Houser Brothers pick up "Entrepreneurs" award

Gamasutra.com has compiled a list of 2008's top developers. Obviously Rockstar picked up an award; second place for "Best Industry Entrepreneurs" category.

King of Hearts: The Housers, Rockstar

Sam and Dan Houser understand what very few others in the game business have managed to perfect -- that a combination of controversy and well-executed, stylish games add up to sales gold.

Sure, one might say that Take-Two division Rockstar Games overeggs the "rebel" card, but Grand Theft Auto IV's massive initial sales -- and a robust slate of other franchises, including Bully, Midnight Club, and Max Payne -- mean that the brothers continue to power much of their parent company's buzz and profits.

Unused Screenplays Grand Theft Auto: The Movie

LatinoReview.com have released the 2008 Hollywood black list, which is a collection of 250 film executives favorite scrips that were written or somehow related to 2008, however will not be released during this calendar year. Below is Grand Theft Auto by Jason Dean Hall, which is a remake of the 1977 film "Grand Theft Auto"

GRAND THEFT AUTO by Jason Dean Hall

“Facing foreclosure on his repo yard, a young ex-con resumes a life of crime only to get blamed when his uncle’s coke deal gets hijacked. Caught in double crosses between Russian mafia, Yakuza, and the ATF, the young ex-con kidnaps a crime boss’s daughter and steals car after car on a Vegas bound suicide mission to retrieve the stolen drugs.”

AGENT Creative Artists Agency –Jay Baker, Greg McKnight

MANAGER Management 360 –Darin Friedman

UNAVAILABLE. Fox Atomic. Stuart Parr, Roger Corman, Paul Rosenberg producing.

 

The Lost and Damned - 3 New Screenshots

Microsoft have released a micro-site, along with 3 new screenshots, for the upcoming GTA IV DLC "The Lost and Damned".

If you want to take a look at the new micro-site then head on over to Xbox.com.

Nvidia release GeForce 180.84 Beta Revision 3

Following todays post about ATI's new Catalyst drivers Nvidia have released another set of beta drivers, 180.84 Revision 3. These drivers should counter some of the visual issues with GTA IV PC but as they are beta drivers lease be careful when installing them.

The latest drivers can be found on guru3d.com.

New San Andreas and GTA IV mods

Over the last weeks a few GTA IV mods have surfaced, however since the game has only just been released modding is still in it's infancy but two mods that I think deserve a mention are the ExplosionFX and Real car names mods by bobbster_uk.

The ExplosionFX mod (Screenshot shown below) makes GTA IV's explosions even more glorious and the Real car names mod, as you can guess, replaces the car names with those of their real-life counterparts.

San Andreas still has a strong following online and there are a welath of mods available for it. A recent favorite of mine is the Design your own Mission mod, which gives you the opportunity to create your own complex missions using the mods intuitive interface.

And the final mod that I want to mention is the Real Weather mod by NTAuthority. The Real Weather mod downloads the weather for your current location every 2 minutes and changes the in-game weather to reflect it!

New ATI Drivers Released

For those of you who are using ATI graphics cards and are having problems with GTA IV I reccommend downloading and installing the latest drivers for your card, which can be found on the ATI website.

TIME Magazine awards GTA IV

TIME magazine have placed GTA IV top of their list of "The Top 10 Everything from 2008".

It's ironic that GTA became a football in the debate over sex and violence in video games, because where it belongs is in the debate over whether video games count as art. No game developers are more radical and more passionate about the storytelling power of their medium than folks at Rockstar North, and GTA IV is the company's most ambitious work ever. It's the story of Niko Bellic, an Eastern European soldier-for-hire fighting his way up the organized crime ladder in an archly satirical version of New Yo— I mean, Liberty City. It's a grade-A shoot-'em-up that doubles as an interactive novel and triples as a sly critique of American consumer culture.

1. The full top 10 list is as follows:
2. Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3, 360, PC)
3. Braid (360)
4. LittleBigPlanet (PS3)
5. Rock Band 2 (360, PS3)
6. Gears of War 2 (360)
7. Dead Space (360, PS3, PC)
8. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Wii, 360, PS3, DS, PSP)
9. Hunted Forever (free Flash)
10. Fieldrunners (iPhone)
11. Spore (PC)

Check out Time.com for the full article.

San Andreas, 7th Most Pirated Game of 2008

According to TorrentFreak.com San Andreas is the 2008's 7th most pirated game with 740,000 downloads.

Rockstar Talks GTA IV Technical Problems

IGN have published an interview with members of the GTA IV development team. As you can probably guess the article focuses on GTA IV's technical problems, which many users are suffering from. To take a quote from the article;

IGN: Can you talk about what you're working on right now, like a patch?

Kevin Hoare: We've never stopped working on the game, we're working on it every day. We haven't had the typical break after it's gone gold. We're continually working on improvements, we're working on a patch right now.

Well it's good to know they aren't giving up! In the meantime you can check out the beta of the latest Nvidia drivers, which are due out on the 10th.

GTA IV PC Patch Coming Soon

Niko Bellic's first taste of PC action has been tainted by a variety of glitches. Rockstar are on the case and plan to release a patch over the course of the next few days. A list of what we can expect in the patch:

• A fix to the crash after legal screen that some German customers were reporting.
• Numerous improvements to the video editor: Smarter naming of videos, improved rendering quality, better fx during replays
• Fix to bowling while using certain sensitive mice
• Fix for ATI 1900 shadows
• Overall savings to memory
• Graphic improvements to particle systems and mirrors
• Multiplayer character settings are preserved
• Support for DirectInput controllers. Note: The current hack way of supporting these controllers may not work with the improved functionality. So we recommend you remove the hack before upgrading to the patch.