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Rockstar Announces GTA San Andreas
Tickenest writes "According to a Yahoo-reprinted press-release, Rockstar Games has officially announced Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the latest in the GTA series. The press release continues: 'Developed by world-class designers Rockstar North, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will be available exclusively for the PlayStation(R)2 computer entertainment system and is expected to be in stores in North America on October 19, 2004 and in Europe on October 22, 2004.'" This confirms earlier rumors of (initial?) PS2 exclusivity and possible name for this much-awaited game.
Is this is going to be something new or just the GTA engine with some minimal improvements and a new locale? My guess is that it's the later, from what I remember GTA 4 was supposed to be an all-together new game.
Mike
Is this console exclusivity or won't it be reaching the PC at all. They've been vauge in the past and having just released 3 & 4 for the xbox I expect that cash will speak the loudest words.
Oh yeah, I hope the game is fun too.
blarg.
Do they make tools for building your own world yet? It would be fun to cruise around your hometown a la Doom.
Stay tuned for new sig...
No screenshots? Aw man...
GTA is fabulous in that in manages to blur the distinction between genres, something that many have tried but few have succeeded.
It's interesting, because I've always loved RPGs, but never been a fan of shooters or racing games. I would never call GTA an RPG, but I would call it a shooter/racing game - but I love it!
The weirdest thing for me is that it's actually making me appreciate consoles. I've been a PC game snob, and my first GTA was Vice City on the PC. I was convinced that superior graphics + smaller load time was better, but having just bought a PS2 with GTA 3 + Vice City, I'm starting to understand that some games are just *made* to be played on consoles.
My religion forbids the use of sigs.
Resident Evil: Codename Veronica was a dreamcast excluive... Code Veronica X came out for PS2 later, the X makes it a whollllle new game.. Now resident evil is a gamecube "exclusive"..
GTA3 & Vice City were PS2 "exclusives", until the PC versions, and later XBox versions came out.
The Final Fantasy series is PS2 "exclusive", nevermind that Crystal Chronicles thing.
It may be exclusive on PS2 for awhile, but I have no doubt a PC version, at least, will surface some time next year.
The only real exclusives are from the console makers themselves, Nintendo's franchise players, etc..
It just doesnt make sense for third party developers to lock themselves into one platform in such a fragmented market.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
One more request; I always like biking around in GTA:VC. Police bikes (maybe just take the PCJ 600 and add a siren and flashing light) would be cool.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
If XBOX 2 is released in '05 I wonder if the XBOX version of this would be for XBOX or XBOX 2...
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
Many of you will remember the brouhaha over GTA3: Vice City and the phrase "Kill all the Hatians."
It was a big stink - bigger than any of the stuff you thought would be worse (you can kill police, or anyone for that matter, in the game) that ended in Rockstar actually changing the game - they now only push a "patched" version to stores AFAIK.
I was wondering why we don't demand an apology from Francis Ford Coppola about the Godfather movies (to which the GTA series is often, for obvious reasons, compared). After all, there's a line in one about black people being animals "who have no souls."
Then again, that was said by a character, not by the screenwriter.
Isn't it interesting that sometimes we're capable of knowing the difference, and other times we're not?
People apparently love these "gotcha" stories. They have no relation to the facts, and are frightening in their ignorance about the basic issues. I mean, distinguishing between something a character is saying and something the game/movie's makers are saying is a pretty basic feat of human intelligence. Of course the context is everything - the context of the line in the game is a gang war (and "the hatains" are one of the gangs in the game). But when it's time to worry about how many people are watching your news program rather than the competitions, a scare story, a little race baiting, even when the facts aren't exactly straight, can slip through.
Especially when it's a video game.
Where are the defenders of all Hatians now? Probably advocating Edward Norton be locked up for being a Nazi (since he played one in American History X).
Apparently we still hold games to a different standard than movies, even when these games are obviously made for adults, and are rated accordingly. If the game were a movie you'd be laughed out of the room for talking about it like that.
And the amazing thing is that Rockstar has caved to this kind of idiocy.
So what's the point of all this?
If Rockstar feels they have to edit everything in their products to fly this far under the stupid-radar, then they will essentially be neutering their product - which succeeds in a large part on the basis of its funny, irreverent, transgressive "creative" (i.e. game design and story, which are, in this as in many cases, inextricable).
I'm wondering how San Andreas will stack up - if they still have their spine after the "Hatian Incident." If they PC'd and PG-13'd the series, I predict an adverse response from the audience, and at the "box office."
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
I would like to see more dynamics with the pedestrians. There's o so much they can do with the virtual city they have.
how about..
1. People getting in and out of cars? We only saw this to a limited extent(cops getting out of cars, carjackigns, etc). How about taxis that pickup/drop off people at random?
2. Different behaviors for different kind of peds? Some would be cowardly, some would be valiant, and some would be just downright crazy, all gang members aside.
3. yes, more indoor locations.
4. I haven't gotten to it yet, but looks like a lot of people got frustrated with "The Driver" mission. I got stuck several times of Death Row, but eventually figured out a plan: take the chopper to get to the junkyard, and fly him to the hospital. If you fly westward a bit, Diaz's Comet car-driving thugs get stuck(since they take a linear route) in the entry area to the junkyard.
Either way, I'll be buying it the minute it's availble.
Personally I'm hoping for more of a San Francisco setting myself. Maybe it's just been far too many cop shows, Bullit, Dirty Harry, etc. but San Francisco just seems more right to me. Not to mention the kind of insane stunts you could get on those hills as well as having a great deal more character to it.
... well, I don't really see a lot that you could easily do with it to make it seem as fun of a setting. Not to mention the fact that Rockstar seems very much into doing pastiches of film/tv (i.e. Vice City largely being Miami Vice thrown in with Scarface) there's a lot more ground to work with.
L.A.
As for the time... well, the 70s could be cool and replicate the same sort of retro-vibe they've been going for, but personally I'd like to see them try their hands at something even older. I mean, how about a late 40s, early 50s noirish L.A.-based setting that draws on Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Music would be radically different, but on the other hand so would the cars, clothes, weapons... everything would be a lot less derivative. Plus, I really can't remember the last time I saw something of this sort done from the criminal's perspective. It would be an interesting approach to things.
I really do not like how you have to play missions to open up parts of the city. This doesn't seem right.
Perhaps they could open the parts up after so much play time.
However, if they really want to the changing dynamic of landscape to match the dynamic of the story, they should change the landscape.
For example, I think it would be killer if part of the city suffered an earth quake and turned into a Terminator2-like chaotic warzone. Missions in those parts would be AWESOME.
The game is mostly a huge bunch of data on top of Renderware Platform. The difficulting in creating the game is the huge amount of artwork required. Unlike a racing game or DOOM, you need to fill an entire city where every building needs all four sides and the roof defined, plus needs a multitude of models so it looks good both close up and at a distance.
Does my bum look big in this?
Someone here is a lil bitter towards the wrong crowd ain't he? Xbox is dead? I don't think so. It must be the 100,000+ people playing PGR2 at a time that is giving you that assumption right? Not including 15 mil consoles sold worldwide?
Why don't you take a look at http://www.gamespy.com/stats/ and see if you can find more than 2 PC games with 50,000+ of players. You can't. Goodbye.
adding on
1.I would like semi tractor trailers that can jack knife in an accident
2. Multi player.
3. bring back the semi open ended mission structure of GTA 1, where you don't have to keep repeating the same mission over and over again if you can't quite pull it off.
4. more and bigger explosions (think tanker trucks, gas stations)
5. make the properties interact with each other (ie a mission that opens in one property only after you have purchased another
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Why is it that so many titles are released exclusively for consoles, and never released for the PC? Do the game companies NOT realize that the most hardcore, high spending gamers use the PC as their primary gaming platform? Granted, there are a lot (A LOT) of PC titles that don't do so hot. But that is because the genious creative minds behing all the great console hits aren't creating them. PC exclusive games are usually buggy as hell upon release, with poor game play and even more poor acting. If we could get some of these top developers to start releasing their console exclusive hits on PC, I think they would notice that we, as PC gamers, are just starved for good content. Our market SUCKS.
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
> Personally I'm hoping for more of a San Francisco setting myself.
From what I remember of GTA 1, there was a big red Golden-Gate-like bridge, so that may be what they have in mind. Also the "San" shared by "San Francisco" and "San Andreas" could be a clue.
> As for the time... well, the 70s could be cool and replicate the same sort of retro-vibe they've been going for, but personally I'd like to see them try their hands at something even older. I mean, how about a late 40s, early 50s noirish L.A.-based setting that draws on Chinatown and L.A. Confidential.
Good idea, but there's one problem: no stats list item that reads "Least favorite gang: Hippies".
I guess "beatniks" could work, though...
All those great chases would hardly happen for more than a block in SF. It may seem thrilling, the prospect of just missing a cable car or MUNI bus, but every block is a light or a stop, 25 MPH speed limits all over the place and grades which would wreck a car over 30 MPH. You could probably tear down a few streets, but eventually you run into some mess. Good for fantasy, sucks for reality.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Not to sound like a Microsoft salesman, but the GTA 3 double pack loads and looks alot better on the xbox. Theres also the cool feature of using music you ripped on the xbox too.
Am I misunderstanding you? Are you saying that Halo is an exclusive for XBox and EverQuest is an exclusive on PS2? Both Halo and EverQuest have been out for PC for a while. Mario, on the other hand....I'm not sure there's EVER been a Mario game for PC.
As posted on my website...
Ways to improve GTA:San Andreas
-Virtual killing is fun and all, but death is far worse than sex despite what american culture thinks. So cut out the murder, and focus on what will make the game great: Interactive Hardcore Pornography.
-If you want to leave the killing in, at least let us, well, dessecrate corpses. Maybe not in a wholly vile way, which would be neat, but at least let us drag the bodies around and build protective walls.
-Try to find a happy balance between Vice City and Animal Crossing. Have a calendar to go with the clock. That way we can see the seasons change. Drive a float recklessly in an Easter parade, build a snow fort out of the winter snow and our corpse walls. Maybe even let us get furniture for our missions so we can decorate our many properties. Leave out that HRA crap, though. That's just gay.
-If you don't want to go with hardcore porn, at least throughly develop the best whore engine ever. I know I've asked for this since GTA III, but the current whore engine is nominal at best. We should be able to proposition anyone anywhere. Stuck up bitch at the mall? You'd be surprised what she'll do when she finds out you're a millionaire. We should be able to pick up as many whores as our vehicles permits. Fill the vans, I say! This single girl car rocking is crap. Maybe I want some awesome girl-on-girl-on-girl-on-girl-on-Vercetti. Maybe I don't have the time or money for a full life point romp in a quiet romantic spot. Maybe I just want a quick $5 back-alley blow job to give me enough strength to finish the mission. Or maybe a quick handjob from that Malibu bar chick while I wait for my latest shipment.....Well, you get the idea.
-Enough with the RC missions. There's not enough to them to make them worthwhile. I mean, what's next? A kite mission?
-Screwdrivers? Seriously, we're murderers, not Richard Karn. I appreciate the fun new weapons, but I'm sure you can think of better implements of death than screwdrivers.
-And maybe build upon that drunk engine from the one Phil mission. Then we could at least have a half-assed excuse for the reckless driving and asking women at the mall for sex. It could also help boost our media rating and give us something to do at the bar other than use the sniper scope to zoom-in on the bartender's nipples.
GameCube owners are still banging their heads against the wall over the lack of quality games not made by Nintendo.
...) and you've got a great selection for the cube. Though I must admit that if there is one non-cube game that I wish I could play, it would be Vice City.
What about these:
XIII
Beyond Good and Evil
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Resident Evil
You add 3rd party games like the above to Nintendo's home-brewed specials (Zelda, Metroid, Mario,
Magnatune: Quality (DRM-free) MP3/FLAC/
I liked how in GTAVC they left a "legit" method to stunt your way past the bridge adjacent to the movie studios... ie using the speedbike to jump with the ramp truck over the wall and onto the bridge behind the invisible wall.
IIRC you could still get the tank at the army base, but you couldnt cross it to the other island unless you cheated.
The main advantage you could get was to collect all the green statues and have a better weapon selection at your hideouts (and the attack helicopter too on the pad near the beach).
I hope that R* continues with the habit of leaving lots of hidden and unintended stuff to do.
How about draw latencies? Sometimes, whatever optimization trick they used in the engine takes awhile to load a model/texture/whatever, and instead of pausing you for a split second, it'll choose to let you keep driving while it loads.
In VC (on my PC which was ok-but-not-great at the time), there's this one bridge that, if you're doing top speed in any decent car, you can't see the walls of the bridge until after you've hit one or made it onto the bridge. It looks like you can save a lot of time by cutting across the grass, but if you overshoot the turn, you hit a small wall of invisibility, and typically your car flies over it and into the river. Nothing in any game has pissed me off more than that bridge.
play the game Mafia. It a GTA3 style game based in 1930-40s New York. You are a cab driver who gets mixed up into doing jobs for the mafia. Great storyline and is really long. It also has an upbeat swing jazz soundtrack by Django Reinhardt.
God is real unless declared integer.
I remember Driver's engine assessed damage based upon how long you were in contact with another object, so that scraping the side of your car along a wall would at 5 mph would total you in about two seconds. Also, your car bounced up and down like some ridiculously over-sprung thing from a 70's show that had been tuned for jumping. Collisions between moving vehicles were handled with all of the realism of Rad Racer. And woe be to the driver who collided with the smallest twig.
Personally, I would love the Carmageddon engine, or something similar. Could you imagine jacking a dump truck, and getting money for smashing up all of the police cars? Or plumetting through mines outrunning rival drug dealers? Getting the turbo boost and ramming a barricade at the top of a hill to go sailing through the skies of Vice City?
The ______ Agenda
Yes, yes, you're being funny. But. San Andreas has no bridges in the original game. They'll have to come up with something new.
Even though I loved GTA3, it spent a LOT of time playing it, and don't intend to get Vice City if it's the same routine in a new city.
I never really could get into GTA3, so I don't know much about it, however some of the improvements I was made aware of had me thinking "How could anybody PLAY this game without that!?" Such as the motorcycles, those are -fun- and the Apache (or whatever, the attack copter) add a lot of fun when you just want to play around and do whatever...
One thing, is it just me? or does anyone else just *WISH* they would add back what they had in GTA, the original, where if you got killed or arrested it told you how many laws you broke, misdemeanors, felonies, murders, cops killed, etc...? I thought that added a lot to the game when you wanted to just screw around and see how long you could last with the law after you.. it'd be even more fun now with the SWAT, Feds and the armed forces chasing after you... I think they REALLY need to re-add that.
-matt