GTA IV Wii Announced with Trailer

GTA IV Wii Announced with Trailer
Rumors have been going on the past few months of Grand Theft Auto IV making its way to the Nintendo Wii. Reggie Fils-Aime, President of Nintendo America, has been pushing Take-Two for a Wii port of the game. It seems his hard work paid off, early this morning a trailer was added to the press website of Rockstar Games announcing GTA IV for the Wii. Because the Wii is not powerful enough to render the same graphics as the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, it seems as though they've gone with the old engine or perhaps an edited version of it.

Trailer Observations
Now that the chaos has died down a bit, we've had a chance to pick through the trailer to see what kind of technical upgrades might be hiding under the proverbial hood of GTA IV. Note, these aren't all confirmed features, per se, but they do seem to indicate things will, in fact, be different.
Perhaps the most obvious technical upgrade visible in the trailer is the real-time lighting and shadows. Now, seeing as this is a next-gen title we're talking about, one might say this feature is a given. However, after experiencing and modding the GTAIII Trilogy, I think this deserves a lot more attention than it will probably get.
In every title since GTAIII, all the environmental lighting has been done by pre-lit vertices. For those not technically inclined, this basically means the highlights and shadows were painted into the models, then multiplied all together to roughly match the time of day.
While the results looked good at any given moment, as time passed by things just didn't seem alive. With real-time lighting, on the other hand, the "living, breathing city" concept of GTA has just gotten a whole lot more dynamic.
Another possible no-brainer for a modern title is normal mapping. But considering the history of somewhat blocky peds in the series, and if this is what we think it is, it is a welcome change.
If you look closely around the arm and face of this ped, you can see that the lighting appears to be smoother than the actual polygonal mesh. This trick is done by creating a smooth, highly detailed version of a 3D model, rendering a texture which stores the vertex info, then applying it to an optimized version of the model.
The end result is a more detailed model with a much smaller file size. Which of course is a good thing when you've got a dozen or so on the screen. It also looks as if both peds in the picture have individual fingers..
One of the most annoying and downright bizarre things about the series has been that it's seemingly inhabited by an army of clones. Granted, San Andreas fixed this a bit by adding tons of different peds, but nevertheless, one would always run into the same person in the same clothes over and over again. Day after virtual day.
Hiding amidst the time-lapse portion of the trailer though are clues that this may be about to change. To the left are a series of screenshots from the trailer showing an otherwise identical person wearing mixed and different color outfits. If you go through the trailer frame by frame, it seems that there are a bunch of other peds wearing random outfits.
Yes, it is possible that they are four unique ped models. But after the player clothing options in San Andreas, it's only natural that Rockstar North expand this to peds. And if that's really the case I would expect the variety to grow even more as the game draws closer to completion.


First GTA IV Preview Announced
Quickly on the heels of yesterday's trailer announcement, Game Informer magazine has announced a world exclusive GTA4 preview in their May issue. The may issue will be reaching subscribers next month, and we'll have the information up once we get it.
A few things to bear in mind. Game Informer was the same magazine that had a world exclusive preview of GTA San Andreas (our reporting), way back in June of 2004. That preview was 10 pages long and included a lot of new screenshots. We are expecting nothing less this time around.

New York City Upset by GTA4's Setting
New York City authorities are upset at the new Grand Theft Auto being set in their city. According to the NY Daily News (via Game Politics and /.), the city councilman and other city authorities have spoken out in condemnation of GTA IV. The city councilman had this little gem to add:
"Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland."
With Rockstar Games' headquarters located in New York, this debate is just getting started. Can't wait to see the lower east side activists demonstrating on Broadway.