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GTA IV Trailer Inflames Big Apple Politicians
GP writes "The GTA4 trailer isn't 48 hours old yet, but NYC politicians are up in arms because the game's setting, Liberty City, is a virtual version of the Big Apple." Obviously these guys never played GTA3, since it was also set in the "fictional" Liberty City, that also felt a lot like NYC.
MOD THE TROLL DOWN!!!
They're not up in arms. Some uppity reporter went to the Mayor and the council and said, "Hey, Grand Theft Auto is set in NYC. What's your response?" And neither reponse was particularly vitriolic. Much ado about nothing.
Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland.
I think I speak for all gamers when I say this would, indeed, be awesome.
[insert politician's name here] Blah, blah, blah! Grandstand, grandstand, grandstand! Outrage!
Two weeks from now, nobody will even remember this "outrage".
It's wasn't even worth reading. All the game maker has to do is release some statement to appease the politicians so that they don't go off and pass some knee-jerk legislation that'll cost a lot of taxpayer money when it gets challenged in court.
And no, these politicians do not deserve my respect because they haven't earned it.
brought us peed on dead guys on the street!
I read on Slashdot today that they're going to set the next Halo in Disneyland. Really.....It's true...Thats right, Slashdot.
This city is a completely unrealistic setting for a story about petty crime, gang violence and ethnicity-oriented organized crime. This is an affront to the citizens, and an insult to its elected officials who work hard to keep it clean. Liberty City is a finest city you will ever find, and for Rockstar to continue smearing it is abhorrent. Why can't they pick a genuine crime-infested hell hole, like New York?
Er, really? You think that huh?
Exactly what would lead you to write a sentence where you'd seriously think it's in question whether politicians who have no understanding whatsoever of video games would have played a particular one in the first place?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Hey, if you're going to have your game take place in a huge, crime-infested, urine-soaked hellhole, it just makes sense to model it after a real-life, crime-infested, urine-soaked hellhole!
New GTA missions include smoking in public, rampant ingestion of trans fats, distribution of black market foie gras, and preemptive spying on puppet people.
What kind of message does this send to the kids?
Leave the violence and wars up to them! You're too stupid to know fiction from reality, and besides, these videogames are interfering with the real-life violence politicians work so hard to bring to your TV sets every night.
does gta 4 feature "Kill the politicians" like vice city had it's "kill the haitians"?
That Peter Vallone not only knows of, but has apparently played Halo!
Seriously, this is a gigantic non-story. The two best pull quotes they could manage say nothing directly negative about the game at all.
...that we have movies that only reflect the great qualities of that city. If movies showed violence, cop killing, etc in N.Y., I am sure we would see equal outrage.
annoyance.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The liberty city in GTA III had a passing resemblence to NYC. If you knew where to look and read between the lines. GTA IV is absolutely blatant. You can't NOT see it, even if you tried. Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Chrystler Building, and Times Square all make an apearance in the trailer. These are iconic New York City to the world, and all of these things were missing in the earlier versions of the GTA franchise.
Love how that trailer is so obviously influenced by Reggio's cityscape stop motion work inKoyaanisqatsi combined with Philip Glass' music. Heh.
...it's as though they're suggesting there's crime in New York. Who would think of such a blatant lie?
How 'bout "Dead Stop News Day"?
Meanwhile, the house committee on "intellectual property" ponders how to implement a licensing regime for ephemeral copies of recordings each time they pass through a computer's RAM.
Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to bitch about rejected stories or (in this case) ones that have been pending for a week... couldn't help it this one time.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I live near Chicago ( Joliet ) and travel extensively through ought the USA. "Safest"? and New York do not belong in the same sentence in my opinion. To me, New York is just NASTY. I did a job just across the Brooklyn Bridge in Williamsburg at a public housing project. The guards there leave after dark for fear of being shot.
I think one of the reasons that New York politico's don't like the New York / Liberty City parallel is that it is just to close to home, and NYC really is very similar to the virtual world inside GTA.
Chicago is a much nicer, safer, cleaner and just better city than New York. Notice that game makers don't generally use it.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
You must be new here. Slashvertisements aree the rule, not the exception.
Thanks for the advertisement, we sure appreciate it.
*laugh all the way to the bank*
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
There was also a GTA game based on London. It was called GTA London.
Obviously these guys never played GTA3, since it was also set in the "fictional" Liberty City, that also felt a lot like NYC
It felt nothing like NYC. Seriously, Rockstar hasn't really done a good job capturing the feel of the cities they parallel. Vice City didn't feel like Miami either.
Set it in the Greater Toronto Area next time! GTA: GTA. ... anyone?
A journalist asks a politician about the inclusion of their voting jurisdiction in the latest instalment of one of the most controversial media franchises, and the politician say they are opposed to it out of fear of offending voters. This is what passes for news? GTA getting bad press is like politicians ducking bad press whenever they can, it is inevitable.
And what is so "unfortunate" about Take Two not wanting to comment? What are they going to say that we can not figure out on our own?
It is just a game for crying out loud. People NEED hobbies, especially if they spend their time attacking the hobbies of others. I guess that could be a hobby, but why not go fishing instead?
Game looks cool though.
I'm confused. I thought that GTA3 was Vice City and GTA4 was San Andreas. Wouldn't that make this GTA5? Obviously I've never played a GTA game.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
Which of these hipster scum is you?
rockstar tells me i have to have flash 8 installed to view the site.
BUT I have flash 9 installed.
IDIOTS!
Sorry, I haven't laughed that hard in a long time :-P
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I used to laugh at this type of suggestions before but this time it seems very likely to me that someone connected to Rockstar Games is deliberately trying to create some controversy about an already (in)famous title. This is as much of a non-story as there possibly can be and still its pretty clear some people are trying their best to create whatever shreds of controversy they can before the release. Seems like it has become the standard tactic before any big RockStar release lately.
/.
I am willing to bet anything that soon that assclown Jack Thompson will hear about the game and spew some shit out, and we will be discussing all that right here on
[Posting Anon because I have already moderated in this thread.]
From TFA: "The mayor does not support any video game where you earn points for injuring or killing police officers" this is highly controversial...
You just know that later today or tomorrow some ass is going to submit your rejected story and get it accepted.
If Rockstar had set IV in a virtual Boston, there's no telling /what/ the city government might have done. Detonate game boxes because they might be bombs, probably.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
... We (the / community) are watching you and your little submission-whore ways.
After Brazil was 'up in arms' over the Simpsons Brazil episode, the Simpsons have this conversation in the Barnacle Bay episode:
Lisa: Uck! This is the most disgusting place we've ever gone!
Bart: What about Brazil?
Lisa: After Brazil.
that's washington, dc.
Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland.
Seems like a good idea to me.
The mayor does not support any video game where you earn points for injuring or killing police officers.
That's OK. It's a video game, his "support" isn't required. A better question would be what kinds of killing Bloomberg actually does support.
Wasn't "Liberty City" the name used for New York in Deus Ex?
There was a game called "True Crime: NYC" that has frickin NYC in the title, that was a GTA-like game. I don't see anyone complaining about that.
Case closed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If Rockstar hadn't already convinced me that the new GTA was going to be fantastic, this has surely done so now.
"Obviously these guys never played GTA3, since it was also set in the "fictional" Liberty City"
um... or the first GTA, which was the original source of the GTA Liberty City? seriously, can no one remember anything more than 3 years ago?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
.... if you go to some of the danker pits of Tokyo at 2am, there is the very real danger that your shoes will get vomited upon by some drunk salariman staggering out of a bar because he can't even sit vertically anymore. The smell (booze plus smoke plus BO plus vomit) could also count as an assault on the senses. If you're a cute female, you might even get groped on the subway in the morning.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
You just don't get it, one of the levels would *be* the line. You kill eachother to get to the front, then you slaughter the bastards that made you wait to begin with... (hey, it'd be just like the flood levels in halo 1...)
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Waiting in line for an hour? I haven't been to Disneyland in a few years. Are the lines really that short?
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
...but I'm eagerly awaiting "Grand Theft Auto: Terre Haute, IN". It'll be hours and hours of dull fun! :P
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
Although there seems to be some misinformation in the article summary, from watching the trailer, it definitely seems that the Liberty City of GTA4 looks much more like NYC than that of GTA3. In the trailer you can clearly see the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron Building, the Metlife Building, the Staten Island Ferry terminal in Manhattan, the Queensboro Bridge, the Roosevelt Island Tram, and the Manhattan Bridge. I don't recall the former Liberty Cities as having any more than a spiritual resemblance to New York City.
Liberty City could also be a good double for Philly.
Hey, 90 days in 2007 and already 100+ murders. Don't count the "City of Brotherly Love" out...
Sure, Windows PCs dominate the market. But so do cheap toupees.
9-11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB!
Well, it's somewhat obvious that the news poster hasn't played GTA3 either, because if he had he'd have known it wasn't based in Liberty City.
It's kind of a rather massive thing to overlook that CJ left Liberty City to move to San Andreas for his mother's funeral. The first GTA was the one that was based in Liberty City (notwithstanding the "Liberty City Stories" mini that came out after GTAIII).
What century are you living in? I'm sure that most slashdot readers are white, but I'm surprised to see anyone use the word negro. It's not just a question of being politically correct: You can use the term Blacks if you find African-American to be too PC. It's an archaic term which suggests that you haven't spent too much time on the south side lately, where I certainly would never use that word. Some consider it a slur. Also, class is usually a better predictor of crime than race.
Dear Ivan Pereira, Michael Saul, Alison Gendar,
3 1/2007-03-31_pols_rage_as_vid_game_takes_shot_at_c ity-4.html
i ndex.html?q=True%20Crime was released. Surely you can guess where this game takes place. Yet, there was no public outcry regarding True Crime: New York City's setting.
"In previous incarnations [of the Grand Theft Auto series], players advanced through the game by killing cops, selling pornography to children and killing prostitutes." http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/2007/03/
After reading the above-linked article, I believe there are some discrepancies that need to be brought to your attention. I have extensively played Grand Theft Auto 1, 2, 3, Vice City, and San Andreas, yet I have never encountered any opportunities to sell pornography to children, nor is there is no way to advance in the game through killing police officers or prostitutes.
In every game in the Grand Theft Auto series, killing a prostitute within view of a police officer will cause him to try to subdue and arrest you. If you kill a police officer, more will come in squad-cars, attempting to stop you. If you continue to kill officers, SWAT teams will attempt to subdue you. Eventually, the National Guard will arrive to subdue you. When your character is subdued by law enforcement, he returns to the game outside of a hospital, without weapons and with a hefty monetary fine. Similar to real life, attacking police officers has consequences, none of which are good, and in the end, you can't win.
I am not a lawyer, nor am I making any sort of threat of legal action (I am in no way connected to Take-Two Interactive Software), but making false, harmful claims about a game's content sounds like libel to me. As I can not trust the New York Daily News to provide accurate, unbiased information, I will never purchase an issue, and advise my friends and family likewise.
If I am wrong about selling pornography to children, please tell me in which games, and in what location it is found. I would like to verify the content, and if it is present, I will gladly inform everyone who will listen.
To close on a slight tangent, Liberty City is modeled after New York City. On November 15, 2005 the video game True Crime: New York City http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/adventure/truecrime2/
Like it or not, video games have become an art form, just like movies. When such movies as "Escape from New York" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082340/ are allowed to exist, the average age of video game players is 33 http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.php , and games have ratings with more depth than movies http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp , why are games held to a different standard?
"Make cyberlove, not cyberwar!" -Khaed(544779)
So that's why George W is against tourism!
(in a southern drawl) "The threat of tourism is real... we have to stop the tourists before they strike again."
Crime dropped during the Clinton era because abortion was made legal 20 or so years before. This is talked about in the book "Freakonomics" You can get it on Amazon.
Libertas in infinitum
According to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, "it's despicable to glamorize violence in games like these, regardless of how far-fetched the setting may be". Jason Post, a spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg had this to say: The mayor does not support any video game where you earn points for injuring or killing police officers. He also mentioned that ever since Bloomberg took over the New York mayoral duties, auto thefts have dropped by 58% and so far this year, the city's murder rate is also down by 28%. In my opinion, NYC has much more to worry about than a video game. Maybe they should worry more about the real everyday violence and crime in their city instead of the fictiious violence in a fictious city in a fictious video game. They should have too much to do to be on youtube watching the damn traikor anyway.