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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."

7 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Progress? by mapmaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Framerate by numberthree · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

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    This guy. This $#!%^ guy.
  3. Re:Progress? by ChaoticChaos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Progress? by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

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    "Derp de derp."
  5. Re:Progress? by misfit13b · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Progress? by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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.

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  7. Re:Progress? by dalamcd · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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

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    moer liek CELtroid prime!!@1!