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GTA IV
Movies, images, interviews; they’ve all been slowly coming out there over the last few months. Every single person always seems to hunger for new Grand Theft Auto information. I’m sure I don’t have a scoop for you if you are always up-to-date with the latest GTA IV news, but for those of you who don’t track down all the information, this could be an interesting piece of text! Oh, and I also have some information on the R*Games Social Club!

In GTA IV you will play as Niko Bellic, an Eastern European who is about 30 years old. He has come to Liberty City (for those of you without any GTA knowledge, roughly based on New York) to pursue the American dream. He visits his cousin Roman, who told him that life in Liberty City is great. Of course this turns out to be a lie and Roman wants you to work for him as a cab-driver. Roman is in debt with quite some people, which is why he persuaded you to come to him. You help him, which is how you enter the crime scene.

Niko Bellic

Liberty City is smaller than San Andreas, but much complexer, with more buildings you can actually enter. Don’t worry, it’s still pretty big! You have 5 areas that are based on the 4 areas in New York and New Jersey. In Liberty City we can find Broker (Brooklyn), Dukes (Queens), Bohan (the Bronx), Algonquin (Manhattan) and Alderney (New Jersey). I’ve read that you can visit Staten Island but, I’m not sure because there has been several different answers on this. Maybe it’s not in the real game, but it is in the multiplayer areas. Anyway, I suppose that Staten Island has a dock for your boat, so if that’s the case it’s definitely possible to visit it. I think it would be cool to climb the Statue of Happiness (Statue of Liberty) there. The city will of course feature Central Park (Middle Park in GTA IV) as well as several other familiar NYC spots.

The Statue of Happiness, can we visit this statue that’s holding a can? I hope so!

With a new and improved combat system it looks like they listened to the complaints of gamers on the previous games. You can choose between various shooting options (including an auto-lock-on and free aim) and there is a cover system (like Gears of War I think?). You can select a combination of auto-lock-on and free aim in which you auto-lock on enemies and you can re-adjust your aim to aim for the head. I really want to try that. Also shooting from cars looks like fun, as you first have to break your window before you can shoot from it :). More expensive cars will feature navigation systems, but of course the familiar radar from previous Grand Theft Auto games will be there too. Your cell-phone will also play a big role in this game. For instance you can call the police on your enemies if you’re alone and they attack you with a lot of men. On the other hand, pedestrians can call the police on you too if you commit a crime.

With a click of a button you can hide behind just about anything using the new cover system. Now lock on and kill!

Then there’s the new Rockstar Games Social Club. A website you can join and pair with your GTA IV game profile. You can compare this club to The Ultimate Guitar Hero Community which syncs to your game profile of Guitar Hero. The Rockstar Games Social Club keeps stats on all kinds of things too. The site will keep track of all kinds of statistics in the game including your criminal activity (keeping track of players all over the world, they can see what areas in LC are the most dangerous, cool!), leaderboards (keeping track on how far you’ve progressed in the story), a 100% club which will show who has reached 100% completion first, a hall of fame (who is the best at… well, several statistic things, could be anything really) and The Liberty City Marathon, which ranks the physical milestones players have reached from the amount of miles driven, walked, swam to things like the number of bullets fired and stunts jumped. Rockstar will launch additional special marathon based competitions here.

Rockstar has announced they will be using this Social Club for future games as well such as Midnight Club: Los Angeles

One of the things in the club that looks cool is Zit. This service works as follows: whenever you hear a song in the game that you like, but you don’t know the name of the song, you can simply dial a number with your in-game mobile phone and it will send it to your on-line profile where you can listen to it, or even buy it via Amazon MP3 (yeah smart). Anyway, you can sign up now for the club and it will then open when the game is released.

Zitt as advertised on Rockstar Games Social Club

As the title says, the game has gone gold and is on route to your local game-store. Did you pre-order? If not, do so! It will be released the 29th of April, and make sure you get the Special Edition including a custom metal safe deposit box for your game, a Rockstar keychain, a limited edition Rockstar duffel bag, production artwork book, soundtrack CD and a special packed version of the game:

The PS3 special edition (X360 will also be available of course)