I have. I want more. Here's one I found about the IGN Review: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10196&Itemid=53 Updated: Monday, 28 April 2008 What’s with IGN’s Exclusive GTA IV Review? By Tom Ivan Print | Send to a friend | Email the editor BLOG - Many people flock to IGN to read reviews, especially when the site gets an exclusivity period as it had with its Grand Theft Auto IV review. Unlike IGN, the likes of CVG, Kotaku and 1UP (and I’d imagine all of the other consumer sites) had their GTA IV reviews embargoed until Sunday. IGN’s review of the game was published on Friday. Variety’s Ben Fritz has an interesting piece about the whole situation, “Exclusive Reviews Are Ethically Troubling”, over on The Cut Scene blog. Here are a couple of excerpts: “… Anyone who knows anything about videogame journalism knows that when an outlet gets a review copy of a game, they agree to an embargo -- not to run their review before anyone else… IGN.com clearly got permission from… Rockstar… to run their reviews before any other outlet. And it means they got their copy of the game pretty damned early in order to have the review ready to run early. “Being the first outlet to review a highly anticipated new videogame is a big deal. It means a major boost in Web traffic or magazine sales. Anybody who cares about GTA IV has probably read the IGN review already, or will very soon. And every major videogame blog is probably linking to it. “I'm not saying that GTA IV doesn't deserve a 10… But how can we trust a videogame review when the outlet running it has been given a major commercial favor -- one that's worth money -- from the publisher of the game? You never see a paper or TV station getting special access from a movie studio or TV network or book publisher to run an "exclusive review." Imagine the L.A. Times or Roger Ebert touting their “exclusive review of Iron Man.” Absurd, right? So why do we tolerate it for a videogame? “Exclusive reviews are really ethically troubling, for all the reasons I've outlined above. And I'll state it flat out: I personally don't trust any review labeled "exclusive." Is anyone else as disturbed by this practice as I am?” Since Fritz’s article was published pretty much every other online publication has given GTA IV a perfect score too, according to Metacritic, so there’s no reason to suggest that IGN was inappropriately influenced when it came to reviewing GTA IV, but nevertheless, exclusive reviews are still a funny business. Fritz also says that had he had his GTA IV review completed by Friday, he would have gone against Rockstar’s wishes and published it as soon as he saw that another site had gone live with its review - he says he’s dumbfounded that no other sites broke the embargo after they saw the IGN review. Note: I failed to mention GameSpot in this article alongside the other big consumer sites because its reviews seem to be appearing increasingly late compared to other sites – its Mario Kart Wii review only landed last Friday for example. I did come across an interesting article on the site outlining some points about its reviews policy though. The article covers a number of the topics Fritz mentioned in his blog post about the potential influence publishers have on exclusive reviews, as well as a few other notable bits of info: “Reviewing online multiplayer games in a timely fashion is always going to be difficult because, ideally, we like to play on regular servers with regular folks before making our final judgment. “Don't expect GameSpot to be posting any exclusive reviews soon. We'll do our best to be timely as we always have, but ultimately we place more importance on accuracy than on being first.” Not exclusive is fine, quality is always good, but the sooner the better please GameSpot. The site was always high on my list of review destinations but now I've often had my fill of reviews before GameSpot even publishes theirs.
Besides the 10 they gave to SC, they gave Jade Empire a 9.9, which is probably the highest score they've given to a game prior to GTA IV (recently anyway). And just because I was bored, I did a quick search on a few games, and they have given out a few 9.8s and 9.7s (HL2, BioShock, SMG, Metroid Prime, RE4, God of War 1 and 2, maybe a few others). Wow, didn't know there was a MGS game for the GBC...and it apparently got a 10 from IGN as well (in 2000).
So who's getting it tonight at midnight? My Gamestop told me they're doing a midnight launch (HWY6 in Missouri City). I have to work tomorrow morning so I'm going to have to wait till Tuesday evening to go pick it up
PS3 for me. I'm going to see a friend act in a show tonight, so I'll be out until at least midnight. I think I will be picking it up on my way home. NYT Review Spoiler Video Game Review | Grand Theft Auto IV Grand Theft Auto Takes On New York By SETH SCHIESEL Published: April 28, 2008 I was rolling through the neon deluge of a place very like Times Square the other night in my Landstalker sport utility vehicle, listening to David Bowie’s “Fascination” on the radio. The glittery urban landscape was almost enough to make me forget about the warehouse of cocaine dealers I was headed uptown to rip off. Soon I would get bored, though, and carjack a luxury sedan. I’d meet my Rasta buddy Little Jacob, then check out a late show by Ricky Gervais at a comedy club around the corner. Afterward I’d head north to confront the dealers, at least if I could elude the cops. I heard their sirens before I saw them and peeled out, tires squealing. It was just another night on the streets of Liberty City, the exhilarating, lusciously dystopian rendition of New York City in 2008 that propels Grand Theft Auto IV, the ambitious new video game to be released on Tuesday for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems. Published by Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto IV is a violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun. It calls to mind a rollicking R-rated version of Mad magazine featuring Dave Chappelle and Quentin Tarantino, and sets a new standard for what is possible in interactive arts. It is by far the best game of the series, which made its debut in 1997 and has since sold more than 70 million copies. Grand Theft Auto IV will retail for $60. Niko Bellic is the player-controlled protagonist this time, and he is one of the most fully realized characters video games have yet produced. A veteran of the Balkan wars and a former human trafficker in the Adriatic, he arrives in Liberty City’s rendition of Brighton Beach at the start of the game to move in with his affable if naïve cousin Roman. Niko expects to find fortune and, just maybe, track down someone who betrayed him long ago. Over the course of the story line he discovers that revenge is not always what one expects. Besides the nuanced Niko the game is populated by a winsome procession of grifters, hustlers, drug peddlers and other gloriously unrepentant lowlifes, each a caricature less politically correct than the last. Hardly a demographic escapes skewering. In addition to various Italian and Irish crime families, there are venal Russian gangsters, black crack slingers, argyle-sporting Jamaican potheads, Puerto Rican hoodlums, a corrupt police commissioner, a steroid-addled Brooklyn knucklehead named Brucie Kibbutz and a former Eastern European soldier who has become a twee Upper West Side metrosexual. Breathing life into Niko and the other characters is a pungent script by Dan Houser and Rupert Humphries that reveals a mastery of street patois to rival Elmore Leonard’s. The point of the main plot is to guide Niko through the city’s criminal underworld. Gang leaders and thugs set missions for him to complete, and his success moves the story along toward a conclusion that seems as dark as its beginning. But the real star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York. From Brooklyn (called Broker), through Queens (Dukes), the Bronx (Bohan), Manhattan (Algonquin) and an urban slice of New Jersey (Alderney), the game’s streets and alleys ooze a stylized yet unmistakable authenticity. (Staten Island is left out however.) The game does not try to represent anything close to every street in the city, but the overall proportions, textures, geography, sights and sounds are spot-on. The major landmarks are present, often rendered in surprising detail, from the Cyclone at Coney Island to the Domino Sugar factory and Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn and on up through the detritus of the 1964-65 World’s Fair in Queens. Central Park, the Empire State Building, various museums, the Statue of Liberty and Times Square are all present and accounted for. There is no Yankee Stadium, but there is a professional baseball team known, with the deliciousness typical of the game’s winks and nods, as the Swingers. At least as impressive as the city’s virtual topography is the range of the game’s audio and music production, delivered through an entire dial’s worth of radio stations available in almost any of the dozens of different cars, trucks and motorcycles a player can steal. From the jazz channel (billed as “music from when America was cool”) through the salsa, alt-rock, jazz, metal and multiple reggae and hip-hop stations, Lazlow Jones, Ivan Pavlovich and the rest of Rockstar’s audio team demonstrate a musical erudition beyond anything heard before in a video game. The biggest problem with the game’s extensive subway system is that there’s no music underground. (Too bad there are no iPods to nab.) The game’s roster of radio hosts runs from Karl Lagerfeld to Iggy Pop and DJ Green Lantern. It is not faint praise to point out that at times, simply driving around the city listening to the radio — seguing from “Moanin’ ” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers to the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark” to “The Crack House” by Fat Joe featuring Lil Wayne — can be as enjoyable as anything the game has to offer. Grand Theft Auto IV is such a simultaneously adoring and insightful take on modern America that it almost had to come from somewhere else. The game’s main production studio is in Edinburgh, and Rockstar’s leaders, the brothers Dan and Sam Houser, are British expatriates who moved to New York to indulge their fascination with urban American culture. Their success places them firmly among the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup. It all adds up to a new level of depth for an interactive entertainment experience. I’ve spent almost 60 hours practically sequestered in a (real world) Manhattan hotel room in recent weeks playing through Grand Theft Auto IV’s main story line and the game still says I have found only 64 percent of its content. I won’t ever reach 100 percent, not least because I won’t hunt down all 200 of the target pigeons (known as flying rats here) that the designers have hidden around the city. But like millions of other players I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City’s bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City is right outside.
I think it'll be 360 for me as well. I like my rumbling controller too much, and am not in any big hurry to go blow $60 for a new Sony that shakes.
There is a line from one of the DJ's in the game that I'm sure you'll love. If you consider something like that part of the game a spoiler, then don't click, but it's pretty funny. Spoiler I was switching the radio stations and the DJ was talking jazz on the radio, saying something to the affect of the station.... "Playing the kind of music before it became the music that you hear on the elevators" I damn near fell out of my chair laughing at that line. The game is full of little stuff like that. Oh and for the politically inclined, you have to watch the show (Yes you can sit down and watch freaking TV in your apartment) The Republican Space Soldiers ! It is hilarious, good stuff and a clear jab at our current administration. Funny stuff
This stream is back up if anyone is bored enough lol. I can't wait to get my PS3 and game. Both have shipped from Newegg. 2 more days. Lol.
I thought there might be some jazz in it because 1)it's NYC, the jazz capitol of the world and 2)one of the TV ads had "Move" from Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool playing in the background. As a sax player, when anybody tells me they like Kenny G, my favorite response is "Oh, I'm sorry. Do you live in an elevator?"
I will be playing the game on my 360! We should definitely get some online games going. My gamertag is Rocket786. Someone pull up the Xbox Live Gamertag thread. I don't have the search option so I can't find it as easily.
+ My gamertag is Sycostaggs and I am getting the game on 360, add me to your friends list if you want to. P.s- a message stating your from clutchfans bbs would be appreciated.
I just paid for mine in full so I can pick it up at midnight if I want to. If I'm still out that late I might but I probably won't play it until tomorrow after work.
I'll be picking up the 360 version tomorrow. Haven't actually been in on any of the BBS 360 games, but I definitely want to try out GTA's multiplayer. I'll have to get some gamertags for this going tomorrow.
alright, I bumped the gamertag thread for 360 users. it can be found here... http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=121072&page=1&pp=20 ill try to find the ps thread for the same thing and edit my post
