This one looks cool......

Grand Theft Auto IV UK Update
GTA returns after six months of spit and polish. We take in an extended look at the near-final Liberty City.

UK, January 23, 2008 - A lot can happen in six months. Just look back over the last half a year: England were knocked out of Euro 2008, the Spice Girls got back together and Dumbledore came out of the closet. So with that in mind we were anxious and excited in equal measure when we got the call from Rockstar to check out the latest version of Grand Theft Auto IV. After all, it's been six months since we last walked the streets of Liberty City, so could all of the little niggles we'd noticed in previous versions - the stuttering frame-rate, restricted freedom of the city and overall lack of GTA's signature humour - have all be ironed out in a few months?

Sometimes ordinary people explode. Natural causes.

Yes. There, we said it. Yes, the frame-rate has been smoothed out; yes, the city is now fully populated meaning you're able to explore however you see fit; and yes, the trademark satirical dialogue and larger-than-life characters are very much back. Grand Theft Auto IV looks and feels like a GTA game, but one that's been punted into the next generation. And while the build we saw wasn't final - the music was still placeholder and there are a couple of visual tweaks to be done over the next couple of months - everything else is in the game. Better still, any worry we had that Rockstar wouldn't deliver on a proper next-gen GTA experience was instantly dispelled within the first few moments of our latest 90-minute tour of Liberty City.

Starting off in Broker in the full light of day, the first of three missions we saw took place in a setting familiar to anyone who's salivated over every tidbit that has leaked from the Rockstar offices. Basking in the glorious midday sun, we join Niko who is on the phone to Brucie, a previously unseeen character in the GTA universe in charge of a nearby garage. A short-haired beefcake, he reminded us more than a little of the Biff character from the Back to the Future series, his mannerisms and flamboyant stupidity infused with characteristic Rockstar wit and pop-culture savvy. Indeed, not only is the humour of previous GTAs present and correct, it is also given an extra lease of life by the new game engine, with characters indulging in little Howard Hawks-esque bits of business during dialogue, be it Niko nonchalantly thumbing his nose as he listens or in some of the wilder gesticulations of the steroid-pumped Brucie as he tells us he wants Rivas, a police informant, silenced in time honoured GTA style - with the business end of a pistol.

Having received our task from Brucie it was out onto the road, where we got to witness the game's free-form driving for the first time. Any fears that may have been raised by previous builds of GTAIV that suffered from inconsistent frame-rates are largely assuaged - they've clearly been burning the midnight oil over at Rockstar these past six months, as the environments of Liberty City manage to zip along at an agreeable pace. There are the occasional lighting glitches and texture pop-ups, but there's still time for these minor problems to be ironed out. Plus, bearing in mind the sheer scale of the city - it's far greater in reality than we ever imagined - we didn't really notice after a short while, instead wallowing in the vastness of it all.

Back to cruising the streets, one interesting feature is every road in the game a name has been given a name. This adds an enhanced sense of location, plus Rockstar aren't one to miss an opportunity at a little pop-culture reference - Jim Jones and Hubbard Avenue were just two examples we noticed on our travels.

Things have certainly moved on from Chase HQ.

The mission at hand required the acquisition of a police car, and there were a number of ways to achieve this. Firstly, you can use the tried and tested method of stirring up a little mischief to attract attention from the law enforcement agencies, but the method we saw utilised one of the new features to GTA IV - the mobile phone. We'll go into more of the abilities of Niko's cell phone a little later, but for this mission it was simply a case of bringing it up via the D-pad and putting in a call to 911. After a little interaction with a hilariously adroit automated emergency service switchboard, and a few little white lies later, the police were on the scene, with Niko waiting with his gun by his side. Again, the open-ended world of GTA meant there were numerous ways to get access to the police car - the approach we saw involved enticing the police away from the car and then hot-footing it in.

Impressive," the echoey voice in my head whispered as a sunset-soaked Liberty City dock appeared in front of us. We're back at Rockstar's London HQ gawping at the first we've seen of GTA IV since its infamous delay. What a difference six months makes.

Of course Rockstar's 100" TV might have something to do with it, but IV isn't looking dated considering it should have been out for a few months already. In fact, it's running visibly smoother at the beginning of our demo. Niko stands on the waterfront at a dock in Broker. It's the kind of rusty, tramp-ridden area of town you'd expect to find flaming barrels and lots of pigeons and that's exactly what surrounds us here.


"The game is in a very, very different place now," boldly claims our Rockstar tour operator for this particular trip. "It's improved in virtually every single way imaginable. When we first showed the game a year ago, we said it was really early - it was the earliest we've ever shown a GTA game. A year later and just three/four months away from release you're looking at a game that's virtually complete."

There's still a lot of polish going on behind the scenes and the painful process of licensing IV's typically massive list of tunes is in full swing. But what's in front of us right now is looking rock solid.

Even with all the gorgeous building and cloud reflections in the water, and impressive real-time shadows skulking across the street, the framerate is bang on. Which is very pleasing to see after a jittery 2007 demo left us a little concerned that GTA IV wouldn't be quite as fluid as we'd hoped.

But this recent GTA IV demo also featured Rockstar showing off a number of the new features that the title will introduce. First and foremost is the fact that GTA IV will be on next-generation consoles, so it'll have a much better look. The graphics seem crisp and clean, with characters that look more lifelike than ever before. The characters come to life with individual personalities, such as Brucie, a wacky guy with tattoos and his shirt off, and who seems a little too enthusiastic to be working crime life with Niko.

However, the game's characters are also going to be more realistic in their actions and movements, with Rockstar laying much praise at the feet of the technologists at NaturalMotion. The company has created software products that take in-game action far beyond that of a physics engine. In fact, it's a good bet that Rockstar and NaturalMotion would probably hope you wouldn't notice the characters' movements at all-that they're so...well, natural that you won't find yourself remembering that you're playing a game. After all, there's nothing that'll snap you out of an artificial world you're supposed to be immersed within than to spot a character who's still trying to stroll along at a quick pace while pressed face first against a wall, or who continues running right at you while squarely in the path of the many bullets you're firing.

No, from our one-hour demo of GTA IV, we saw many cases of characters under the influence of NaturalMotion. In fact, in one situation, Niko and his cousin were literally under the influence: They went to a bar and came away seriously inebriated, stumbling out of the establishment and often into each other as they tried to make their way back to Niko's vehicle. The swaying walk and how the characters interact with each other and objects in the world around them aren't pre-rendered animations, but are rather algorithms that govern their behavior based on their drunken conditions. The last generation of games wowed us with realistic physics on bodies and objects, and helped make "ragdoll" a commonly used term for describing video-game character animation. It seems that this generation will step the realism up by making characters "perform" more independently, so that replaying the same mission four times won't likely have you seeing the same movements four times.

Rockstar is starting to open up more about the game as it nears the end of its marathon development process, and is answering more and more of our burning questions. Today we'll reveal a much broader look around liberty City including our first unrestricted look at the entire game map. We got to see was parts of Liberty City we hadn't been taken to before, and best of all, we'll introduce you to some awesome new characters and missions in detail you won't find anywhere else.

We're also starting to get a much better overall impression of what Niko is like as a character now. Hardworking, risk-taking, calm, firm and determined, with a subtle sense of humour. One aspect we're also curious about is Niko with the ladies. At one stage of our latest demo we saw the words, "alternatively you can ask her on a date" appear on the HUD. Intriguing.

The technical quality of the game is now very solid. The frame rate is drastically improved since we first saw it, and Rockstar says it is basically what the final game is going to be running at - it's obviously not going to get any worse. It looks like sex, quite frankly, and the solid frame rate combined with the exceptional detail and really make things feel powerfully real. Rockstar is basically just polishing now - some lip-syncing, a few glitch fixes here and there. But essentially the game is now finished. Our hands-on will be in about a month from now, and then we'll have a review close to when the game is hitting shelves "before the end of April", with the exact date is still to be decided, says Rockstar.

hope my computer can play this game. hoho

Grand Theft Auto IV will be simultaneously available for Xbox 360(R) video game and entertainment system and PLAYSTATION(R)3 computer entertainment system and will be in stores worldwide on April 29, 2008.

Whoa!!!! thank you Rockstar for releasing it on my BIRTHDAY!!!!! yahoo!!! i can save my

money now for other games... my wife definitely going to buy it for my BIRTHDAY PRESENT!!!!

I LAP CIU ROCKSTAR!!!!      
p.s: Released date worldwide, April 29th

waaaaaaa. i hope my ex gf going to buy this game for me. wawaawawa

Preview for GTA IV: EGM GTA IV - The REAL story you wont read anywhere else