In October of 2001, Rockstar Games dropped a bomb on the gaming world. That bomb was called Grand Theft Auto III. In just one release, Rockstar shifted their flagship 2D series into a 3D world, introduced an enormous chunk of the population to the concept of massive sandbox games, and stirred up the first of many controversies that the company has since become known for.

Just over 10 years later, GTA3 is back — but now it’s mobile. As of yesterday, it’s available for iOS and Android. Same game, same grit, same campy over-the-top action… but in your pocket.

So, how has the game held up? How well did it make the jump from controller to touchscreen? Is it worth your $5?

Lets go ahead and answer those immediately: Surprisingly well, moderately okay, and probably.

For a game that’s probably older than the TV sitting in your living room, Grand Theft Auto 3 is still remarkably entertaining. I won’t wax on too much about the gameplay itself; many hundreds of reviews did that a decade ago, and it’s still the same game (save for a few little perks ported in from modern GTA games, like instant retries on failed missions) it was then. What worked well then still works well today: you run around, explore, go on a few hundred missions, then blow up everything in sight whenever all that gets boring.

It’s not what most would call “gorgeous” by today’s gaming standards (read: it’s no Infinity Blade II), but it really does still look good. The audio is also wonderful, with an absurd amount of dialog, sound, radio chatter, and music crammed into the 500 MB package. At the very least, it’s a wonderful testament of how far technology has come; what required a big ol’ dedicated gaming console just a decade ago now runs effortlessly on an itty-bitty battery-powered slab of glass.

To say it “runs effortlessly” requires a bit of a caveat, though. Rockstar claims support for all of the more recent iOS devices, including the iPhone 4, iPad 1, iPhone 4S, and iPad 2. On the latter two, it’s butter. On the iPad 1, graphic quality takes a massive hit (see the comparison shot above) — and still, framerate issues tend to rear their head. (Alas, I don’t have an iPhone 4 handy to test it on, so I can’t comment on the compatibility there.)

Look up at the screen shot above. The buttons! They’re everywhere! You can feel your hands cramping already.

It’s actually quite playable — in most cases, at least. The D-pad drops wherever you put your thumb when you’re hoofin’ it, and the other buttons are big enough that they’re not too much trouble to find (Oh: and if you think you could layout a better control scheme, you can re-arrange/re-size them in the settings screen.) Driving isn’t too bad either (though, man is it easy to flip your car now. I don’t know if they tweaked the physics engine or something, but it’s far easier to find yourself upside down and covered in flames than I remember.)

Shooting, however, is a rather terrible experience… which is unfortunate, considering how crucial it is to the game as a whole. The game has an autolock system which, even after fair amount of playtime, never seems to work the way I expect. It’s not so bad as to make the game impossible (just quite frustrating at times) but is detrimental enough that it influences my recommendation.

As for said recommendation: if you’ve never played through GTA3, I wouldn’t suggest having the mobile experience be your first. The controls, while acceptable, just take away too much of the magic. GTA3 is a great game and was far ahead of its time; if it’s going to be played by a newcomer, it deserves to be played as originally intended. If you played through the original (or started it, and never got a chance to finish before Mom slung the PS2 at a garage sale) and are just looking to swim in nostalgia, however, it’s easily worth the 5 bucks.

You can find GTA3: 10th Anniversary in the App Store here

There are a lot of rumors out there about the next version of GTA. But, the closest to confirmation we’ve seen so far is this resume from stunt driver Declan Mulvey. He lists his involvement with all the movies and video games he’s worked on and GTA V is one of them.

Some think that it would be easy to forget the I before the V, which we can understand. But, his name is nowhere in the credits for GTA IV. While we have known about GTA V for a little while, this certainly shows that further development has taken place.

Gotta love cops. A woman in Boston got mad at her 14-year-old son for being up at 2:30am playing Grand Theft Auto. (At least the kid wasn’t smoking dust in the street at that hour.) In fact, she got so mad that she called 911 for help. You know, “You have to help me. My son is up in the middle of the night playing video games! I don’t know what to do!” The cops responded, no doubt aggravated that they had to deal with this garbage, by saying, “Calm down, ma’am. Just put your dumb kid to bed.” That’s not an exact quote, but you know that’s what they were thinking.

The woman, Angela Mejia, feared that her son was addicted to video games. Rather than throwing the kid’s PlayStation into the Charles like a normal parent would do, she waffles, baffled that her son is acting out by having the audacity to stay up late and play games.

And who knows: maybe this kid is absolutely miserable, and the time he spends playing video games represents his only outlet. That certainly sounds familiar.

It’s like, I could see the mother being upset if her son ran with gang-bangers, but staying up past his bedtime to get in a little GTA? Doesn’t sound like too big a problem to me, and certainly not worthy of harassing the 911 operators. As if they don’t have actual emergencies to respond to!

What’s the longest you’ve ever played GTA IV? A couple of hours, maybe? That’s a shame, since the official Guinness World Record currently stands at 28 hours. “Currently” is the operative word, since a 26-year-old man is currently attempting to break said record.

The beauty of it is that you can follow the man’s exploits live on Ustream. It’s pretty much just a guy playing GTA IV, so not exactly must-see-TV.

One of the people in the video has an Arsenal shirt on, so that’s neat.

All of us here wish the man nothing but the best of luck in his future endeavors.

And I sincerely hate to use the same pic as Destructoid did, but it’s just too perfect not to use.

Coming to an iPhone/iPod Touch near you this fall from the creators of the greatest game in history, Grand Theft Auto, is Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. I guess it’s going to be an exact port of the DS title. Are you excited?

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.

Odds are you’ve already played Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Perhaps you haven’t opened the box, popped out the game card and moved your Nintendo DS’ Power switch to “on,” per se, but trust me: you’ve played the game. And depending on your point of view, your attitude toward the GTA franchise, that may or may not be a bad thing.

This time around you play as Huang Lee, a self-described “pampered little snot” who has to fly to Liberty City, all the way from Kong Kong, for two reasons. One, your father, who just so happens to be your family’s head, was just killed and you’d like to find out why; and two, to deliver a family keepsake— a sword—to your uncle. Fair enough. Only when your plane lands, and totally out of nowhere, you’re ambushed; it’s a scene right out of 2002′s Vice City. The men who ambushed you then dump your presumed-dead body into a nearby body of water; they also steal the sword you were supposed to deliver. So, to recap: you’ve flown halfway across the world, only to be ambushed and left for dead. Yes, it’s GTA, all right.

The plot—I can’t name too many people who appreciate the GTA games for their plot, despite the fact that GTA IV was one of last year’s better written games—then concerns your attempts to figure out what the hell is going on. Why were you ambushed, and by whom—why? And so on. Keep in mind that, in form, it’s a portable game, one played on a (well, two) tiny screen, and, in function, an action game; don’t go into it expecting The Great American novel, but, rather, do go into it expecting something infinitely more intricate than the shovelware nonsense you find on the DS.

The game’s developers, Rockstar Leeds (the same guys who developed the PSP’s Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories), try to preserve the game’s GTA-ness while taking into account the realities of DS gaming. That’s why the game is presented the way it is, with an almost-overhead view, one that’s certainly reminiscent of the series’ pre-GTA III installments. It is important to note, however, that the game isn’t 2D. All objects have depth, and the bold-colored outlines, found in so many cartoons today, help the graphics “pop out” more, if that makes any sense at all. Put another way, if you were to magically reposition the camera so that it’d be more like GTA IV’s, then you’d see Liberty City just as you did on the Xbox 360 (or PS3). The developers went with this almost-overhead view as a concession to playing on such a tiny screen(s); you see more of the city this way, and more clearly.

The game’s radio stations, so much a part of the GTA universe, are limited by the hardware. You won’t find any Nas songs here, though I’ll be damned if I didn’t recognize Deadmau5‘s logo in the radio station selector.

Control wasn’t really an issue for me, but then I may be more forgiving than others in this regard. The D-pad, as you might expect, moves Huang up, down, left and right; hold the B button to run. You aim using the the R button, and cycle between targets using the L button., then use A to shoot. No, it’s not exactly analog control, but then again control has never been one of the series’ strongest aspects.

I hope you weren’t expecting an IGN-esque 9.265333333 here. As you’ll recall, I think assigning numbers to game reviews—I wouldn’t even consider this a review, more of a “here’s what’s up” sort of thing—is silly, and contributes to Metacritic, which is also terrible. All I can say in closing is that if you’re a big fan of the series you’ll no doubt enjoy the game. Those of you who subscribe to the “been there, done that” line of thinking probably won’t miss it. But outside of Chrono Trigger and maybe Final Fantasy IV (I am, or at least was, very much into RPGs), you probably can’t find a better DS game. So there’s that.

DiiFii, an energetic man-child of indeterminate age, reviews GTA: Chinatown Wars on the Nintendo DS with even more arm flailing and karate chopping than usual, which is quite an accomplishment in and of itself.

I lost count of how many times he uses the word “funtastic” but that appears to be the overall experience in a nutshell: pure, unbridled funtasm. Our own Nicholas Deleon spent some time with the game back in February and has been playing it recently for an upcoming post.

When I asked him if he shared the same enthusiasm as the young man in the above video, his response was “Good heavens, I won’t be doing that.” Not that the game isn’t fun, that’s just a lot of energy for one person to expend in several closely-spaced funtastic outbursts.

Once Monday rolls around you’ll be able to cruise around San Andreas on your Xbox 360, for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has showed up on Xbox.com. The game, which will cost the usual 1,100 Microsoft Points ($14.99), isn’t too bad; in truth, I prefer it to the gritty realism of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Plus it has that Marshall Jefferson song on one of the radio stations, embedded here for my amusement and your pleasure. Rock your body.

via Maxconsole

Somehow I doubt it will have the same level of ultraviolence that GTA and GTA II had (gouranga!), but the screens (here and here) are encouraging otherwise. [via Kotaku]

Imagine: Grand Theft Auto on the Wii. Need to hail a cab? Just wave the wiimote around in the air. Tryin’ to stab a guy? Shank him with the wiimote. Taking your e-girlfriend out for burgers? Eat the wiimote. Sounds like a perfect fit, right? Rockstar doesn’t think so.

In a recent Nintendo Power interview, Rockstar co-founder said that they didn’t develop a GTA game for the Wii because it just “didn’t feel natural”.

Instead, they went with the unique platform offerings of the DS: “The stylus and the chance to use minigames in that way was really interesting and exciting to us, and we thought we could integrate seamlessly between those two modes.”

While the folks at Rockstar have said that they may bring GTA to the Wii at some point in the future, there’s nothing currently on the horizon. To be honest, that’s good to hear. Thanks for not trying to cram some crap motion gimmick into a game that has no use for it, Rockstar.

Electronic Arts has “moved on,” and is no longer interested in buying Take Two Interactive, the publisher of, among of games, Grand Theft Auto IV. EA made it official sometime Sunday evening, ending the months-long back-and-forth between the two companies.

Ask any gamer, and they’d tell you Electronic Arts was simply looking to buy the Grand Theft Auto brand, which, at least in the U.S., is good as gold right now. And since the holiday shopping season is rapidly approaching, EA didn’t feel there was enough time to cross all the Ts and dot all the Is—you know, business stuff—in time to get some of the holiday GTA money. So they balked.

There are other, larger business-y concerns going on here, but I’m gonna guess that none of you care too much about that.

Besides, isn’t it an unofficial rule of the Internet that you must hate everything EA does and produces?

Facial animation made big news at SIGGRAPH earlier this month, with Image Metrics showing off their Emily Project. The process is not motion capture, so it requires no markers or special cameras. The actor simply acts and then software analyzes the images to create the animation. Since this is achieved at the pixel level, the animation looks surprisingly realistic.

Image Metrics is the company that has been producing animation for the GTA series. Video games on the (current) next-gen systems get all the attention for looking so real, but when this tech gets integrated into games, look out! Can we start the hype for GTA V yet?

I actually don’t recall many ultra-violent games for the NES. Am I misremembering?

Oh, MADtv, is there anything you won’t make fun of with your trademark guffawing, low-brow humor?

(via NoWhereElse)

Like Microsoft with Yahoo!, EA refuses to concede defeat in its pursuit of GTA publisher Take-Two. The Redwood City, Calif.-based corp said today that it has extended its self-imposed deadline to acquire Take-Two by one month. So now we have till June 16 to read all sorts of fun stories like:

“T2: You’re undervaluing our company”

and

“EA: No we’re not”

Both EA and Take-Two are down in early morning trading, with EA losing one-quarter of a percentage and Take-Two down just over one percent, as one 10:01am EDT.

A Grand Theft Auto movie would be “super interesting” for Mr. Uwe Boll, the German director of great movies such as House of the Dead and Postal. You may remember Mr. Boll for being a giant douche in every interview he gives, up to and including this latest one with New York magazine, where he extols his love for the GTA franchise, He admits, rather caustically, that, if the game is ever turned into a movie, it’ll likely go to a Michael Bay or a Brett Ratner, a big-budget, big explosion hack director. Sounds familiar.

Honestly, I can’t be bothered with “hating” a director, especially since I’ve never seen his movies. Just know that he’d love to direct a GTA movie, but that he feels he’d never be allowed to.

I’m really wondering what happened that let R*’s crown jewel out so early. Folks have been playing this game since last Wednesday and it doesn’t launch until the 29th, a strange bit of highly professional piracy indeed. Oh well. R*’s loss is our gain as we watch hundreds of hours of HD encoded GTA in the privacy of our own man dens.

Houser talks about living in New York (he’s British) and the places he finds unique and interesting, like Brighton Beach, which inspired Hove Beach in GTA.

He also talks about the mixture of British and American humor in the series, the shift away from movies like Goodfellas, Boyz in the Hood, and Miami Vice towards a more Eastern European organized crime influence in GTA 4, character development and interactions, and, of course, the controversy that constantly surrounds the game’s violent nature.

It’s a pretty interesting read. Check it out.