The Walking Dead Rewiew

Episode 1: A New Day review

Instead of following Rick Grimes and his ragtag group of mildly-unlikable friends, Telltale decided to cook up some new heroes for its Walking Dead game. Enter protagonist Lee Everett, a convicted murderer (it's complicated) freed from the shackles of law when a corpse meanders in front of the police cruiser transferring him to prison. A montage of fading in and out of consciousnesses later and all of Georgia is run by the Walking Dead. It's never really addressed how things went from bad to full-blown zombie invasion in what feels like a matter of minutes (the world is in as bad a shape as it was when Rick awoke from a coma after a few months in the hospital), but once that suspension of disbelief is hurdled over, you're in the clear.
After blowing the head off of a zombified police officer, Lee makes his way into a nearby home where he meets Clementine, a little girl whose parents are... erm... uh... away... on vacation. And totally coming back for her. He takes her under his wing and goes about trying to find help, food, water, and shelter from the flesh-hungry monsters trying to bash apart the walls of society.
The first episode of The Walking Dead game sets up the tone and setting well, and caters to fans of the books, fans of the television show, and even those who haven't cared about either. It also strikes a strong balance between Telltale's older point-and-click adventure games and the action-based gameplay of Jurassic Park. Whereas the latter felt like you were directing a movie instead of actually playing a game, Walking Dead makes you feel like you're actually controlling Lee as he bashes in undead heads. It handles action in an unorthodox manner, but it's, in a way, more realistic, making it feel like Lee's a fairly regular guy, and not an expert marksman.

Also successful is the use of player choice. On several occasions we were asked to make fairly important decisions that affected the lives of the people around us. These choices had cascading effects on the story in both major and minor ways. Some simply altered how survivors viewed us, changing dialog options later in the episode, while others would lead to the death of one character over another. It worked as fluidly as could be hoped, and made us feel truly in control of the world, instead of the other way around. What's more, a trailer the played for the second episode after the first ended showed our choices carrying over - an extremely exciting prospect.
There were some graphical and audio issues, as there often are in Telltale's games, but, all in all, we were genuinely surprised with how much we enjoyed the first episode of The Walking Dead. A New Day definitely sold us on the series, and we'll be coming back for more every month as long as the quality stays high.

Episode 2: Starved for Help review

Telltale's Walking Dead series continues to impress us. Picking up a few months after the events of Episode 1, Starved for Help has our survivors dealing with high-tensions and low food reserves. Since the last chapter they've met up with a new friend at an air force base who was able to supply them with rations, but even those are running low. Things are looking bad, and they're being forced to push out further and further away from their camp in hopes of finding something to quiet the rumbling in their gut. While exploring, Lee hears a scream and rushes to investigate, finding some survivors that have stumbled across a bear trap. One is stuck - the release trigger on the trap has been removed - and roamers are moving in. Lee is faced with two options: attempt to break the nearly indestructible trap, or try to smash through the man's much-more-fragile leg with his axe.
This is just the first of many decisions of the episode, each leading to different, brutal outcomes. Starved for Help drives forward the compelling story based on decisions we made in the last episode, adding nice customization to the already strong tale that continues to get darker and more interesting. Just as was the case with A New Day, we were amazed by the number of decisions Telltale was able to shove into the episode, both major and minor.

Deciding whether or not to cut off a man's leg in a desperate attempt to save him is obviously a fairly big deal, but opting to lie or tell the truth to a friend, or picking who gets food for the night, leads to other interesting interactions. There are some hiccups in this system - sometimes Telltale wants to show you the fruits of your labor immediately, leading to somewhat forced encounters where characters will immediately question your motives mere seconds after you've made your decision - but it usually helps to flesh out the incredibly personalized story.
Episode 2 also ramped up the need to make quick choices. We'd often find ourselves scrambling to decide what to do in a situation when presented with a few difficult options. Hell, at one point we flat-out failed to act, freezing up completely and being incapable of picking the lesser of two very real evils. It was a unique response that we've never experienced in any other game, and we were left breathless after it was all over.

We're still shocked at how great Telltale's newest series is. The gameplay is tense and great, the story keeps getting better, and the unique visual style continues to blow us away. We're hungry for more.

Episode 3: Long Road Ahead review

Episode 2 ended with some great storyline hooks, and some absolute point-of-no-return moments. And, frankly, it serves as a great lead-in to the emotionally wrenching third episode of The Walking Dead. Long Road Ahead turns the narrative screws with ruthless efficiency and will undoubtedly hook you for future installments. If you've been on the fence about playing up to this point, there's no reason not to dive in now that it's beyond the halfway mark.
After the events of Episode 2, and the tensions that come out when people are hungry and desperate, there's no shortage of fracturing alliances within the group of survivors. Not even a the sharpest blade could slice the tension between Kenny and Lilly--given the events of the second episode--and based on simple cues like text color (if you've turned on subtitles), you can immediately see the choices you've made in the prior episodes carry into this one. Long Road Ahead begins as Kenny and Lee peruse downtown Macon, GA in search of supplies. They come across a bedraggled survivor who can't stave off a pack of undead in time. It's up to you to decide whether to leave her as a zombie magnet to keep tension off your back, or draw attention to yourself by putting her out of her misery.

The moment kicks off a tense setpiece that mixes up the "fast decision" dialogue choices seen in past episodes with the game's item gathering system. Mechanically, it's a tad wonky, as the on-screen timer counts down quickly and (on consoles) the analog sticks feel sluggish. It's an artificial tension-raiser. Upon returning to the camp, times are still tough, and a few tangled plot threads fray into something much bigger. The game does an effective job of weaving the interpersonal relationships of survivors against the ongoing hazards just outside the group's confines.
Long Road Ahead does an excellent job of juxtaposing multiple playstyles. While some elements--most of the shooting, but especially first-person sniping, and a terribly annoying zombie audio glitch--fall mechanically short, the dramatic beats that Telltale hits with this episode are powerful and heart-wrenching. At the point at which the episode stops, the momentum, like the pack's train, has gained so much speed that you won't want to stop. Episode 4 can't come soon enough.

Gta History

It's all about the American Dream. You start at the bottom, put in effort and time, and you make it to the top...no matter who you have to kill. Any stone player can get known and get paid if they take what they want, and survive the day. And see the next guy lining up to take what's yours and make it his. That's what makes this country great.
Gamers live the life Rockstar's built for them, 50 million of them, doing what they want and getting ahead one drive-by, one stolen ride, one felony at a time. It's a funhouse mirror on our sliding culture, envisioned by a Scot and a pair of Brits. Imitators come and go. None come close to Grand Theft Auto's excesses, successes, consequences, and stepping outside the lines. The franchise is big-time. Stocks jump at the mention of its name. So do giant-killers, lawyers, mothers, and politicians – all stepping up to take their shot at a game that turned controversy into fame, and then infamy.
A life of crime ain't easy, baby.

Take the Money and Run

Scotland in the mid-80's didn't exist on gaming's radar, but that didn't stop full-time student David Jones from taking a half-done, spare time project – side-scrolling shooter Menace, written on his Commodore Amiga – into a PC expo to show it around and get some feedback. He walked out with multiple offers. Jones picked Psygnosis mostly because at two hundred miles away, the Liverpool-based publisher was the closest of the bunch.
There weren't any local developers to hire on with, so Jones founded one to facilitate his "hobby" while finishing up a computer science degree. DMA Design (for Direct Mind Access) delivered Menace in 1987 and won praise for its polished gameplay. After a second successful shooter, Blood Money, hobby shifted to career. DMA started hiring.

A throwaway test animation of tiny men marching to their explosive doom, created by programmer Mike Dailly, soon inspired DMA's first powerhouse franchise. Lemmings was a puzzler with a sadistic streak, selling more units on its first day than Menace and Blood Money ever had combined. Sequels and dozens of ports occupied DMA for years. Jones and company settled into the Lemmings business, only dropping two non-Lemming titles in-between to stay fresh.
Before the pattern fully set in, circumstances nudged Jones to break all his old habits. Sony bought out Psygnosis, his one and only publisher, and Commodore's bankruptcy announcement sunk the Amiga, his primary platform. After completing small but admired Uniracers for the SNES, DMA accepted an invite to join Midway, LucasArts and Rare on Nintendo's content "Dream Team" for the upcoming Ultra 64 console. Jones had a new home. He went to work on an exclusive launch title, Body Harvest, DMA's first 3D effort, and it did things a little differently from those other Nintendo games. You played an armed and armored soldier in a free-roaming mission to save humanity from hungry alien carnivores, able to jump into any vehicle you found. Less fortunate humans, whether they fell to invaders, careless driving or over-aggressive marksmanship, died screaming in a haze of 64-bit blood.
It didn't get a pass from Nintendo EAD lead Shigeru Miyamoto. Mario's creator wanted more puzzles, less gore.
Jones' opinion differed. The aggressively over-the-top gameplay and open-world environments fit like personally tailored brass knuckles. It needed more, not different. Body Harvest fell off Nintendo's schedule (to be picked up years later by Midway), but DMA was already moving on a newer, better project. Programming had an engine that simulated a top-down cityscape, and centering the camera on a moving object gave it a incredible sense of speed. Jones quickly dreamed up a cops-and-robbers chase game around that dynamic, set in a living, breathing city where the player could go anywhere and do anything. Then he got bold: The player wouldn't be the cop.
The core problem remained. If Nintendo objected to occasionally splattering the odd civilian, no way would they ever accept the criminal activities on Jones' mind. He needed a new publisher...somebody willing to piss a few people off.

It's All In the Game

Sam and Dan Houser were the prep school sons of a London jazz club owner, but their addiction was East Coast rap and America's growing hip-hop movement. Looking to break in, they took jobs at BMG Music, scouting and signing British acts to sub-labels and hunting for ways up the ladder. When a video game division launched in 1993, they jumped to BMG Interactive with big, big plans. If music had a culture, gaming did, too, and the Housers – with zero development experience between them – decided that culture was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Their product would reflect the attitude and sell a lifestyle around it.
Unfortunately, game developers didn't get the memo. BMG releases like Exhumed and Off-World Interceptor Extreme, both for the poorly performing Sega Saturn, didn't exactly live up to the Housers' vision of unimaginable coolness.
Then David Jones pitched them a PC game called Race-n-Chase.
The 2D graphics sucked by late-90's standards, but the pure scope of the thing chumped every other game on the market. You played a petty thug making a grab for the big time in the criminal underworld, boosting cars at will and bopping through contract murders, aggravated assaults and chained collateral damage for handsome rewards. Almost any car could be stolen, and a Porsche handled differently from a truck. More importantly, the world responded to your choices, especially the bad ones. Creating armed mayhem in the streets led to increased police response as your Wanted level rose, until you were killed or busted...unless you gave them the greasy slip. If you screwed up a little, the game didn't end; you had to deal with the problem you created for yourself. Advancement was all about scoring cash, and you could do that any way you wanted. Deliver a drug shipment on time. Mug a few citizens on the street. Mow down Hare Krishna for a fat bonus, Death Race 2000-style.
All that freedom carried a price. Players could go anywhere in Liberty City, Vice City or San Andreas, on foot or behind the wheel, and do – or not do – anything they wanted in totally unexpected ways. DMA had to plan and execute contingences for emergent gameplay, something none of them had ever seen, much less coded for. Jones originally scheduled an 18-month development cycle. It took 30 to finish.
As far as the Housers were concerned, they'd just discovered the New World. Here was a mature game with a sick sense of humor, something for anybody who'd outgrown plumbers and Pac-Men and pixelated spaceships. They instantly signed Race-n-Chase, and immediately changed its name. Grand Theft Auto roared into town in 1997 on a solid wave of controversy.

British, German and French officials condemned it before a single unit sold. Brazil banned it outright. There were no aliens, elves, dragons, ninja or princesses to soften the blow; GTA spooled out in the real world – or a stylized super-mafia version of it – loaded with 200 missions that encouraged all kinds of antisocial behavior. Losing Johnny Law usually meant dropping a few badges in your way, sometimes with a flamethrower. One mission involved car-bombing a police station. And at any point, a player could simply step out of his stolen vehicle and start blasting away, challenging the authorities to bring ever-increasing levels of force to stop the rampage. In Grand Theft Auto, consequences followed actions. That was half the fun.
Gamers tore in. Non-linear play was old news, but GTA's early sandbox freedoms easily made backdated graphics acceptable, and if every adult in the world hated and feared what GTA represented, so much the better.
Finally, BMG Interactive had their hit. Sam and Dan Houser had their mean streets lifestyle to sell. Critics had their rally point against the evils of video games.

Repeat Offender

Ports and mission packs followed. London 1969 became the first expansion made for the PlayStation. Under-the-radar London 1961 was early downloadable freeware for the PC, and brought multiplayer deathmatches to the party. Both kept gamers on the streets as DMA and BMG started work on a true sequel. Nobody wanted off this ride.
Plans, however, changed.
Corporate buyouts always seemed to follow David Jones around. After losing Psygnosis to Sony, he took on a Creative Director title and sold DMA to British publisher Gremlin Interactive, severely complicating DMA's deal with BMG. Soon after, French publisher Infogrames stepped in and bought Gremlin. Jones, not happy with that turn, left his company and his unfinished sequel behind. Development moved forward with his blessing.
Grand Theft Auto 2 smoothed out the graphics, but to the casual observer it was more of the same. The real improvements were under the hood: more story, worse consequences.

The timeline moved from the groovy past to the vague future, from thinly veiled locales to Anywhere City, added electroguns and vehicular weaponry, and even gave your sociopath alter ego a name. Claude Speed had to balance allegiances between three rival gangs; showing any favoritism automatically meant trouble. Other muggers and carjackers wandered the streets, making you for just another easy mark. Picking fights with cops now escalated into SWAT operations and army maneuvers as tanks converged to end any war you started. Unless you threw them off the scent with a fast paint job.
Anywhere City felt more alive, more random and unpredictable. Social commentary crept in with a save system that required hefty donations to the church. Music was part of GTA1's world, but the sequel benefited from two-way licensing with Moving Shadow, Apricot Records and others. Anywhere City's radio stations catered to every taste, carrying a distinct track list courtesy of the Housers' music connections...connections that outlasted their association with BMG.
Jones wasn't far out of the picture when BMG Interactive became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, an American publisher with expansion high on its priority list. The Brothers Houser relocated to their own personal Mecca, New York City, and renamed their division Rockstar Games. Soon after, Take-Two bought DMA from Infogrames, just to settle out the GTA rights. Ownership came full circle in just a few months. The Housers took a bigger role on GTA2, starting with a live-action promo of Claude Speed fencing stolen Zaibatsu drugs all over town and rescuing Hare Krishna. Sam produced it, Dan wrote it. Eight minutes of GTA 2: The Movie, chopped to ninety seconds, opened the game. It was the first time they'd gotten so involved in a project. Now they had a taste for it.
The sequel did well, but the top-down graphics stuck out worse than ever. Gaming went 3D in the mid-90's; GTA 2 released with only three months left in the 20th Century. Even Lara Croft stole vehicles three years prior, and it wasn't like she really meant it.
The game was right. They just needed to take it down to street level.

The World and Everything In It

Bringing GTA into the present tense hit its first roadblock when the DMA crew pulled Body Harvest's 3D code off the shelf and found it'd aged badly. Building a whole new engine from scratch didn't fit the schedule. Renting one did.
Instead of licensing a proprietary game engine, they became one of the first developers to use generic third-party middleware. Renderware scaled fast. A basic Liberty City was up by summer 2000, and a nameless anti-hero – only referred to as "Claude" in a few obscure lines of code – could boost cars and drive around in it. New elements popped in every month. Weather changed. Day and night marked the time. Some jacked drivers fought back. Stealing the right car opened up bonus missions. Multiplayer got a carry-over from London 1961 and was dropped before the design strayed. DMA's team knew from experience how fast building an open world environment could go out of control, but a 3D environment demanded a scope nobody had seen in a game before, and everybody liked that. They rolled with it, enabling their players to go anywhere they wanted, do anything they wanted, in any way they wanted. The gameplay sprawled. Amazingly, the schedule didn't.
Sam Houser took over permanent duty as the series' Executive Producer. Dan and James Worrall stepped up to write story, cutscenes, pedestrian quips and (with talk radio staple Lazlow Jones, also the host on Chatterbox FM) radio dialogue and fake commercials, and filled every inch with the sharpest satire they could devise. The foundations were set. GTA came out the other side with an even greater disrespect for authority than before and a cast of name actors to voice it. Sacred cows got carved into prime rib on a minute-to-minute basis. Nobody was safe. Grand Theft Auto III staked out October 2, 2001 as its day to terrify every parent, outrage every politician, and represent what a real game could do when it didn't hold anything back.

On September 11, the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell to terrorist attacks, choking Manhattan in dust and uncertainty. Rockstar's offices were within walking distance of Ground Zero.
Suddenly, there were lines they didn't feel like crossing anymore.
Sam Houser publicly announced GTA III's release would slip three weeks, then the whole team combed Liberty City –- their thinly veiled New York – for inappropriate content. LCPD squad cars were repainted to look less like the NYPD. Aircraft-based missions, a GTA first, were curtailed. School kids and elderly pedestrians pushing walkers vanished off the sidewalks. Missions doled out by homeless anarchist Darkel got the chop; only his ice cream truck-bomb job survived, transferred to El Burro with the targets switched from cops to rival gangsters.
Also gone: Dismemberments. Arms and legs designed to fly off wounded NPC models stayed attached instead. Post-9/11, it just looked too gruesome. The PC port, released seven months later, gave players the full effect.
The harshest stuff was gone, but GTA III still became the industry lightning rod...and 2001's top-selling game, with only two months on the shelves. The revolution was live.
The plot came straight out of a Richard Stark pulp novel. A sweet bank heist turned into a messy break-up when girlfriend Catalina shot up your silent protagonist. One lucky escape from prisoner transport later, "Claude" was back on the Liberty City's dark and gritty streets, taking jobs from the local organizations to make some scratch and looking for a little payback on the ex. Yakuza, a designer drug called SPANK, and sleazy media baron Donald Love all played into your not-so-noble quest.
Liberty City was the ultimate sandbox playground, so good you could enjoy the hell out of it without accepting any missions, advancing the story, or basically doing anything any other game would force a player to do. You could earn honest money in a stolen taxi, go Vigilante on some criminals, drag race through the streets or casually mow down civilians while chilling to the radio beat...for starters. DMA even left in the old 2D view option for veterans. Nobody used it. GTA III was about depth.
Rockstar also pushed the sex and violence way past what most were used to in a game. Players routinely gunned down First Responders trying to stop them from gunning down civilians. "Claude" got health boosts by getting it on with a hooker, and enterprising gamers could whack the chick for an instant refund. After 30 hours, everybody experimented with the rules and found out there weren't any. By 60 hours, they knew every side-street, shortcut, and scam that let them get away with murder. If GTA pushed the envelope by design, gamers figured out fast how to burn that envelope and spit the ashes in The Man's face.
One year into the PS2's lifespan, Grand Theft Auto III became the killer app, the must-play crime simulator for anyone mature enough to recognize outrageous fantasy when they played it. To the morality police, it was a new low. The game caught a ban in Australia and lawsuits from the likes of Jack Thompson. Retailers like Wal-Mart finally started carding anyone buying an M-Rated game. Over ten years later, it remains one of the best-selling, best-reviewed, most reviled games of all time.
And the trouble was only just starting.

Grand Theft Auto III perfectly translated the anarchy from 2D to 3D and put it in a living, breathing city like nobody had ever seen. The scale and variety alone sold it, and they'd sell another exactly like it just as easy. But Sam and Dan Houser didn't need to repeat themselves, not with a property this rich, and they weren't tied to silent "Claude" as their lead, either. Their plan wasn't complicated: same formula, different flavor, and they didn't have to look far for inspiration. There were two more towns from the original game to pick over, and radio station Flashback 95.6's entire GTA III playlist came straight off the Scarface soundtrack. They'd already pulled influences from Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Now it was Brian De Palma and Michael Mann's turn.

With barely a few tweaks to their Renderware engine, DMA Design – officially redubbed Rockstar North – filled out the sun-drenched faux-Miami of Vice City in record time. Powerboats cut waves through the canals, neon trimmed the clubs. Motorcycles and some tough-to-control helicopters joined the list of vehicles available for the taking, every one getting improved damage models. Players could shoot out tires, bail out of moving cars, and take advantage of a revamped targeting system that prioritized troublemakers over civilians. And it wouldn't be Miami without miniguns and chainsaws in the arsenal. The Housers set their sequel in the decadent, Reagan-ized 80's, going full-bore on the nostalgia. Buying up real estate was where the real money happened, and as produced by Lazlow Jones, the radio dial popped with recognizable Top 40 hits. It was their best, most eclectic soundtrack yet.
Goodfellas pretty boy Ray Liotta signed on to voice Tommy Vercetti, a Liberty City psycho struggling to pay back the mobsters who staked him after a drug deal went far south. It didn't take long before Tommy blew off his former employers to create a criminal empire of his own, with Lance Vance (voiced by Philip Michael Thomas of Miami Vice fame) supplying muscle and legal backup provided by Ken Rosenberg, carbon copied off Sean Penn's coked out lawyer from Carlito's Way. His expert courtroom defenses ("Tommy Vercetti doesn't even own a gun!") whenever Tommy got busted were highlights in a game that punched up the satire in an even deeper shade of dark than before. The Vercetti Gang pulled bank heists, got incriminating photos of impure politicians, helped Scottish glam rockers Love Fist with their drug and hooker shortage, and caused millions in property damage. A few hundred bodies and betrayals later, Tommy cut the cord with Liberty City in a final mansion shootout worthy of Tony Montana.
Not to mention a epic slow-speed golf cart chase with Mexican gangsters at Leafy Links, made more perfect by Radio Espantoso's kicky Latin jazz.

One year after GTA III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City tapped into the 80's retro vibe sweeping America in 2002 and put the franchise on a whole new level of popularity...and controversy. Dennis Hopper and real porn star Jenna Jameson voiced a pornographer and his lead actress, people Vercetti did regular business with in cutscenes that got fairly explicit without actually showing anything. Prostitutes were still an option for staying healthy. Violence and cop killing were still inevitable. A year post-release, Cuban and Haitian groups in Florida pointed at missions that targeted ethnic gangs and filed lawsuits, claiming racism.
Headed for federal court, Take-Two reissued the game with the offending dialogue gone before opening arguments were ever heard. They'd dodged this bullet, but Rockstar was already loading up for another self-inflicted wound. The biggest yet.
Everyone expected the third GTA to tool around San Andreas by late 2003. Instead, Rockstar North only confirmed the project existed with a 2004 release date, and didn't pass out any other details for months. When they did, San Andreas was unveiled as an entire state, not a city. Dan Houser and Worrall were taking the series old-skool gangsta for a 90's ride in NWA's Los Angeles, with detours to San Francisco, the California badlands and Sin City...four times the space Vice City took up.
The graphics got an extra coat of paint, but the accent was on making everything bigger, and then on making things personal. Over 200 vehicles went in – more than double GTA III's count – including harvest combines, police motorcycles, bicycles, jets, and jetpacks. You could even jack a train. Hip-hop and different degrees of Rap dominated the airwaves, leaving room for New Wave, Rock, Country, and Talk Radio. But the main focus went to playing it RPG...as in both the weapon and the game genre. Your character had to eat to stay healthy, exercise to stay fit, and then got tubby or buffed depending on how overboard you went in either direction. You decided the look and mode of dress; cornrows or afros, shirts to shoes, hats and tats, blinged out or masked up, and it all affected how you were treated by the public at large. Respect level became another attribute. Driving and shooting were skills to build up, just like stamina and swimming, the new trick for a seven-year-old franchise. Pedestrian IQs went up, talking their hearts out and running at the first sign of your trouble. Prostitutes were out of the picture, but you did have girlfriends to keep happy with dates, dancing and drive-bys. The latest protagonist had questionable taste in women at best.
His name was Carl "CJ" Johnson, a menace to society stepping back to the Los Santos hood after his mother's death, only to find the crack epidemic had nearly wiped his old gang off the map. Worse, he wasn't two steps off the plane before dirty cop Tenpenny (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) put CJ under his crooked thumb. But that didn't stop Carl and estranged brother Sweet from representing the Grove Street Families, bangin' their way to a better tomorrow...until amigos Big Smoke and Ryder sold them out.

Gangsta non grata in Los Santos, CJ took his game on the road and found new allies; blind triad Dragon Head "Woosie" Mu, hippie drug guru The Truth (Peter Fonda), and government spook Mike Toreno (James Woods). The game even drew a few guest appearances by Catalina, Claude (officially his name this time) and Ken Rosenberg, among others. Minor cameos by past degenerates in GTA: Vice City already tied the games into one shifty universe. Now Houser and Worrall started establishing a real continuity.
If you wanted to rush through the story, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was not your game. Before CJ smoked Big Smoke and Tenpenny, he'd see over 90 missions, plus Pimping bonus missions, Home Invasions, turf wars to secure territory, rival gang graffiti to tag over, arcade minigames and all the old side-missions from GTAs past. Sometimes the game seemed too big; getting from Point A to Point B could be a long, windy, boring road. But there wasn't a single load screen from Los Santos to San Fierro, unless you went indoors. Running out of things to do took real effort, and that was before the community got involved.
A subcult of GTA modders coded in their own skins and multiplayer modes for years before San Andreas, with tacit approval from Rockstar. In June of 2005, eight months into its lifespan, a Dutch modder named Patrick Wildenborg discovered an unused file in the game code labeled "Hot Coffee" and released a patch to activate it.

Competition was always a vital part of the GTA design formula. Houser, Worrall, and Jones constantly strove to one-up the gonzo signage team for edgy humor, and creatives at all levels planned out ways to push the franchise half-step past safe. When CJ reached a certain level with his girlfriend de jour, she'd invite him in for "coffee," and early plans followed up with a sex minigame. Facial expressions, dialog and animations were all coded before it was dropped in favor of abbreviated moaning, heard from outside the building. Wildenborg's patches opened that code up in two modes, one with full nudity, the other fully interactive, from thrusting and spanking to switching positions. San Andreas simply didn't go through the same post-9/11 content scrub GTA III did.
Grand Theft Auto had finally gone too far. By accident.
Production halted. The ESRB re-rated the game from M to AO, freezing sales. A massive recall was issued as top politicians targeted San Andreas, Rockstar, and the entire gaming industry. Senator Hillary Clinton famously proposed writing legislation to impose federal oversight and policing of game sales in the U.S. Neither happened, but a Congressional vote launched a FTC investigation into Take-Two's business practices.
Thirty months after Hot Coffee went public, Take-Two settled its last class-action lawsuit out of court, while a reissued San Andreas became the best selling game in Sony history...and the franchise's epitaph on the PlayStation 2.

For years, GTA was Sony's top exclusive, and the "III" series helped make the PlayStation 2 everybody's first choice in a gaming console, but the IP did go traveling. Ports to the PC, Dreamcast, Xbox, and Game Boy Color – though true to David Jones' suspicions, never a Nintendo console – filtered out months or years after their PlayStation debut. An original GTA on a non-Sony platform was much more rare.

Grand Theft Auto Advance for the Game Boy Advance released the day before San Andreas, and brought a few modern side-missions to the old top-down perspective. The only GTA ever written and developed outside of a Rockstar setting (by Digital Eclipse, soon to become Backbone Entertainment of Death Jr. fame) stood as a serviceable prequel to GTA III, but gave up the music, the variety, and the feel to fit on a GBA cartridge. Everyone agreed that portable criminal endeavors were better suited to a PlayStation Portable UMD.
By 2004, Take-Two's aggressive acquisitions policy had put a string of specialized companies under the Rockstar banner. Rockstar Japan localized games for Asian markets. Rockstar Lincoln handled QA. Rockstar Vienna ported console titles developed by Rockstars Toronto and San Diego, before being shut down without warning and its duties transferred to Rockstar London. Rockstar Leeds, formerly Mobius Entertainment, specialized in mobile platforms. Under Rockstar North's direction, they caught the job of bringing GTA to the PSP.
Two decisions were made. They were taking gamers back to Liberty City for the first time in four years, and they were dropping Renderware.
Rockstar Leeds built a new game engine in-house, and then rebuilt Liberty City from the ground up, almost exactly as it appeared in GTA III. The goal was to put a console GTA on a handheld, with all the cars, bikes, chatty pedestrians, dark twists, hot music, strange DJs, twisted cutscenes and 100+ hours of gameplay fans expected, in an open sandbox world, without draining the PSP's battery in five minutes flat. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories dropped in October 2005, a few weeks late, and it was all in there. All of it. Plus one thing the console games didn't have: multiplayer.
Liberty City Stories predated GTA III by a few years and told the heartwarming tale of Toni Ciprini, back in the LC after four years of lay-low for wasting a made man. His reward? Helping Don Salvatore Leone (Claude's one-time boss) win a mob war. Missions were largely tailored to deliver a short hit of violence for the pick-up-and-go mobile gamer, while six-player races and deathmatches played out across the entire city, assets intact and framerate kept high.

A 3D Grand Theft Auto suddenly fit in gamers' pockets, and it kicked ass.
Response was so good, Leeds did it again in 2006. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories crammed in even more on a fully optimized engine, and followed Victor Vance (Lance's brother, gunned down in the first minutes of Vice City) on his path from straight-arrow army soldier to empowered drug warlord, rampaging in an attack helicopter. Gameplay centered on empire building, splicing Vice City's real estate options to San Andreas' turf wars, then letting players build up their own illegal businesses on their new property, when they weren't playing Baywatch in "Beach Patrol" side missions. Victor could even pay a steep bribe to keep his weapons when busted.
But for all the brag of a console-quality crime spree, PS2 ports of both Stories came off as inferior work, even with extra missions. San Andreas was the watermark, and neither game could measure up to that, particularly with the multiplayer features dropped.
A console needed a console-built GTA, and Rockstar had one in the works. But true to form, it would break rules everybody took for granted...starting with their oldest, strongest partnership.

 

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Gta 5 OriginalPics

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