..and about 5 seconds of 'gameplay' at the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5jp7oq4zdM

gameplay

http://www.dailymotion.com/search/gta/vide...iler_videogames

looking really slick.

Hmm there was major pop-up at 1:57, pedestrians just appear in front of the car. Does look nice though.

The Xbox is making a hell of a racket in the background!

Neat. I like the little touch of putting on a helmet before riding a motorcycle now.

The car wash section looked a little overlong though- hopefully that doesn't have to be done on a regular basis.

And ELO? Hmm...

That Dailymotion link's dead. Try this -

http://www.wegame.com/watch/GTA_IV_real_ga..._not_Saint_Row/

The entire game is up on torrent sites.

How do you go about playing pirated X360 games, though? Does the console need chipping?

you need to flash the disk drive bios so that it thinks copied discs are originals (i think you have to connect the drive to a pc in order to do this)

Do you lose access to XBLA if you do that?

IGN Review:

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/869/869381p1.html

10 Presentation
The story is Oscar quality. The use of the phone as a gaming portal is genius. There's really nothing more that could be asked for from GTA IV.

10 Graphics
The level of detail is astounding. Liberty City feels alive and lived in. While there are some technical issues, the artistic merits push the score to the max. A true marvel.

10 Sound
The dialogue makes the story. Without the excellent writing and the stellar voice acting, the story would fail. And the soundtrack kills -- more than 200 songs and almost all are great choices.

10 Gameplay
The cover and targeting system work great. Blind firing with an RPG is a thing of beauty. Everything works in harmony and not a single one of the missions is bad. The most fun I've had in years.

10 Lasting Appeal
The story will take anywhere from 25-45 hours to complete, depending on your skill level and attention span. There's plenty more to do once you finish the story, such as excellent multiplayer.

10
Masterful OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)

When games get gushing reviews it kind of puts me off....I'm some sort of inverse snob I think.

video taken off7

Hard to tell, I don't think I can survive past the first page if I tried reading it.

Aye. I got as far as the third page before getting bored. Seven pages? What were they thinking? Not a single memorable line, either. It's not badly written by any means, but it's pretty boring.

It puts me off too. Not because of any sort of snobbery, but because I've played so few games worthy of gushing praise that there has to be something up. IGN got the exclusive first web review, so that's another element of doubt (we all know Rockstar's "at least 8 and on the cover" stipulation for review code).

Not that I'm not expecting this to be absolutely amazing, of course. They'd have to seriously go some to fuck up a GTA game.

And as for 7 pages? Advertising, basically. More pages = more ads.

I hate spreading online reviews across pages. One of the advantages of the internet is that pages can be as long as you fucking like. Also, IGN is terrible.

Been wondering about this...Saints Row had a nice mobile phone gimmick, is GTA 4's massively different?

(going to buy GTA, but I'm far more excited about SR2)

Mafia 2 is the game to get excited about.....

And for all you cheaters out there - http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=187854

it is? tell me

probably going to buy GTAIV sooner or later, but not now yet.. still MKWiiing and wiifitting and pes2008 etc..

more excited about mafia 2/saints row 2? you have got to be kidding me!

Saints Row is better than all the GTA games. I have no reason to believe that they've made any really significant changes for GTA4, although I'll be happy if I'm wrong. I just can't get excited about GTA 4- the last time everyone hyped the shit out of a GTA game, it was exactly the same as the others, only with a horrible muscleheaded gangster theme and tedious statistics. Fun, yeah, but nothing new, and quickly becoming tedious and annoying, just like all the previous games.

I'd be more interested to hear what happens with Saints Row 2 than GTA4, personally, as they seem to understand how to make a game fun without making it a total pain in the arse to get anything done.

I've still not played Mafia, mind.

I'd need to buy a Ps3/360 to get GTAIV, which means it'll be a long time before I can play it. A shame, because I was really looking forward to the whole virtual-New York aspect of it.

That was my favourite until I played the Wii version of The Godfather. Just had to get a mention of that in there as it was severely underrated/unnoticed. The driving's not up to much, but the combat is brilliant, and the dialogue, atmophere and sense of the city are unmatchable. There's a constant sense of purpose too, while still giving you loads of choice of stuff to do - that lack of purpose always gets to me with GTA.

Was not really sure whether I wanted GTA4, but ended up going to Asda with a mate of mine, at Midnight, just to see the queues. I used to be a manager at Game, and always thought that the company underestimated the sales lost to the supermarkets. As it happens, it looks like I was right - there was over 200 people there, so I thought I;d buy a copy.

It's really good. It's certainly better than I expected. Basically it's much the same as any other GTA, but after a while it's the little touches that make it....

Turn on the TV in the apartment to see what I mean.

I really tried to like Saints Row, but the story was boring and it didn't really do anything for me at all.

It probably didn't help that I got Crackdown at a very similar time, and fell in love with that game.

Yeah, I loved Crackdown for what it was (basically GTA with the cheats enabled :))

Saints row on the other hand was just a charmless GTA clone with inferior city design and piss-poor AI. I much prefer the Scarface and Godfather games to Saints Row.

I wish I could. Every time I try to go back to the safehouse I keep getting phonecalls and texts.

My friend reviewed it.

http://www.popquestionmark.com/?q=node/23

He didn't like it :)

If you put your phone on sleep, the plot goes away until you turn it back on again.

Same here, in terms of lack of PS360. Although I would be reluctant to buy GTA IV without first reading some very reliable critical opinions of it. It's one of those games that as a so-called cultural event, is likely to suffer from 'emperor's new videogame' syndrome, unfortunately. (That say, if I did have any friends who owned GTA IV, I'd probably be pestering them to come over a play it.)

It's GTA3+VC+SA with a better central character than any of those, much prettier and with a bunch of very neat little touches.

If that appeals, get it.

I barely scratched Vice City or San Andreas, and didn't even glance at the PSP Stories, but I'll definitely be buying IV in a few weeks when it's £25. Liberty City FTW.

I haven't played any of the 3D GTAs, and was not-too-enthusiastically thinking about getting one for th'Xbox just out of curiousity. Having had a go on this new'n for a couple hours tonight, I don't think i'll bother.

It pretty much left me lukewarm. It's very shiny, and I'm sure it's super polished for what it is, but it's still largely a drive-around-em-up. As far as that goes, the mechanic seemed largely the same as the 2D games, but without the fun cartoony graphics. I'm not much for driving around shiny, brown virtual cities. (And has the shooting been changed much? I've read people complaining about that since GTA3, and it still seemed less than intuitive to me. And the ladder climbing chase was really awkward.)

The fuck brown. The colours in this are glorious, the weather plentiful and gorgeous.

It's pretty brown, man. And greenish grey. The colours in 'Super Mario Galaxy' are glorious. In 'Outrun 2' they're glorious. What I've seen of 'GTA4', they're all very atmospheric and so on, but it's dark and hazy and grimy.

The weather makes things shiny.

I haven't picked up a copy of GTA4 yet (I'm waiting until I get the time to actually play it, hopefully by which time 'pre-owned' copies will have surfaced), but it seems it's sold out everywhere, with copies going on eBay for over £70 a pop.

Ah, that's the main thing that pissed me off with GTA3/VC. Annoying controls. Clunky and plain frustrating - just inexcusably clumsy. I didn't really get too worked up with it in GTA3 at first, because at release in 2001 the game felt to me at like a true 'event' in terms of evolution of videogames, the kind of thing I dreamed would one day be possible when playing Hunter on the Amiga years earlier (and heck, I only played GTA3 at my friend's house anyway). However, with all the GTA3 sequels and spin-offs you'd have thought that someone who've tweaked the controls to be more responsive and satisfying.

great that's finally spring now, dutch bird protection society has a website with webcams of breeding birds, cute
http://www.beleefdelente.nl/

It depends on the time of day, weather, place and scenario how the world is coloured.

As you move up in the world and expand your horizons, you'll find the world gets a fair bit brighter.