Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned Hands-On

We get our motor running and head out on the highways of Liberty City in this hands-on with the upcoming Xbox 360-exclusive expansion for Grand Theft Auto IV.

The Lost and Damned has been somewhat of a mystery thus far, with few concrete details known about the upcoming expansion to Grand Theft Auto IV other than that it would focus on a brand-new protagonist (biker Johnny Klebbitz) and that it would add plenty of content in the form of new music, rides, weapons, and characters. So as you can imagine, we have been keen to find out more and jumped at the chance to roam the streets of Liberty City again when Rockstar opened up its offices to us this week for an early look.

Is he lost, or damned? Answers on a postcard...

From what we saw at our hands-on session, The Lost and Damned expansion is certainly much more than horse armor or a few extra added missions. Rockstar claims this Xbox 360-exclusive addition features the same attention to detail and production values as the original Grand Theft Auto IV. While we couldn't pin down our local Rockstar rep on exactly how many extra hours of playtime goodness 360 owners can expect, it seems that there will be plenty to do as you explore this new story set in a familiar place. The biggest GTAIV fans will, unsurprisingly, get the most out of The Lost and Damned, with seemingly plenty of nods to Niko Bellic and a difficulty level that presumes from the get-go that you know your way around Liberty City.
Unlike the mostly solitary fish-out-of-water tale that was Niko Bellic's narrative in GTAIV, Johnny's journey in The Lost and Damned is more about brotherhood. So while Niko--a new arrival in Liberty--had to work at getting safe houses and contacts for guns, backup, and cars, Johnny (as a longtime resident of the city) will have all these at his disposal right from the start of the story. Safe houses are where you can interact with your other brothers in the Lost, with new minigames such as arm wrestling and card games joining old favorites like pool. There will be plenty of missions where you'll ride out as part of a pack of Lost, with your brothers helping you out in the tougher firefights. You'll be encouraged to keep your bros alive, and surviving members of your gang will receive a stats boost to their health, accuracy, and damage dealing after each mission. If a Lost member does die, he'll be replaced with a new brother with set-to-zero stats. Simply put, the longer they stay breathing, the more help they'll be. And the attempts to make you feel like a member of a real biker gang don't stop there. When you're riding with your gang, a Lost logo will appear on the road to indicate where you need to be in order to stay in formation. If you stick to the logo, you'll be rewarded with dialogue with your brothers, as well as a small health boost.

Here's Johnny... Expect fireworks.

Main character Johnny is the second-in-command of the Alderney-based biker gang The Lost, while gang president Billy is serving a stint in rehab. The Lost and Damned begins with the violent and unstable Billy finally making it out of rehab, taking the reins of the gang back from the more profit-oriented Johnny. Billy's first order of business is to shoot a member of rival gang The Angels of Death directly outside the Lost clubhouse, ending the truce Johnny brokered and sparking off a new gang war. The Rockstar rep had control of the demo at this stage, taking Johnny as he and the rest of the Lost got on their hogs to chase down the remaining Angels as they sped away from the clubhouse. It was here that we saw a new weapon--the sawed-off shotgun--which Johnny used one-handed to bring down the Angels. We also saw the first of the new vehicles promised: the Hexer, Johnny's custom-built bike, which is unique in the game. And when we say unique, we mean it--apparently there is no way to recover the bike should it get destroyed during a mission.
We grabbed the controls at this stage and set about walking Johnny around to see how different a character he was to Niko. He certainly acted differently onscreen, exhibiting a unique set of mannerisms from what we were used to with Niko. The first mission we took on was called Action/Reaction, in which Billy ordered the Lost to attack the Angels' clubhouse in retaliation for the supposed murder of a young Lost member (fans of GTAIV, however, will remember that it was actually Niko who capped that biker in the No Love Lost mission). Johnny starts the mission off with a grenade launcher, pegging an explosive through the Angels' clubhouse window to start the pain. Plenty of Angels then stream out of the building, starting a large firefight with the five or so members of the Lost who are acting as backup. After the opposition is cleaned up outside, Billy and Johnny make their way into the clubhouse to finish off the remaining Angels. In the basement, Billy orders another Lost to take the Angels' stash of heroin, prompting Johnny to suspect that revenge was never Billy's motive for the attack.
The next mission we took on once again intertwined with a storyline from GTAIV. If you played the full game, you'll probably recall one mission called Blow Your Cover, where drug queen Elizabeta sent Niko and Playboy X to broker a heroine deal in some abandoned apartments. It seems that the heroine was actually the gear the Lost stole from the Angels, and Johnny hooked up with Niko and Playboy X to try to sell the smack. In The Lost and Damned, you'll play this mission, now called Buyer's Market, from Johnny's point of view. Of course, the deal ends up being a police sting, and while Niko escapes by heading to the rooftops and sneaking away, Johnny decides to go the direct route downstairs and take on the cops. This is, of course, a pretty tough option, because there are plenty of police with heavy armor standing in between Johnny and the Hexer. We're not ashamed to say we found this fight quite tough, but it's going to be a good challenge for experienced GTA veterans..

The Lost and Damned starts off pretty tough--but Liberty City veterans probably won't mind.

The final mission we played harked back to the old on-rails shooting challenges of previous GTA games. In the Shifting Weight mission, yet another drug deal goes wrong, and Johnny and Uptown Riders gang members Malcolm and DeSaun have to flee the police. You control Johnny as he rides on the back of Malcolm's motorbike. The Lost gang member is armed with a cool automatic shotgun with unlimited ammo, which is handy given that dozens of police cars are in pursuit. This section was pure fun, with a palpable adrenaline rush as you pound police car after police car (and even two low-swooping police helicopters) with shotgun pellets as you zoom through the city.
From our brief hands-on with The Lost and Damned, it's clear the expansion will feature the same mature narrative, great voice work, and action-packed mayhem of GTAIV. It's especially rewarding to see the intertwining stories of Johnny and Niko play out. We'll have more on The Lost and Damned in the weeks leading up to its release in mid-February, so keep it locked to GameSpot for more information.

Credit By Randolph Ramsay, GameSpot AU

The Godfather II Hands-On

We take rival mafia thugs to the breaking point in this sandbox strategy adaptation of the classic film.

If you've seen The Godfather II recently enough to remember its story in detail, take a moment to choose which of these genres is best suited to convey its unique portrayal of Mafia drama: third-person shooter, sandbox action, or role-playing strategy. Got your answer? So does developer EA Redwood Shores, and it has chosen "all of the above" for its upcoming video game adaptation of the same name. As you take on the role of up-and-coming Mafia don Dominic Corleone, you'll roam the streets busting heads, you'll charm your way through dialogue trees, and, when your empire begins to take form, you'll need to carefully allocate and manage your resources to make sure it continues to grow. We recently spent some hands-on time with The Godfather II to see how these disparate genres are coming together.

To be fair, the Godfather II game doesn't have the same plot as the film. The game tells a parallel story that often intersects with the film's story at critical moments, but for the most part you'll be forging a story of your own. That story begins in Havana, Cuba, on the night before the revolution of 1958. Just as a meeting of Mafia bigwigs is beginning to wind down, violence erupts in the streets, and you're suddenly responsible for guiding members of the Corleone family to a nearby airport so you can escape to safety. Sadly, Aldo Trapani, star of the first Godfather game, doesn't survive this frantic journey. His sudden death is the catalyst that establishes the premise for the rest of the game. Michael Corleone promotes you to Aldo's former position, a role that requires you to form your own semi-autonomous branch of the Mafia.

Once the family returns to New York, you begin establishing your own corner of the family by recruiting a new member into your ranks. Initially, this is as simple as talking to some of the freelance talent already wandering around the Corleone compound, then choosing which you like best. Each potential associate has a unique skill set that you need to take into account. The pair we had to choose from at the game's outset included a gentleman skilled in the art of arson and another who considered himself a talented medic. Each has a mini-bio and personality quirks, too, but these are essentially classes you'll want to keep balanced out in your crew. We went with the arsonist and set out to take over some of the local businesses in order to build our empire.

At the suggestion of Frank Pentangeli, a friend of the family, we set our sights on a local prostitution house disguised as a bakery in order to collect our first money-laundering front. Adding businesses to your burgeoning empire is key to The Godfather II, because to expand your influence, you'll need money and manpower. We took a car from the front of the Corleone compound, cruised through the late-1950s sandbox representation of New York City that makes up the first of three environments in the game (the other two being Miami and Havana), and arrived at the bakery. We began the takeover by exercising some melee abilities on the guard inside the legal front of this two-sided business. Melee is a simple but fun combination of triggers that lets you throw punches, grab enemies, and exercise a wide variety of intimidating moves while they're in your grasp. You can head-butt them, throw them, slap them around, and more. It's an easy system, but one that results in several dozen possible moves.

What's the point of doing this? Every character of interest has a breaking point where they'll start to give you information and access to what you want, but you need to be careful, because just beyond that breaking point is when they fight back, and further down eventually die. As long as you don't go too over the top with the violence, you'll be able to rough up people in a really slick, Mafia-inspired way. In our bakery mission, we began by shaking down the guard protecting the door leading from the legal face of this business to the shady basement where the unsavory deeds occur. This let us gain access without killing him, but the guards inside weren't so lucky. After a bit of third-person gun combat against these watchmen, we finally went into the back office and found the owner. This poor soul had the unfortunate luck of being the last man standing in the joint, so he wasn't exactly in a position of leverage. Nevertheless, we popped him in the face, threw him into his desk, then picked him up and began to threaten more violence. At this point, he gladly handed over the establishment in exchange for his life. Thus the "bakery" was ours.

Once you obtain a new establishment, it's a good idea to jump into the "Don's view" so you can see a visual representation of which properties you own and set a strategic plan for how you'd like to hold onto them. The first choice you'll want to make is how many guards you want to keep there. The more you have, the less likely the tables will be turned on you by a rival family, but guards cost money. However, money is also how you upgrade your stats and those of your immediate crew for more offensive-minded purposes, so you'll need to carefully decide how much to spend on securing your property.

The Don's view is definitely what separates The Godfather II from other action sandbox games. This collection of screens is where the heart of the strategy and role-playing aspects exists. You can look at your property, compare it against that of other families, inspect which properties are most ripe for the taking, and manage your crew to best take on those challenges. Let's say another family is exercising too much dominance over the city and you want to take it down but you don't have the manpower to do it. Using the Don's view, one option is to send an explosives-trained associate to bomb one of the family's properties. Another is to stage a hit on one of its higher-level underbosses. A third option? Channel your energy into making sure your crew is the most fashionably dressed in the entire city. That might not get you anywhere, but hey, it's an option.

As we continued to go around town, hijacking cars and collecting property, we were impressed by The Godfather II's mix of combat and cinematic drama. There's a stark contrast between the stylish executions you can pull off on a wounded enemy and the careful prodding you need to perform on those whom you're trying to pry information from, but it's a really interesting change of pace and speaks to the fact that you're not just out to mow everyone down--you're a businessman, first and foremost. One thing that may turn people off is the driving. Since this is an open-world game, you'll be spending a lot of time behind the wheel. But because the game is set in the 1950s, you'll see a lot of boats out on the road that drive about as advanced as they look (imagine a city filled with the Hermes from the Grand Theft Auto series). However, this only adds to the level of realism and works well alongside the unfortunate 1950s fashion and period weaponry to give you the feeling that you're really in that time period.

Altogether, The Godfather II looks like a very intriguing take on the sandbox action genre. It's hard to think of many games falling under that category that have attempted the level of strategic depth that this game is going for, so we're looking forward to seeing how it all comes together when The Godfather II is released in February.

Thx So Much

Credit: Gamespot.com

สเปคที่แนะนำอย่างเป็นทางการของ Grand Theft Auto IV PC

แวะมาเตือนความจำกันอีกทีสำหรับเกม GTA IV ในเวอร์ชั่นพีซี พร้อมกับสเปคที่แนะนำอย่างเป็นทางการจากทาง Rockstar Games โดยสเปคที่สามารถปรับได้ Option ทั้งหมดได้สุด (ระดับ 11) ทาง Rockstar games แนะนำสเปคตัวนี้มาครับ

Processor: Intel 2.4GHz Quad Core / AMD Phenom X3 2.1GHz
RAM: 2.5GB
GPU: Nvidia 8600 512MB / ATI 3870 512MB
Hard Drive: 18GB Free Space (36-54GB for digital distribution installation)

เห็นสเปคแล้วหนาว ๆ ร้อน ๆ พอตัวเหมือนกันสำหรับหลาย ๆ คนสำหรับลูกเล่นอีกหนึ่งที่น่าสนใจคือ Social Club ซึ่งเป็นบริการจากทาง Rockstar เพื่อออกมารองรับฟีเจอร์ใหม่ภายในเกมนั่นก็คือ Video Editor ที่ทำให้คุณสามารถตัดต่อวิดีโอเป็นของตัวเองโดยใช้เค รื่องมือที่มีให้ในเกมได้ในทันทีและอัพโหลดสู่ Social Club เพื่อให้คนทั่วไปได้เข้าชม

โดยการจะเป็นสมาชิกของ Social Club นั้นจำเป็นต้องอัพโหลดวิดีโอเข้าสู่ระบบด้วย ส่วนบุคคลทั่วไปนั้นก็จะสามารถเข้าชมวิดีโอได้ตามปกต ิ ที่สำคัญบริการของ Social Club นั้นจะมีการใช้งานในเกมต่อ ๆ ไปของทาง Rockstar ด้วยโดยอาจจะแฝงเข้ามาอยู่ในรูปแบบของโทรทัศน์จากภาย ในเกม

Grand Theft Auto IV เวอร์ชั่นพีซีมีกำหนดการวางจำหน่ายในวันที่ 3 ธันวาคมที่จะถึงนี้

สำหรับ Screenshot ใหม่ ๆ รวมถึงวิดีโอจาก Social Club สามารถเข้าไปชมได้ ที่นี่

Source : VE3D

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Credit : Thaigaming.com