Do you shop at Whole Foods? Live in gentrified Brooklyn? Read the Sunday Times with no seething sense of rage? Then Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City isn't for you. But fear not, Conan O'Brien and his pals at Late Night have developed a kinder gentler version. Sample clip after the jump.
Grand Theft Auto IV is not so much the apotheosis of modern console entertainment as the first post-modern video game. While it provides the usual bloody entertainment, the latest installment of Rockstar's hit title is also a fully-imagined alternate world-complete with a witty satire of 21st century media. Serbian…
In the harbor of Grand Theft Auto's Liberty City, there's a statue. It differs from the Statue of Liberty in New York in two respects: the landmark's name is the Statue of Happiness; and it contains at its heart... a beating heart, chained to the exterior walls. The makers of Rockstar's hit game are twisted-and…
Restaurants and bars in Liberty City are like other landmarks based on places in New York, the real-world city on which the universe of the latest Grand Theft Auto game is based. The names, locations and designs are all slightly off, like a riddle made for trivia-night nerds. Ed Levine has risen to the challenge. …
I wish Stomp disappeared a few years ago so we could be ironically nostalgic about it by now, like the Spice Girls, Ninja Turtles, and Taft. But instead it's still around so everyone knows it kinda sucks but everyone also likes it as a guilty pleasure (right guys? right?). Because then I could just link to the…
If you're taking the day off to explore Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto's revamped version of New York, keep us in mind. We're looking for Gawker-worthy gameplay from the videogame—Niko beating up an annoying hipster would work for instance, or a clip from I'm Rich, the celebrity gossip show-in-show. Send to …
When Rockstar Games in 2005 shipped an installment of its Grand Theft Auto videogame series with an embedded, but hidden, sex scene, an international controversy ensued, with Wal Mart, Target and other retailers pulling the game from shelves and the nation of Australia outright banning it. Since then there have been…
"A... thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun. It... sets a new standard for what is possible in interactive arts... I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City's bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City…
This fictional ad for the "Steinway Beer Garden" in "Dukes" is maybe supposed to be the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden in Astoria. Oh, and it's from the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto IV. Warm Beer and Misogyny! What New York—and video games—are all about.
A gamer with an early copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, the videogame set in a hyper-realistic version of New York City, has already tried out the one new feature we were most intrigued by. Niko Bellic, the hot Serbian immigrant at the center of Rockstar's videogame, can now stumble around intoxicated, and make drunken…
The Liberty City of Rockstar's crime-celebrating Playstation game, Grand Theft Auto, was always based on New York. In the videogame's fourth outing next week, the city is much more fully realized-but intriguingly off-kilter. For example, Liberty City (like the metropolis upon which it is modelled) has five boroughs.…
Oh the steamy summer of 2005, otherwise remembered as the "Hot Coffee" scandal. Take-Two Interactive ushered in a new wave of videogame scrutiny after shipping Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas with a sexual intercourse minigame hidden in the code. (Players had to actively hack the game to get to it.)…
