Not much info to give, but we (and just about every other Web site in existence) just got notice from Rockstar that a new DLC for Grand Theft Auto IV will be released this fall for the Xbox 360. That’s the rather festive logo right there for Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Here’s how Rockstar describes the DLC, which will be released in the fall for 1,600 Microsoft Points (or at retail for $20):

Grand Theft Auto IV’s second downloadable episode, The Ballad of Gay Tony injects Liberty City with an overdose of guns, glitz, and grime. As Luis Lopez, part-time hoodlum and full-time assistant to legendary nightclub impresario Tony Prince (aka “Gay Tony”), players will struggle with the competing loyalties of family and friends, and with the uncertainty about who is real and who is fake in a world in which everyone has a price.

There’s also going to be a pack called Episodes from Liberty City that has both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony on it. That’ll be $40 and doesn’t require you to have GTA IV to play.

I cannot wait till controversy erupts over the name.

Stuck at work and unable to play The Lost and Damned? Well, Xbox 360 owners, this may tide you over until you get home. NSFW, so plug in your headphones/ear buds.

Just a reminder, sports fans, that Rockstar has released Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and Damned DLC for the Xbox 360. It’s available on Xbox Live right now, so if you’re the office (or in class) be sure to queue up the download from your browser. Comedian Bill Burr plays a prominent role in the game, which is absolutely tremendous. Lazlow was on Opie and Anthony this morning talking about the game, so if you missed it be sure to catch the replay later on today.

As I’ve said in the past, I have zero interest in the whole biker culture, but Lazlow did a bang-up job of selling the game. Lazlow was also hounded as to why the DLC was only being produced for the Xbox 360, and he reiterated that Microsoft threw Rockstar a bunch of money to develop the game. Complaints, of course, can be personally sent Lazlow, since, you know, he makes all the business decisions at Rockstar.

Rockstar and Xbox LIVE will also be holding sweepstakes promotions and give users a chance to take on DJ Statik Selektah in the new game. So mark your calendars and be sure to get in 5 days of solid gaming. More info here.

What a day. First Barnes & Noble is a jerk to me, then I get the red ring of death. Oh, and Sirius XM may be going under. Isn’t everything just peachy?

It’s like this: I was watching a DVD last night in my Xbox 360, and all of a sudden—these things are always “all of a sudden”—the screen turned all fuzzy, then it froze all fuzzy. Then we got the telltale three red rings. (Sorry, I didn’t think to grab my camera.) Jesus H. Christ, no!

Then today I figure, “let’s see just how broken this thing really is,” and put in GTA IV. The game loads up fine, then two or so minutes later, bam! Fuzzy frozen screen all over again. No RROD this time, but I know I’m just playing with fire at this point.

The writing’s on the wall: I’m going to have to buy a new Xbox 360, preferably in time for Street Fighter IV next week. Then again, give how I play games nowadays—pop it in, play for half an hour or so, then never play again—I’m wondering if I should instead just save the $200. Maybe I’ll luck out and I can grab an Xbox 360 Arcade from Circuit City on the cheap. See, silver lining!

[PSGallery=336elhqshv]

Rockstar just opened up its sitefor the upcoming Grand Theft Auto IV DLC, The Lost and Damned. There’s two new video for you to check out, one of which I’ve embedded here, and a bunch of screen shots.

http://media.rockstargames.com/products/rockstar/mediaplayer/RockstarMediaPlayer.swf

The game comes out, that is, will be available to download, on February 17. I can’t stand the type of music featured in the trailer—is that called metal or hardcore or punk? I don’t even know—so I may pass this go-round.

Rockstar Watch is reporting that Rockstar sent out an e-mail detailing the upcoming Lost and Damned DLC for GTA IV that’s due out on February 17th for the Xbox 360. RW goes on to say that said e-mail from Rockstar hints at other news regarding the DLC in the coming weeks. We’ll keep you posted.

* Get Good Wood – 50 – In the Bike Races, whack off 69 bikers with a bat.
* Easy Rider – 100 – Finish The Story
* Full Chat – 70 – Your backup are riding at their best!
* The Lost Boy – 25 – All hail the leader of The Lost!
* One Percenter – 5 – Billy is back on his bike.

On the other side of things, Nvidia’s new 180.84 beta drivers have been released in response to issues with GTA IV performance, and while some users are reporting up to an up to 10 FPS frame rate improvement, most are reporting no change at all.

In some cases, users have been reporting that the frame rate has actually even dropped, or that the new drivers have decreased stability.

Given the fact that the drivers are still very much in beta, it’s probably best to skip them for now.

[via Tom's Hardware]

You know how in trailers of terrible “family” movies there’s always a part where the announcers says, “Here we go again!” in that dumb “enthusiastic announcer guy voice”? Think of that right now, only juxtaposed with the sights and sounds of Liberty City, for it has been revealed that Grand Theft Auto IV uses SecurROM DRM. That’s the same DRM that upset so many would-be Spore players (but didn’t bother Fallout 3 players).

Straight from a Rockstar rep:

GTA IV PC uses SecuROM for protecting our EXE… Product Activation is a one time only online authentication when installing the game. GTA IV has no install limits for the retail disc version of the game, and that version can be installed on an unlimited number of PCs by the retail disk owner.

So, if we’re to believe this shadowy Rockstar fellow, the actual restrictions imposed by SecuROM seem to be minimal. That is to say there are none, as all it’s used for is to validate your CD key. Certainly that seems reasonable. You should also know that the game requires Games For Windows Live—how in God’s name did Microsoft manage to foist that upon savvy PC gamers?—is required to play the game.

Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC is to be released on December 2. SecuROM or not, expect to find cracks available within two seconds of its release, if not before then. Such is life.

via Rock, Paper, Shotgun

GTA IV is set for a PC release on December 2 and Steam is currently offering Vice City for anyone who pre-orders before then. What are you waiting for?

Pre-order

A round of applause for Eurogamer, which did the thankless task of testing out the NXE‘s HDD Install option and comparing it to normal method of playing games off the DVD. Several games of all shapes and sizes were checked, including Gears of War 2 (or should I say Gears of Bore, yuck), GTA IV and Halo 3, and found that, on average, you’re likely to shave a few seconds off your loading time by installing a game to the hard drive.

Take Gears of War 2. Running the game off the DVD, as you do now, the initial load takes 32 seconds. Running off the hard drive—each game is installed as a disc image, so it’s one big file per game—that same initial load takes only 24 seconds. So, you save eight seconds by installing to the hard drive.

Games like Half-Life 2, which can be found in The Orange Box, fare the best, as they’re not at all optimized to run off the disc; the game loads its sections as necessary with no fancy streaming to speak of. As such, loading the level We Don’t Go To Ravenholm (presumably that’s what Eurogamer meant with “We don’t go there any more”), which normally takes 47 seconds instead takes only 15 seconds—that’s 32 seconds saved, chief.

Games like GTA IV, which Rockstar designed in such a way that it’s constantly streaming data off the disc, minimizing load times, don’t benefit as much from the HDD install. Starting a new game drops from 26.5 seconds to 25.2. Loading an in-game mission dropped from 8.5 seconds to 7 seconds.

It comes down to this: if the game streams data off the disc as it’s played you’re not going to see much improvement (the GTA IV example). If, however, the game goes about its business the old school way, loading data as it’s needed (the Half-Life 2 example), then you’ll see a marked improvement.

There’s a nifty, jargon-free interviewover at Variety with Rockstar Games’ Dan Houser. (Let’s just call Houser the czar of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.) In it, which you really ought to read in its entirety, Houser explains the differences between Japanese and American gaming preferences (and how that affects GTA), how the industry has moved beyond all-Japanese developers and Japanese-style games to one where Western developers have finally gotten their act together, to the upcoming DLC for GTA IV.

While admitting that he doesn’t know exactly when the DLC will be released, Houser did say that Rockstar plans to announce a release date in the next few weeks. The way the wording is, I wouldn’t expect it this year, though. If that changes, great; if not, well, what are you gonna do?

Downloadable content (DLC) for the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV should be available this November. Eurogamer, in true Woodward and Bernstein style, claim to have a source who swears up and down that the DLC is shaping up nicely, and will be comprised of two, 10-hour episodes.

Considering many games don’t even top out at 20 hours these days, gamers should be in for a treat in two months’ time.

That is all.

EA has been after Take-Two since late last year. The process went public in February with Take Two letting EA’s offer expire five times. Now, EA has finally given up on its attempts to acquire Take Two at around $25-26 per share. The deal would have been worth around $2 billion, however Take Two has held fast that the offer was too low.

It looks like EA is finally going to listen and take a second look. EA may be the world’s largest video game publisher, but having the Grand Theft Auto franchise (not to mention BioShock) would certainly be an impressive feather in its hat. Take-Two and EA expect to enter into a confidentiality agreement, formalizing the process to “evaluate strategic alternatives”.

Despite breaking sales records left and right, GTA IV didn’t cause any measurable uptick in console sales. That probably hurts Sony more than Microsoft, seeing as though the GTA series has, since GTA III, been seen as a PlayStation franchise; Sony was expecting PS3-holdouts to see the game and buy a system. Didn’t happen.

In fact, sales of the Xbox 360 version nearly doubled those of the PS3 version, 867,000 to 443,000. A function of install base, sure, but still not something Sony wants to see parroted around the press, on blogs and message boards for the next few days.

An NPD analyst puts it quite plainly:

The continued success of GTA IV is not translating into big hardware sales for the PS3 or the 360. But there may yet be a lift in June due to gift-giving for Father’s Day and graduations

Sure, a bounce because of Father’s Day. Pretty sure my dad is too busy, you know, working, to be playing video games.

So there, no Halo effect.

I eagerly await PS3 fanboys—ahem, Josh—to now accuse me of hating the system, when the truth of the matter is I couldn’t give a damn. And why should I?

Grand Theft Auto IV is still among the top five torrented video games on Blackcats, the premiere, video game-specific, private BitTorrent tracker. With something like 970 seeders (the numbers fluctuate by the minute it seems) between both the PAL and NTSC version, the game trails only the just-released Race Driver Grid and Enemy Territory Quake Wars.

And did everyone beat the game yet? I got up to the first mission where you’re allowed into Manhattan and haven’t played since. I tire very easily of games these days, sad face.

EA’s self-imposed deadline vis-à-vis its proposed acquisition of Take-Two expired Friday with nary a peep from either company. EA, fond of money, offered to buy Take-Two, the publisher of GTA, back in February, with the two companies going back and forth like little children ever since. Well, mainly EA; Take Two has been fairly quiet throughout, telling AFP that any further action is “in [EA's] court.” Speaking of balls being in courts, just two hours till game seven of Cavs/Celtics. I’m excited.

So yeah, numbers. EA, remember, offered Take-Two the equivalent of $25.74. Meanwhile, Take-Two closed at $27.10 Friday—on what planet would shareholders accept a bid for less than the present value of the stock?

I’d expect EA to murmur something tomorrow.

Admit it, some of you did this, too. You just didn’t have the guts to make a video. Some language NSFW, so find your headphones.

We get the point, Blendtec. You have a kickass blender that blends just about everything we fawn over these days. Of course your blender is going to obliterate a copy of GTA IV. Get over it and think of something new.