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Tag: Grand Theft Auto

  • RIP Tom Sizemore, 1961-2023

    RIP Tom Sizemore, 1961-2023

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    Photo: Jim Smeal (Getty Images)

    Veteran actor Tom Sizemore has died at the age of 61.

    As Rolling Stone report, Sizemore was “found unconscious after suffering a brain aneurysm from a stroke at his Los Angeles home in the early morning of Feb. 19″. Having been kept alive on a ventilator for the past two weeks, his family made the decision over the weekend to “remove him from life support”, and he subsequently “passed away peacefully in his sleep”.

    Sizemore, an actor you almost repeatedly saw described as “troubled” over the course of his career (he had long-standing drug problems and in 2003 spent seven months in prison on domestic abuse charges), was one of the most memorable stars of the 90s, owning every second he appeared on the screen in everything from Heat to True Romance to Saving Private Ryan.

    For me, I can just never get his “very upset undercover agent” Point Break character out of my head. I will, even today, say the line “YOU THINK I LIKE THESE CLOTHES?!?!” every time I’m forced to put on a tie. Incredibly, the dude is only in this movie for like a minute. Point Break goes for two hours! And here I am saying it’s one of his most iconic performances. That’s what Tom Sizemore would do to a movie.

    Tom Sizemore in Point Break

    As you’d already know, this being a video game website, Sizemore was also famous for his role as Sonny Forelli in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

    The game opens with Sizemore’s performance. He’s miles away from where the game’s actually set, you will barely see his face and yet he’s entrusted with setting up the whole damn thing, tone and all, and he absolutely nails it. Even when you can tell the parts where he’s just reading off a script with little idea of the context or what’s coming, it’s still good.

    Sonny Forelli (GTA Vice City Definitive Edition) GTA Character Stories (GTA TRILOGY 2021)

    His WHERE’S THE GODDAMNED MONEY phone calls are also excellent:

    Gta Vice City – Sonny shouting at Tommy

    Here’s some behind the scenes footage of the game’s voice cast—and man, what a cast—in which Sizemore makes a brief appearance:

    GTA Vice City – Behind the Scenes (Voice Over Session)

    In a statement following his passing, Grand Theft Auto developers Rockstar Games point out that Sizemore’s “effortless cool and phenomenal character work” had been “an inspiration to all of us” years before Vice City.

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    Luke Plunkett

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  • The Best And Worst Part Of Every Grand Theft Auto

    The Best And Worst Part Of Every Grand Theft Auto

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    Screenshot: Rockstar Games

    Best: New Toys: It’s hard to choose one thing that I’d call the best part of Vice City, the GTA game that brought the series to Florida and the 80s, but if I have to (Editor’s note: You do.) then I’d pick the introduction of more vehicles to the sandbox. In Vice City, you could fly in planes and helicopters, drive scooters, golf carts, dirt bikes, various boats, and even pilot remote-controlled helicopters, too. All of this made Vice City a more fun playground to tinker with between missions.

    Worst: Crappy Combat: The annoying, crappy combat. While it’s mostly unchanged from GTA III, it stands out in Vice City more because everything else—like the improved visuals, larger map and better cutscenes—is so much better this time around. And Vice City has a ton of combat in it, making it even harder to ignore just how clunky and bad it is.

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    Zack Zwiezen

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  • The 23 Best PS2 Games

    The 23 Best PS2 Games

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    Photo: Kotaku

    It’s the best-selling home video game console of all time. So yeah, the PlayStation 2 has some good games. But which of them are the best?

    We’ve put this list (which is not in any kind of order or ranking) together based on a couple of considerations. Firstly, the list includes our own personal favorites from the time, of course. But also, given the fact we’ve got some perspective on the PS2 now, we wanted to acknowledge some special games that defined the PS2 experience, the kinds of games that we maybe only ever got because of the combination of the console’s place in time and its market dominance.

    Before we begin, though, please remember to spare us your sob stories. If your favourite PS2 game isn’t here, chin up. Just because we didn’t dig a game—or didn’t think it was good or weird enough to make a list called THE BEST, or felt it was more deserving of going on another platform’s list (Rez, Resident Evil 4, etc)—doesn’t make your own feelings on it somehow invalid!

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    Luke Plunkett

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  • Link To The Past Has Been Reverse-Engineered, Fully Ported To The PC

    Link To The Past Has Been Reverse-Engineered, Fully Ported To The PC

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    Illustration: Nintendo

    One of the most interesting developments in the emulation and coding scenes in recent years has been the increasing trend in taking classic old video games and completely reverse-engineering their code.

    We’ve seen fans do this for everything from Mario 64 to Ocarina of Time to Grand Theft Auto, all with varying degrees of legal opposition. The reasons for doing this are multitude; there’s the challenge of the reverse-engineering itself, of course, but also the benefits it brings, mainly in the form of being able to create genuine PC versions of classic console games, rather than relying on emulation.

    What’s the difference? As we’ve explained previously, emulation relies on your computer pretending it’s an old console to run a game coded to run on that console. A reverse-engineered port is able to be built for the PC (or other platforms!) from the ground up, allowing for the seamless insertion of stuff like widescreen support and even (in the case of polygonal games) graphical tweaks like ReShade.

    The latest game to receive this treatment is The Legend Of Zelda: A Link to the Past, first released in 1991 on the Super Nintendo and then re-released a number of times since on everything from the Game Boy Advance to Nintendo Switch Online.

    As Nintendo Life report, a team of 20, led by xander-haj, managed the feat after working their way through 70-80,000 lines of code, and in the process “key enhancements have been added, such as faster transition times, speedier text, widescreen support, pixel shaders, and a more detailed overworld map. Perhaps most significantly, a secondary item slot has been added, allowing users to quickly switch between two items on the fly without having to go into the inventory screen to pick them out one by one.”

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    Here’s footage of the original game (running in an emulator on PC) compared to this new PC “port”:

    zelda 3 emulation vs pc port

    Neat! This is now the part of the post where we point out that, legally, this is still a very weird grey area. Reverse engineering itself isn’t illegal, but the use of a company’s assets can be, and these projects are a mix of both. Only they’re also not; the creators or reverse-engineered games like this simply provide the underyling code and ask you to get the assets from a ROM yourself. This game’s description, for example, says “You need a copy of the ROM to extract game resources (levels, images). Then once that’s done, the ROM is no longer needed.”

    Nintendo would argue that doesn’t matter, the creators would argue it’s an important distinction, and until we start getting some definitive rulings in disputes like this I’m going to have to keep typing this out at the end of every post about it!

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    Luke Plunkett

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  • GTA 6’s Leak Showed Us The Future, Now It’s Hard To Care About GTA Online

    GTA 6’s Leak Showed Us The Future, Now It’s Hard To Care About GTA Online

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    Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – 2002
    Screenshot: Rockstar Games

    Last year, footage of the next Grand Theft Auto—assumed to be GTA 6—leaked online. While Rockstar quickly tried to erase the videos from the internet and plug the holes in the ship, it was impossible to completely contain such a massive, unprecedented leak. So fans around the world got a very good look at the future of Grand Theft Auto. And now myself and others find it hard to go back to the aging GTA Online.

    Late on September 19, 2022, 90 short videos of early gameplay of what would later be confirmed by Rockstar as the next GTA entry leaked online via a hacker. The footage revealed a lot about the next game in the massively popular open-world franchise, including that the series would be returning to Vice City, Florida, a fan-favorite location last seen in GTA: Vice City Stories, the prequel to the beloved PS2 classic, GTA: Vice City. It also gave us a good look at the new protagonists of this next criminal adventure and some of the missions we might experience when GTA 6 is eventually released. Fans even began mapping out the game’s virtual world using the leaks.

    Rockstar undoubtedly hates the leak and likely wishes it could rewind time and prevent it from ever happening at all, but it did end up revitalizing the playerbase. For the first time in a long time, there was excitement and energy in the GTA community, which after years of GTA Online updates and poorly received remasters was in a pretty bad place prior to the leak. Even an early, unfinished or unpolished leak of GTA 6 was better than radio silence and glitchy remasters. People were pumped and hyped about the future of Grand Theft Auto in a way I hadn’t seen in years.

    But then, once the leaks were scrubbed from the web and it became clear Rockstar wasn’t going to release any official teaser or trailer to capitalize on the moment, all I and other GTA fans could do was go back to GTA Online. And that’s harder to do now that I’ve seen the future.

    Rockstar Games

    The latest big and free expansion to GTA Online, Los Santos Drug Wars, was released late last year at a really bad time for me to play and cover it for the site. So I just…didn’t play it. For the first time ever in the history of GTA Online, I skipped a new update completely. I’ve still not played it. At first, I blamed my skipping of the latest update on bad timing and a busy schedule due to holidays and end-of-the-year content. But now, weeks removed from all that, with more free time to play stuff, I’ve still not fired up the new update. And I think it’s time to admit to myself that my growing burnout around GTA Online was increased greatly by that small taste of what’s to come. That look at the future of GTA in Florida ruined me.

    I could go back and drive around the same highways and streets of Los Santos I’ve been cruising around since 2013. I could fire up the game and check out the newest business and missions connected to it. I could, sure. The thing is, I don’t know if I want to. I mean, eventually, I will play more GTA Online. I sort of have to as it’s part of my job here at Kotaku. Yet, if it wasn’t part of my career there’s a real chance that I might just never play GTA Online again.

    To be clear: It’s not because GTA Online is worse today than it was a decade ago—it’s actually much better to play in 2023 than in 2013—but because getting a glimpse of a fresh new world has killed my desire to boot up the same old Los Santos after a decade of GTA Online and GTA V. I mean, just having new songs on the radio will be amazing. I love Queen’s “Radio Ga-Ga” but you can only hear it so many times in 10 years before you’re ready for new tunes, too.

    At this point, I’m hoping the wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 and its sunny beaches, palm trees, and new characters isn’t too much longer, because I’m ready to leave Los Santos behind for a tropical vacation to Vice City.

     

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    Zack Zwiezen

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