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

You’ve wreaked havoc on Liberty City before — but have you ever done it on your phone? Just imagine it! You can hijack a (virtual) taxi… while in an (actual) taxi! It’s all of that good ol’ early 2000′s controversy, on the go!

RockStar Games has just announced that Grand Theft Auto 3 10th Anniversary will be hitting a rather elite handful of handsets come December 15th, and it’ll only set you back 5 bucks. While it’s coming to both iOS and Android, you’ll need one of either platform’s beastlier offerings to be able to get this one up and running.

The list of supported devices:

iOS: iPad 1 and 2, iPhone 4 and 4S, iPod touch 4th Generation
Android Phones: HTC Rezound, LG Optimus 2x, Motorola Atrix 4G, Motorola Droid X2, Motorola Photon 4G, Samsung Galaxy R, T-Mobile G2x
Android Tablets: Acer Iconia, Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Dell Streak 7, LG Optimus Pad, Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1, Sony Tablet S, Toshiba Thrive

First person who figures out if RockStar was able to somehow get the whole soliciting-a-virtual-prostitute thing through the App Store approval process gets a high five.

Who said Japanese players don’t appreciate video games made outside their home country? I just went out to buy the newest issue of the Famitsu, Japan’s leading video game magazine (which came out about 3 hours ago/it’s currently 3am Thursday over here), and saw what you see above: L.A. Noire, one of the biggest game titles this year, missed the perfect review score by just one point.

Three out of four editors gave away ten out of ten points but one went for only nine (without really explaining why). In total, L.A. Noire scored a still excellent 39/40 points for both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions from the Famitsu.

You can read our extensive review of the Rockstar game here.

For your reference, here’s a list of all games that scored a perfect 40/40 from the Famitsu. L.A. Noire would have been the first not made by a Japanese company:

1. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998, for Nintendo 64)
2. Soul Calibur (1999, for Dreamcast)
3. Vagrant Story (2000, for PlayStation)
4. The Legend of Zelda – The Wind Waker (2003, for GameCube)
5. Nintendogs (2005, for the DS)
6. Final Fantasy XII (2006, for PlayStation 2)
7. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008, for the Wii)
8. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008, for PlayStation 3)
9. 428: Fusasareta Shibuya de (2008, for the Wii)
10. Dragon Quest IX (2009, for the DS)
11. Monster Hunter Tri (2009, for the Wii)
12. Bayonetta (2009, for Xbox 360)[
13. New Super Mario Bros. (2009, for the Wii)
14. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (2010, for the PSP)
15. Pokémon Black and White (2010, for the DS)

We’re just a few weeks away from the release of LA Noire on May 17, and today Rockstar has released the game’s third trailer.

What an indictment of Hollywood that Rocksta can produce a better drama than seemingly at will (see also GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption).

This is pretty big. Rockstar’s upcoming LA Noire will be an official selection at the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s the first time a game has been accepted into the festival.

As you can see in the above picture, Rockstar will host some sort of preview on April 25, moderated by the film festival’s chief creative officer, that will discuss the coming nexus between gaming and filmmaking.

The game, as I’m sure you all know, will be released on May 17 for the Xbox 360 and PS3.

I suppose I’m not the only person who immediately thinks of LA Confidential when thinking about the game. That’s good, yes.

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.

Look at your calendar. That’s right, it’s Chinese New Year. What does that mean? One, fun photos, and two, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for iOS is 50 percent off. The sale lasts until Sunday.

Ladies and gentlemen: the second LA Noire trailer has landed. “LA Noire?” Yes, it’s the next Rockstar game that will sell 80 zillion copies in two days.

My bad, guys. I had meant to post this two days ago, but I was busy meeting a super-secret company in preparation for CES. At the very least I now know CES will have at least one fun device to look forward to. Moving on. This here is a video talking about Rockstar’s brand new motion capture technology that’s being used in the creation of LA Noire.

Yes, there’s a lot of videos being posted today. That’s just how it goes sometimes.

Edge had a big article about LA Noire several months back. It’s sort of a detective/spy game that takes place in 1940s Los Angeles. Think LA Confidential.

Once again, the 800 scripts on our site seem to be interfering with the ability of the video to load, so you may have to ctrl-r a few times.

Ooo, I didn’t know this was coming out. It’s the Grand Theft Auto: Complete Edition, and it includes GTA IV along with its two DLCs, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. It’s only available for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Sorry, PC gamers. Look at that: it’s available on Steam. Maybe I had had checked first…

The package comes out today and it’ll retail for $39.99, which, eh, seems about $10 too expensive when you consider GTA IV came out on April 2008. (And doesn’t GTA IV occasionally go for $5-$10 on those Steam sales?)

There’s no extra features in any of the games, but the package does come with a “collectible map and poster.”

I suppose this is handy if you’re one of the half dozen people on Planet Earth who hasn’t already played these games.

The other fun part of Comic-Con? Playing the upcoming Red Dead Redemption DLC, Undead Nightmare. We now have the official launch trailer.

The DLC, which should hit Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network later this month, has you, John Marston, trying to cleanse the area of a virus that has resurrected the dead. Well, the undead. Whatever: they’re zombies.

Rockstar has handled the whole situation (zombies in the old west, what?) about as well as you could have hoped.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars first came out for the Nintendo DS back in March, 2009. Since then it’s been ported to the PSP and iOS. Today? There’s Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars HD for the iPad [iTunes link]. I cannot think of another GTA release that’s had so many releases across so many different platforms across such a span of time.

Any new features this time around? Well, as the name implies, the graphics have had a resolution bump. You can also listen to your iTunes music via the Independence FM radio station.

I would imagine that playing the game with the iPad’s touchscreen controls are a little more easy to handle than having to fuss around with a DS stylus.

It’s $9.99, which is quite inexpensive for an entire GTA game.

Gotta love Rockstar’s embrace of iOS. If I had any money to speak of maybe I’d consider getting an iPad for some of the games now appearing on there!

Apparently someone is thinking about creating a movie based on Red Dead Redemption, and they want Brad Pitt to play John Marston. Could be neat.

If you’re going to make a movie based on a game, you might as well base it on one with an actual story, right? Considering Red Dead Redemption did, in fact, have a pretty good story—I actually enjoyed watching the story unfold more than I enjoyed running through the same playing mechanics over and over again—then yeah, this has the potential to not be trash.

But that depends on several things, including how closely Rockstar works with the screenwriters and the director.

As for Brad Pitt, ShowbizSpy—a real hit with techies, I’m sure—quotes a source (a source, people!) as saying, “The idea is to make this in the style of an epic Western movie but with a few modern touches*. Brad is perfect for the role and he is being given first refusal.”

That basically means whoever is behind the movie wants Brad Pitt to star, and is giving him the role (if he wants it) without even talking to him. Nice gig he has.

You’ll recall that Brad Pitt has already starred in a western in the movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (pictured above). Pitt was quite good in it, and the movie is worth going out of your way to see.

In other Red Dead Redemption news, Rockstar has announced another DLC pack, called Liars and Cheaters. It includes more multi-player shenanigans, and comes out on September 21..

*Instead of trying to find his family, Brad Pitt will be looking for his lost iPad

Rockstar, developer of Red Dead Redemption (and Grand Theft Auto), has decided to ban certain players it finds cheating online in its Wild West-themed action game. Don’t like it? Don’t cheat! Simple as.

The “ban hammer,” as Rockstar puts it, goes down today, and only applies to people who have hacked their save file to have impossibly high scores.

Since the game’s release, Rockstar has re-balanced its distribution of experience points. In the early days of its release you’d get like a zillion points for doing menial actions. People who took advantage of the early, unbalances scoring system won’t be affected by the ban.

It is, in fact, a ban for cheaters, not people who merely played the gamed as is, er, as was.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, and that’s don’t cheat while playing online video games. You’re just being a jerk, and no one likes a jerk.

Oh, it’s been about a month or so since Red Dead Redemption has spun around inside my Xbox 360, but Rockstar’s new DLC, the Legends and Killers Pack, may convince me to give it another go.

The pack will be available for both the PS3 and 360 version for $9.99 and 800 M$ Points.

(Get it, M$? Clever, yes.)

I love the way the announcer here says “Tomahawk.” It sounds like he’s announcing a BattleBots fight.

Can we all agree that Red Dead Redemption is one of Rockstar‘s finest games? It’s probably one of the best games of this generation, too. A 30-minute short film based on the game, directed by the guy (John Hillcoat) who directed The Road (good) and The Proposition (great), debuts tomorrow night on the Fox network at midnight. Set your DVR. Here we have a short trailer (that I should have posted yesterday).

Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption came in the mail on Tuesday, and my first course of action was to call the Ron and Fez Show on Sirius XM. “Hey, guys, I see your names in the credits. You rock!” Calling the show and talking to East Side Dave (by the way, SAVE DAVE) and Ron was the highlight of my week. Well, it was the highlight of my week until I was able to pop the disc into my 360 (it’s also available for the PS3). As I told Ron on the air, Rockstar knows how to make a good video game. A really good video game, in fact.

What’s pretty funny about Red Dead Redemption is that I’ve seen it derisively referred to as nothing more than Grand Theft Auto IV in the Wild West. You know, as if GTA IV is a bad game! Was the hype surrounding that game warranted? I don’t know. What I do know is that it was a fine, fine game in a world filled with (polluted with?) generic modern warfare shooter after generic space marine shooter. There’s more to GTA than running over pedestrians and robbing hot dog vendors. Play the missions, let the story develop, and you’ll say to yourself, “There’s actually a pretty great script and some solid voice acting here.” Rockstar (along with BioWare) is the best in the business in that regard.

It’s 1911, and the old ways of the West are dying; its days of being “wild” are drawing to a close. That’s not good news for the game’s main character, a well-dressed ex-crook named John Marston who’s forced to track down one of his old running buddies for the increasingly powerful federal government. (I feel like I’m channeling Rush Limbaugh or that other bozo with “increasingly powerful federal government.”) You approach your destination, from parts unknown, on a train straight out of “There Will Be Blood,” eavesdropping on the conversations of an old woman who speaks of bringing “civilization” to the area and a young woman who asks her father to reconcile Christianity’s many contradictions.

This will not be a light day at the office.

Your train pulls up to a small town in the middle of nowhere, and off you go.

This sandbox-style game takes place in a literal sandbox: dirt and broken down rocks comprise the majority of the scenery, and cacti and other rubbish-looking plant life remind you that you’re not “back east” anymore. It’s a big sandbox, too, and as believable as Liberty City, with cross-map trips taking upwards of 10 minutes on horseback. Small towns—nothing more than a couple of shacks and a saloon—rise out of the nothingness and offer you a place to have a drink, buy guns and ammunition from a vendor voiced by noted gun nut Anthony of Sirius XM’s Opie and Anthony, gamble with local miscreants, and rest/save your game. Nowhere near a town? With a few button presses you’ve made a campfire, where you can save your game and fast-travel to a waypoint. Don’t fast-travel too often lest you diminish the game’s sense of scope. Exploration is vital, as it’s the only way to find and kill local fauna, whose hides you can collect and later sell.

You already know how to use the map; it’s identical to GTA IV‘s. Letters hover over it, located on the lower left-hand side of the screen, and point to mission-giving characters. You visit these characters, obtain a mission, complete the mission, then go on another mission until you move onto the next mission-giving character. This moves the story along, in short, well-acted cinematics—again, like in GTA. You’ll have noticed a pattern by now.

Mid-mission checkpoints are more frequent, thank heavens.

When I played the game at PAX East a few weeks (months? I’ve lost all track of time) back, one of the things the friendly Rockstar rep highlighted was the horse mechanics. I’m almost certain that’s the first time I’ve written the phrase “horse mechanics.” There’s nothing to it: you tap A to get the horse going, then hold A to keep steady the pace, steering all the while with the Left Stick. When in town you hitch your horse to a handy hitching pole—the horse will wait for you. Or, if out in the middle of nowhere, hitting Up on the D-Pad causes you to whistle out for the horse, which shows up a few moments later. It’s all very Zelda-like, an observation that rather pleased the Rockstar rep. There’s no harm in being compared to Zelda.

Aiming is less frustrating than it’s been in past Rockstar games. You whip out your gun with the Left Trigger. The default mode lets you free-aim with the Right Stick, but if you pull the Left Trigger while near, say, a bad guy’s head, the aiming reticule automatically locks on. Then you pull the Right Trigger. Then the bad guy dies. It’s all very poetic. In my view this is Rockstar saying, “Look, there’s no way in hell you’re going to have any sort of precision while aiming with the 360 controller, so let’s just automate the process for you as much as possible.” (There is, of course, a fully manual mode if you’re a crazy person.) Rockstar should be given credit for trying (and trying… since the days of GTA III for the PS2) to figure out how to make aiming with a controller as painless as possible, but let’s face facts: no control scheme will ever better a mouse and keyboard. This is not up for debate. Perhaps a PC version is warranted? The game looks good on the aging 360 hardware, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the visual bump with a modern day video card and processor.

The multi-player? I know that it exists, but I haven’t put in the time to write about it. My guess is that if you got a kick out of GTA IV‘s multi-player mode then you’ll probably feel right at home here.

A few more things come to mind. One is that Rockstar seems to have perfected this particular type of gameplay experience. That is, going from person to person, doing mission after mission, developing a story along the way that’s better than much of what’s coming out of Hollywood these days—Rockstar has that on lockdown. For how much longer will that appeal, I wonder? The second is that Rockstar’s virtual worlds are the most convincing in gaming today. Red Dead Redemption‘s lands aren’t as densely populated as Liberty City, but every single inhabitant has something on his or her mind, and will, if given the opportunity, talk your ear off. Voice actors not currently affiliated with BioWare (because they already know this) take note: this is how lines are supposed to be delivered. I’ve recently been playing through Halo 3 and I can, at times, feel my kidneys cringe in embarrassment at some of the dialogue. So bad.

How do I end this? I guess by saying the game could be Rockstar’s best effort yet. So if that appeals to you…

Once upon a time I heard an EA so-and-so, in a totally unofficial capacity, say something to the effect of “western games never sell.” I guess we’ll find out soon enough with the release of Red Dead Redemption. This is the official launch trailer.

Will the game be as big as Grand Theft Auto? Maybe not, but given what I’ve read/seen/played it’s certainly just as good.

My immediate reaction to this trailer was, “Man, Rockstar does have a knack for making a game seem, well, ‘epic,’ to use the Internet vernacular.” Rockstar and BioWare are probably the best in the business in that regard.

Remember: May 18. My one hope is that there will be a PC version…

Well this is interesting. A person far cleverer than any of us here decided, on a whim, to look at the main executable of the Steam version of Max Payne 2 in a text editor. Because that’s what you do, you know? Anyhow, a funny little thing appears: the ASCII logo of famed (now defunct) release group Myth. In other words, it sure does look like Rockstar uploaded a cracked (PIRATED OMG OMG OMG) version of the game to Steam’s servers! You can’t make this stuff up.

Why would Rockstar do this? (Well, “Rockstar,” it could have just been some low-level coder acting on his own, not like a direct order from the project manager or something.) Presumably just to save the few minutes it would have taken to recompile the game to run without a CD check. I mean, it sure would be easier to simply supply the cracked .exe file than do the work yourself, right? That’s certainly appears to be the case here.

The question now is, will the FBI, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, break down Rockstar’s door, arresting everyone in the building for committing the heinous crime of software piracy?

Doubtful.

As the world turns…