Detractors, too, keep a checklist handy for any new "GTA" release ... a recurrent boon to the nation's concern industry.

One seldom finds a more pithy characterization. Keep Farhad Manjoo in plentiful video games, Editor — it seems to inspire him to write at the top of his game.

Geez, Farhad, just because you haven't stopped playing long enough to take a shower in four days doesn't mean EVERY article needs to be about GTA!

I am guessing it will be available for PC in the fall. I can't imagine it will work on most PC's, either. It seems to have extra-fancy graphics. I'll wait it out and play my friend's X-Box version to get an early taste.

I think it's a little cruel of Rockstar to release it just before college finals. GTA is ruining GPAs!

I'm hoping the next game will take place in Europe. So many possibilities there. Or, they could do a Dubai version, chock full of different Arabs and factions, with a Palestine full of barbed wire and an Iraq where you have to dodge IED's...hmmm...this might not happen for a while.

GTA Tokyo would be cool too. Indoor skiing! Godzilla! Hello kitty!

Anything else that could be said about it, like the depths of the characterization of the people you rape and kill, is trumped by that basic quality of the game.

The second I hear anyone talk about this bit of violence porn, I back away from them, because they are likely to pull out a gun and start shooting, or kick a puppy, or rape a Girl Scout, or...well, anything evil. It's inappropriate to say the game depicts a dystopian future. It's helping to create it. Thanks a lot, Pornstar Games.

Aaaand cue the bitter aging boomers unable to string together an argument. Far be it from me to suggest that someone like you, who is clearly much too cultured and intelligent than the rest of us, lacks the basic reading comprehension to note that raping and killing prostitutes is a POSSIBILITY depending on CHOICES made by THE PLAYER rather than "the defining characteristic" of the game. Why bother? I hope you feel better having expressed your outrage. Go back to watching American Idol. You will go the way of the dinosaurs soon enough.

tomreedtoon: "The second I hear anyone talk about this bit of violence porn, I back away from them, because they are likely to pull out a gun and start shooting, or kick a puppy, or rape a Girl Scout, or...well, anything evil."

Have you played the game?

I agree that they could easily take out the prostitutes and the other elements of the game. I'd be all for it. But the gangster storylines are pretty popular. You might check out the entire video-game industry -- the most popular games are all first-person shooters. Some of them are war games, some of them are alien-attack games. GTA is a merging of a first-person shooter (actually third-person, since you see your character) and a racing game. It's also becoming more like an RPG game. It basically has several game elements combined, and it does it very well.

Being against GTA against violence isn't sensible unless you are against the majority of computer games out there. Even the Star Wars games are pretty violent -- you are killing people with light sabers after all. What do you think happens when somebody is hit with a light saber, a flesh wound?

If somebody wants to make a game where you run around saving puppies, and if they think they can sell it, then more power to them.

It's inappropriate to say the game depicts a dystopian future. It's helping to create it. Thanks a lot, Pornstar Games.

Vapid inanity.

Firstly, the game doesn't depict the future. It depicts _now_. Radio DJs chatter about "Web 2.0". The roads are full of current-model cars. Political "news" is personality-all-the-time and policy-never. Internet dating. Theme pubs and "quirky" ethnic restaurants.

Second, the game is a _criticism_ of the hyper-capitalism sex-and-celebrities world we've created for ourselves. "I know there's a shortcut to the top for me," says one character, "I've just gotta find it." So, of course, he has a gambling addiction.

Finally, in being such a realistic "underworld simulator", the game completely strips the glamor (and I mean _completely_ strips) out of that life. Comparisons to "The Wire" are very apt. Why is Niko ("your" character in the game) such a successful killer? Because he has nothing to live for, and literally doesn't care if he lives or dies. There isn't a single moment in the game where this is depicted as a _good_ thing.

It's like that moment in good crime films where the (thrilling, sure, no argument there) bank robbery is over, and the wise old gangster says to the young guns "You know you can't go buy cool stuff now, right?"

And then the one that _does_ go out and buy an expensive roadster dies.

There's a difference between depiction and adulation. There's a difference between verisimilitude for the sake of criticism, or for the sake of "shock". There's a difference between great games like this, critically acclaimed, best-selling -- and violence-for-shock-value crud, which is _always_ panned, and more to the point, doesn't sell.

the most satisfying aspect of the game is breezing past traffic, running tollbooths, fishtailing around corners, rear-ending cabbies, breaking all those traffic codes you wish you could in real life. Racing games have allowed you to do all that but it's not very satisfying to weave through traffic just to go in circles, or to do so in a cityscape that could care less.

Running down pedestrians happens, usually just because they're in the way... but anyone who's ever tried to drive in a major metropolitan area, let alone NY, can understand the slight bit of satisfaction that results.

Don't those goddamn joggers know that these are my streets?

I've got people to meet, cars to steal, gangers to kill. I don't have time for red lights and crosswalks.

But all of the anti-social fun available in the game doesn't have nearly the impact of getting beat by your cousin at bowling or reading emails from you mom. Niko and Roman's relationship rivals that of any video game pair ever created; it's right up there with the tension between Revan and Bastila or The Nameless One and Morte.