In other words, it is much more accessable to everyone.

2) I saw a study on one of the major gaming sites, and kids *are* playing this game by the ton. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

Re:Progress?

[NanoGator]

"Actually, the funny thing about the prostitution in the game, I never knew about it till the news media told me. It's not required and, honestly, not very obvious."

Another thing that's amusing this is that if you don't know what prostitution is, this game won't teach you.

Here's what happens:

- Pull up to a prostitute (who, btw, only looks like a prostitute because we're aware of what they are and how they stereotypically dress. To a child, she's just woman dressing up slightly fancier than other women.)

- She gets in the car.

- When you get into a secluded area, the car will shake. However, there's no movement inside the car. Turn the camera around, switch to 'cockpit view', do anything you can to peek inside and you see two people sitting in the car on their own side.

I find the media's attention to the prostitute aspect of that game ridiculous. It's okay to show 'Girls Gone Wild' commercials on TV, but we need to pick on GTA3 because we can sensationalize it and scare those parents out there who have no idea what the game is really like.

Re:Progress?

[misfit13b]

This is progress?

This is insightful? Don't like it? Don't play it and don't let your kids play it. The rest of us will make up our own minds. The game didn't sell millions of copies cuz people hate it you know.

Go figure that /. is the one place where a user named "ChaoticChaos" could be so stuck-up.

Now instead of replying, go ahead and mod me down.

Re:Progress?

[NanoGator]

"2) I saw a study on one of the major gaming sites, and kids *are* playing this game by the ton. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise."

What exactly is the harm in that? I've played GTA3 from beginning to end. I think it's fine for ages 13 and up. Despite what the media's made it out to be, it's really not that bad.

One of the chief complaints about the game is prostitution. They fail to mention, though, that if you don't know what a prostitute is when you play the game, you won't suddenly find out. The peak of it's graphic depiction is a rocking car. Look in the window and you see two people sitting there staring into space.

Another complaint is about being able to kill innocent people, and then making money for it. Fair point, almost. You can kill people if you like, but that's really your choice. It's not the goal of the game. (besides, wouldn'it be MORE twisted if the game didn't respond to people getting run over or hit with a bat at all? What kind of message would that send to children?) It doesn't help you in any way. If anything, this aspect of the game game teaches you a sense of right and wrong. If you beat somebody up, the cops will come get you. If you resist the cops, more of them will come. Before you know it, the entire city is against you. There's something to be said for reality here. If I kill somebody, my freedom is over. The 'money' you recieve from killing somebody is probably more a reward for taking the risk, rather than a reward for killing somebody. You have to kill a LOT of people before you can actually do anything with the money. It's kinda like getting paid 50 cents to piss off the cops. There's no benefit to murder, it only makes the game harder.

One of the other complaints about GTA3 is giving kids the urge to steal a car and try to outrun the cops in it. There might sort of be a point here. GTA3 lets you steal a car and then you can take a run at outrunning the cops, all while pulling off stunts etc. The level of physics of this game makes it seem easier than it'd really be, i.e. if you jump over a hill with your car and land on the roof, it doesn't collapse the car and kill you. Instead, if it rolls onto it's tires it can keep going. Yeah, on the surface, I can see that bothering people. However, when you play the game, you find out just how scary a police chase can be. You see, as mentioned before, this is a simulation of a city. There's all kinds of random elements that you just cannot always account for. No matter how good you are at this game, getting away from the cops is a flip of the coin that usually doesn't land in your favor. You ever see those police chases videos that Fox used to run? This game is very much like that. All it takes is for somebody to pull out in front of you to wipe you out. If this game teaches you anything, it's not that it's fun to outrun cops. It's that if you value your life at all, you're much better off being a good citizen. You'll live longer.

My biggest complaint about the media's attention on this game is that it's plain as day that they haven't actually spent any time playing the game. The news would have a much more detremental affect on your child than GTA3 would. They don't really understand what it's about, instead they take screengrabs and sensationalize it. As a result, people who have no interest in the game see these screengrabs and develop strange ideas about what it's about. You know that old saying "The camera never lies?" It's completely untrue. Cameras always lie. The entire point of a camera (or in this case, a screenshot) is to tell a story. Take a screngrab of the character from GTA3 clubbing a little old lady to death, and the story that gets told is that the game is about a guy running around killing innocent people.

I would advise anybody to not get their parenting tips from places like CNN or Donahue, especially when it comes to video games. Instead, seek the opinion of somebody who's actually played the game and can tell you what it's really about.

Re:Progress?

[weeboo0104]

Back when you were playing Donkey Kong, adults were playing Leisure Suit Larry

I was playing Leisure Suit Larry too. Adult content aside, that game really improved my typing skills!

Re:Progress?

[Hadlock]

and it's not even that popular of an option. i don't even own the game, and i've showed that health trick to at least 3 of my friends who own the game and they didn't even know it existed. it's one of those things you'd have to read about in the news to find out about it. one thing the news doesn't point out (often, at least) is that after your romp in the woods, you can kill the hooker and reclaim all of your $$$ and then some. either way, it's not somthing i'd be worried about my kids learning about; if they do learn about it, it'll be by word of mouth in school, somthing you can't control regardless, and if they do hear about it in school, they're probably nearing the age when they should start to learn about the realities of the world around them. I learned about sex on the playground in 3rd grade, two years before sex ed. I found my dad's "nudie mags" between the matresses in 5th grade, and I like to consider myself well adjusted. people don't give kids enought credit for taking what they learn with a grain of salt. ok i'm done ranting.

Re:Progress?

[NanoGator]

"And you get a wanted level, you either bribe the police or get your car painted. It's not hard to get rid of wanted levels. (That's a good thing to teach people, how to bribe police)"

Yeah. Next time a pair of flashing lights appears behind me, I'm going to look for a token on the ground with a police badge on it. That'll get them off my back. Failing that, I'll pull into Maaco where they'll instantly paint my car and the cops won't recognize me. Heh.

"Plus the goal of many missions is to kill people. They may not be innocent in the sense that they are merely pedestrians, but you do end up killing alot of people in the game, even if you are very careful not to kill "innocent bystanders".

Yeah, you kill bad guys. Which sounds bad, right? Sure. It also shows why being involved in a gang is such an awful thing. And as I said before, when ya kill innocent bystanders, you get more police attention.

Re:Progress?

[NanoGator]

"I think most people, even teens and younger can separate games from reality. But to assert that you do nothing bad in the game is just wrong. "

I didn't assert that. What I said was that it was blown out of proportion. The entire point that I was making was that this game was unlikely to turn people/kids towards becoming criminals. It'd likely have the opposite effect.

"The whole thrill of the game is that you are doing bad things and getting away with it. "

Not exactly. Nobody'd bother finishing the game if it were just that. The thrill of the game is that you can break out of the conventional scripted environment of most games and actually use creativity to complete a mission. The simulation is good enough that you can be a true legend to this game. It's a very rich game even if you strip out the darker side of it.

"Plus you can usually kill one or two pedestrians before you get a wanted level. And if you only have 1 star, you drive around long enough and it will disappear. So the penalty for killing innocent people really is not there. "

Not true. If you run over somebody in plain view of a cop, they're after you. Yes, you can get away from one-star easily. When you get to two stars, then police focus on you. Then it's on. You can easily draw paralells from real life here.

Re:Progress?

[dalamcd]

The remaining 0.1% would get just as easily turned on by a million other things, including hundreds if not thousands of literary "classics", many of which are mandatory reading in schools. As an example, the main character in a Mark Twain books has another character killed for telling a bad joke (IIRC correctly, anyway--the book in question is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). Movies, TV, books, games... a dead bird on the sidewalk, stepping on an anthill, shooting a BB gun... Too many things are just as likely as anything else to make a certain kind of mind go "hey, I can kill/maim/hurt/steal". Blowing any one of these out of proportion is just stupid.
Basically, anything can be a trigger. Whether it's going to be tripped or not at any point is impossible to determine.

None of this is to say "why bother trying?" but merely to go after the _cause_, which is not necessarily the trigger.

dalamcd

I'd be excited...

[NanoGator]

... if these games didn't appear on PC well before they will on XBOX/GC.

Hopefully Rockstar won't be dumb enough to sign another exclusivity contract, unless it's with the platform I already have, then it'd be okay. ;)

Re:I'd be excited...

[fatgraham]

Dumb? I'm sure sony made it worth their while. Not to mention concentrating on working on a single platform (or do they use renderware? I forget)
Also being limited to the largest user base cant be too bad. especially when your the main reason for increasing that userbase :)

Re:mmm, pointless violence.

[NanoGator]

"I can see this game being entertaining for the first week, but I've watched it being played and found myself quite uninterested, after having seen the various obligitory guns and stuff. I recommend renting the game before you buy it, unless you have a short attention span and are easily amused."

I can understand you not liking it, but the 'short attention span and are easily amused' comment is not really what makes these games appealing in the longer-term sense. What makes this game unique in contrast to FPS games is that it takes place within a simulation of a city, completely with traffic and all. This is in stark contrast to modern FPS games where you run around and shoot everybody AND anybody.

The replay value here is that much like life, what's about to happen in GTA is unpredictable. I have to say also that the missions are far more interesting than most of the action games you see. Things can always go wrong, and when they do, you can find yourself on the edge of your seat trying to figure out how to get out of this sticky situation. Mix the city-simulation in this and you've got yourself a rather engaging game that never plays the same way twice.

Frankly, I'd rather play a game with this type a variety over a "click, build, click, build, click oh-shit-he's-got-twice-as-many-units-as-i-do" strategy game that hasn't significantly improved since StarCraft. The funny thing is that strategy games could learn a lot from GTA3. If a C&C type game was set in a city simulation where the goal was to minimize collateral damage, and deal with the randomness that human behaviour generates, they could find themselves on top again. In the mean time, though, strategy has turned stale.

Framerate

[numberthree]

I'm no hardware scholar, but wouldn't porting the game to GameCube and X-Box speed up the framerate? My biggest issue with GTA Vice City was the blurry tracers you got on everything. It was like being on drugs. It sounds like a lot of work to beef up the polycount in the models in the game, but would the engine need to be re-written to feature a better frame rate?

Re:mmm, pointless violence.

[pythian]

I'm in total agreement with NanoGator here.

GTA3 is much more like an RPG than half of the RPGs that are out these days. The plot works, first of all. It may not be incredibly involved, but it's consistent and enjoyable.

The simulation aspect of the game is remarkable, and I'm eagerly awaiting Vice City on the PC to see any improvements. I've played the game most of the way through, and had a blast without the stereotypical senseless maiming and killing.

On the other hand, when I do act out in violence, I tend to do it with much gusto (; Sniping your way up to a 4 or 5 wanted level and trying to escape entertains me from time to time.

In essence, I actually play the role of the character, and that's what a role-playing game is all about. They're certainly not about stats and numbers, but most people tend to think so, heh.

Exactly!

[neurostar]

...is for adults. They have an M rating. They are not for children. When my nephews visit me, they are not permitted to play my GTA games. We rent a Spyro the Dragon game or something like that if they want to play a video game.

Exactly! This is what people need to realize. It isn't the responsibility of the game devs, govnernment, or any group to censor games, movies, songs, etc. It is the responsibility of the parents/legal guardians to ensure that the children in their care aren't watching/doing/listening-to things they shouldn't.

neurostar

Re:you must not have played it

[angle_slam]

Agreed. There is a huge difference between watching your friends play it and playing it yourself. I'll admit that, when I first got the game, the joy of being able to just go anywhere and kill people was fun. But that gets old. That's where the missions come in.

Regress

[stefanlasiewski]

Back when you were playing Donkey Kong, adults were playing Leisure Suit Larry.

Yeah, I remember the part when Larry beat the shit out of the cop and stole his gun... use the gun to shoot the brains out of the creep who stole your drugs, and then run over the prostitute after receiving her services.

Oh wait, that wasn't in Leisure Suit Larry...

Re:With Sony exclusivity ending...

[AvantLegion]

The only way I see multiplayer working in a GTA game is a sort of multiplayer co-op mode. Going around in some sort of kill-each-other deathmatch would NOT work well with that game engine, but a co-op mode where two people work missions together could be VERY interesting. One chucks a grenade over the wall, the other mows 'em down as they come running out. Or one guy's driving with some sort of sensitive cargo, and the other guy's running interference against cops or gangs or whathaveyou. THAT would have potential.