Rockstar and Future Green Entertainment have announced that they will soon be releasing a new music album called “Liberty City Invasion: Music from and Inspired by Grand Theft Auto IV” by DJ Green Lantern. Obviously, the disc won’t contain the entire game’s soundtrack — that would take a large box set — but it will feature 16 tracks: half from the game and half inspired by it. Eight of the tracks come from the in-game radio station, “The Beat,” while the rest are cashing in on the game’s popularity inspired by GTA IV. The album will feature several known artists like Busta Rhymes, Wyclef, Fat Joe, Styles P, and Fabolous, as well as a number of up and coming artists. All the tracks were picked by DJ Green Lantern, who has gained a reputation for producing well-crafted albums.

“The Grand Theft Auto games have always featured stunning soundtracks and the amount of eclectic music in Grand Theft Auto IV goes above and beyond anything we have been able to do before” said Sam Houser, Founder and Executive Producer of Rockstar Games, “DJ Green Lantern’s contributions give the soundtrack a true New York flavor and we’re excited to be releasing his full album to fans.”

The album will be available for download on May 20th with a physical release to be announced soon.

Via Press Release

Flickr user Matthew Johnston has posted some pretty interesting side by side comparisons of spots in Liberty City vs. real-life parts of NYC. There are definitely worth a look, and instead of posting them all here at once, I will just let you click through the link at the bottom.Say what you will about Rockstar all you GTA IV naysayers, their attention to detail and dedication to immersive experiences are almost second to none.

Via: Flickr

I think we all could have guessed this was coming sooner or later. GTA IV is the biggest video game launch of the year, so it’s only natural that Yahtzee Croshaw would eventually turn his witty reviewing eye towards it. Amongst all the lavish praise for the game, it’s actually a little refreshing to have something poking fun at the game’s foibles, few though they may be. Although I have to admit that I’m now really wishing there were more dinosaurs in the game.

Oh, silly Uwe. You make so very many gamers angry with your terrible videogame-to-movie adaptations and box your critics and send angry messages to Wired. It’s all very amusing to me, since I don’t expect the movies he does to be any good regardless of the director, but his antics just make everything hilarious.

Boll’s most recent noteworthy actions were his comments on the inevitable Grand Theft Auto film. I’ll let you read his statement in its entirety, but first, you know who I think would be perfect to do a GTA film?

Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

With puppets.

Grand Theft Auto would be super interesting for me, and I think I would actually be the right guy to do it, because my movies are all bloody and violent and I don’t have a problem with action scenes. But look, they will go, in the end, with a Michael Bay or a Brett Ratner, and it will be a PG-13 movie made for $150 million. I think it would be better to make a $30 million, very hard, brutal movie without compromising, but I’m not optimistic.

A $30 million Uwe Boll GTA movie, or a $150 million Michael Bay GTA movie. Am I in hell?

via Game|Life

Okay, so if GameStop is any indication of how the rest of the retailers in the U.S. sold Grand Theft Auto IV, Microsoft saw its system cash in on 64% of sales for Rockstar’s game, while Sony only got 36% of the love in the game’s first week. But, as the numbers show, the PlayStation 3 actually had the better performance when you compare the number of systems that have been sold. (Thanks to Level Up for doing all the math so I didn’t have to.)

After reaching out to both Microsoft and Sony, Level Up got two very different takes, as you’d expect.

Microft’s Aaron Greenberg (the same one that ripped the PS3 recently) had this to say:

I think many people have been surprised to see how well GTA IV is selling on Xbox 360 given the history of the franchise. These sales results add GTA IV to a long list of franchises that have switched over from Playstation to find a new home on Xbox 360 similar to what happened last year with titles like Madden and Guitar Hero. As you have covered on Level Up in the past, the majority of third party franchises are being developed first on our platform so they end up playing best on Xbox 360 and when you combine that with Xbox Live, we expect this trend to continue as more multiplatform releases hit the market. With that said, it is fantastic to hear that we beat PS3 two to one on Grand Theft Auto sales from a major retailer like GameStop.

Sony marketing VP Peter Dille offered this take:

GameStop probably does a little bit better with the early adopter crowd. There’s a larger installed base right now on Xbox 360 than on PS3. So it’s not surprising that there’s going to be more selling on Xbox 360 than PS3. Having said that, we’re really excited about the ratio. If I had an installed base advantage of 3-1, I wouldn’t be crowing too much about a 60-40 sales advantage. We think it’s not as high as what GameStop’s telling you, if you look at [the full picture on] the national level. They’re outselling us, but not by that same margin, and it’s because of their installed base lead. With an installed base lead that’s close to 3-1, if you’re bragging about a 60-40 software split, it’s clear evidence that the Playstation 3 consumer is overindexing on GTA IV, and the Playstation brand loyalty that we’ve been talking about is bearing itself out in the marketplace as we speak.

Dille’s right, as the numbers proved, but does anyone else find it funny that for once Sony is actually using its smaller install base as an argument in their favor?

via Level Up

Microsoft went pretty number-crazy after Grand Theft Auto IV was released, claiming that 40% of new consoles sold with a copy of GTA, sales of the 360 increased 54% over the week prior to GTA’s release and, most notably, that about 60% of all copies of GTA sold in the US were the 360 version. We now have another source to back up that claim — GameStop, which says that 64% of all copies sold were for the 360, compared with 36% on PlayStation 3, in the game’s first week of availability.

There’s no doubt that this has to do with the larger install base of the 360 here in the US. But how exactly did the game perform compared with the relative install bases? As of March, the NPD group reports that 9.9 million Xbox 360 systems and 4.1 million PlayStation 3 systems had been sold. Now, without including the number of systems sold in April (which shouldn’t have too drastic an impact on these numbers, anyway), the 360 holds 70.7% of the total 360 and PS3 systems sold to the PS3’s 29.3%. So with 64% of the copies of GTA being sold on 360, Microsoft’s box actually underperformed compared with PlayStation 3.

You can see how the two companies will go about spinning sales of the game, but at least we can begin to see the reality of this matter.

via Level Up

Above you’ll see an SNL Weekend Update segment mocking the biggest videogame release of the year, GTA IV. Niko and Vlad from the game come on to defend the criticisms of Liberty City, but apparently just show off GTA’s poor animations.(?) While I didn’t find that part of it all that funny (and it was clearly the focal point), the idea that they tried to pull off jokes about something so subtle on a mainstream TV show speaks volumes about the success of the game. I never thought anything of the animation in the game; I’m not sure if they were exaggerating or if I’m just used to imperfect videogame animation.

The whole, “I will beat you!” was kinda funny, at least. I think the SNL Digital Shorts guys would be better suited for a GTA skit, though. For now, the Chappelle’s Show GTA skit remains the king of GTA parodies.

The name’s Chappelle.

Welcome to the latest edition of Pachter Predicts, where Wedbush Morgan analyst and my sworn adversary Michael Pachter makes his predictions for the past month’s console sales here in the United States. For the second straight month, Pachter has predicted that the PlayStation 3 outsold the Xbox 360. (Although last month his prediction turned out wrong, as the 360 had a 5,000 unit edge over the PS3.)

Here are his predictions, with last month’s numbers in parentheses:

Wii: 600,000 (721,000)
PS3: 290,000 (257,000)
Xbox 360: 275,000 (262,000)
PS2: 160,000 (216,000)
DS: 550,000 (698,000)
PSP: 235,000 (297,000)

If Pachter turns out to be right, it looks like the 360 and PS3 won’t have seen a major boost in sales as many have thought they would. He attributes his predicted higher sales of the DS and Wii to their greater availability.

As for Grand Theft Auto IV, he expects it to have sold 3.3 million units in its first six days in the US alone, and also notes that he expects 20 games to have cracked the 100,000 unit mark in April, compared with only nine last year.

Those of you who still find yourself looking for a Wii, Pachter thinks that situation might be soon resolving itself: “We believe that Nintendo has diverted a significant portion of its available supply to Europe since April 2007, as the weakening dollar has made US sales less profitable for the company… We expect the supply situation will begin to improve over the next several months. We expect a surge in supply in the US for Wii Fit’s May 21 launch here, and believe we could see as many as 900,000 Wii units show up at retail this month (May).”

via Next Gen

Aside from World of Warcraft, the biggest MMO of 2007 and so far this year isn’t one you would name off the top of your head. According to the author of an article up on Eurogamer; it’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The piece goes on to defend the position that although CoD4 isn’t an MMO in the strictest sense of the definition, it does share many of the same gameplay elements that typify an MMO.

Call of Duty 4 proves that it’s possible to take some of the things that MMOs do right and distil them for a game that wouldn’t traditionally be seen as an MMO. The potency of the idea, even in this form, is obvious; the drive to play just a little bit more, because there’s a reward waiting just up ahead, is an incredibly powerful and addictive force for players

I can actually agree with the author on most of his points, and the idea isn’t one that hasn’t been presented before. The success of MMOs is changing the way traditional video games are being designed. One of the latest examples of this trend is the multi-player mode in RockStar’s Grand Theft Auto IV. I think we’re going to see the games industry moving ever closer to this formula as gamers demand more of a social element to their gaming experience.

via Eurogamer

EA issued a press release yesterday regarding another bid at trying to take over Take-Two, and while we felt that this was just another chapter in the soap opera not worth mentioning, today, I just had to post something about it because our favorite analyst has thrown his two cents in on the subject.Michael Patcher, whom one of our writers calls “his nemesis” has had plenty to say regarding the back and forth between both companies, and while visiting Game Politics this morning, I came across this lovely bit of information.

Apparently, EA has only $1.7 billion in the bank, and the deal they have offered Take-Two deal is $2.1 billion, so they have talked to Morgan Stanley, the Bank of Nova Scotia and several other financial institutions who have all agreed to loan them some money so as to secure the deal.

Here is what I pulled from Game Politics:

It is something that should be expected. After [the acquisition of] Pandemic/BioWare, EA has only around $1.7 billion in available cash… The Take-Two deal is around $2.1 billion… so they’re short. They also probably need around $400 million in available cash for working capital needs, so they need to raise around $800 million to complete the deal. The extra $200 million is just a cushion, although I suppose it could be construed as how much higher they’re willing to go [for Take-Two]…

The timing isn’t particularly unusual, a bit later than I would have thought, as they should have started the process on March 13 (when they went hostile). However, I have no experience in credit markets like we’re experiencing now, so maybe it’s normal to take 8 weeks to get something like this done. It’s also possible that they waited for their new CFO [Eric Brown] to start in order to allow him to negotiate terms…

I would not read any significance into the filing, other than to say that if they want to raise their offer price [for Take Two], they will likely need a higher credit line…

So EA, what are we going to do tonight? The same thing we do every night, Pinky – try to take over the world!

Via: Game Politics