24 hours after rearranging its entire Board of Director’s and Take Two is already receiving flak from politicians in New York over its upcoming video game, Grand Theft Auto IV, which is set to be released stateside this October 16th and in Europe on October 19th.

While hopeful gamers fawned over the trailer - helping to knock the servers hosting Rockstar Games and IGN to the ground, New York City officials lamented over its featuring of New York as the setting for Liberty City.

According to New York Daily News:

The latest version of an ultraviolent video game will unleash its murderous mayhem on the streets of New York.

And outraged political leaders say the rampant brutality of the game, Grand Theft Auto IV, has little in common with reality.

Commenting on the subject, City Councilman Peter Vallone of the Council’s Public Safety Commitee had this to say:

“Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland.”

Rayond Kelly, Police Commissioner stated, “It’s despicable to glamorize violence in games like these, regardless of how far-fetched the setting may be”.

Despite these comments, their story seemed slightly biased and in some cases, entirely distruthful. As most people (whom have actually played the game, rather than listen to the negative press) are aware, you can not sell drugs to children, let alone anyone at all. You also do not [directly] advance through the game by killing prostitutes, although it can be done. However, according to the NY Daily News once again:

In previous incarnations, players advanced through the game by killing cops, selling pornography to children and killing prostitutes.

Such can lead one to believe that the writers of the article hasn’t played Grand Theft Auto a day in their lives, however, it is not far from the rhetoric of a certain other critic: Jack Thompson.

This is not the first time the setting for Grand Theft Auto has been in New York. It has been in Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto 3, GTA: Liberty City Stories, and even made a brief appearance in San Andreas. Hence, this is obviously not the first time it has drawn negative remarks from New York City Officials. “The mayor does not support any video game where you earn points for injuring or killing police officers,” said Jason Post, speaking on behalf of New York City’s mayor.

Known as “Things Will Be Different”, the first trailer premiered for GTAIV yesterday. The latest character of the GTA series (featured right), bearing a rugged appearance and an accent hinting towards a Russian background, states the following as the trailer closes: “Life is complicated. I killed people, smuggled people, sold people. Perhaps here, things will be different.” Given the fact that this is Grand Theft Auto we’re talking about, that idea is extremely unlikely.

Take Two declined to comment on this story.

Below are various screenshots for the upcoming GTAIV.

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Shiken ga owarimashita! (exams are over)

I didn’t get much of a chance to post last week, due to the fact that it was filled with final exams, and so instead will post a big summary of all news deserving note.

Dragonball MMORPG

An official announcement has been made by Bandai Visual regarding a new MMORPG which will be themed around Akira Toriyama’s amazingly popular Dragonball series. The game, known as “Dragonball Online“, will be set several hundred years after the events of the original Dragonball arc and will feature both old and new characters. Expect to see the game sometime in 2008, and check out 4Gamer for more screenshots and information (if you speak Nihongo).

New Studio Ghibli Movies Announced

Studio Ghibili, the Japanese anime film studio who are responsible for films such as Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, have just released details of two new projects:

The first, “Gake no ue no Ponyo“, is about a 5 year old boy known as Sousuke, and a goldfish princess called Ponyo who wishes to become a human. Suitably eccentric. A 2008 release for this movie is planned.

Ghibli also announced a joint venture with artist Naohisa Inoue; the film is titled “Iblard Time“, and is about an imaginary world, Iblard, conjured up by Inoue. The movie will be released straight to DVD/Blu Ray on July 4th.

Ghost Hound - A new Shirow Masamune/Production I.G. project

Production I.G. have announced a new anime series, “Ghost Hound“. The series will be written by Shirow Masamune, creator of Ghost in the Shell, and aired on Japanese TV channel Wowow this autumn. Ghost Hound’s official Japanese website can be found here.

L’arc~en~ciel Single: “Seventh Heven”

After almost two years since releasing their last single (Link), Japanese Rock group L’arc~en~ciel have announced a new single “Seventh Heaven“. The song should be hitting Japanese stores on May 30th. More details on the band’s official website.

A group consisting of 11 manga creators have today (March 14th, 2007) filed a lawsuit against two individuals, and their hosting company, for distributing their manga works online without permission. The group is seeking ¥22m in damages (around $188k).

Amongst the group of mangakas there are several big names such as:

Nagai Go - Devil Man
Inoue Takehiko - Slam Dunk
Hara Tetsuo - Fist of the North Star

The defendants are alleged to have scanned the works and distributed them via their website (address unknown) between September 2005 and January 2006. During this period the site was said to have been receiving around 100k visits a day.

I wonder what the mangakas opinions are regarding fan translations of manga which are unlicensed outside of Japan. Let’s hope this doesn’t have too much of a negative effect on the manga scanalation/translation communities.

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Via: ANN

If you regularly check out anime blogs, by now you will probably have come across several pictures where faces have been obscured using the Laughing Man symbol (taken from Ghost In The Shell: SAC).

I have never tried it myself, but I can imagine doing this manually could get very tedious. There is now better solution: http://thelaughingman.net/, a new site which provides a free service that will automatically hack your images and apply the Laughing Man logo to any faces it finds!

I ran a few tests to try it out; the first was of some randoms I found using Google Image Search, and below is the result:

After the first success, it was time to try something a little more complex. The result was not so flattering:

Conclusion: A nice utility for anomyzing basic scenes, it needs quite a bit more work though if it is going to be of much real use (e.g. anonymizing a crowd of Otakus roaming Akihabara).

Via: ANN

ANS has just reported details on a new limited edition (30 available) Death Note themed laptop (or “notebook”, a aha).

The laptop comes with a trendy ringo (apple) USB dongle, other than that it looks much like a regular laptop with a big Death Note sticker stuck on its body.

The laptop is being sold on NTV’s website; by the looks of things it has already sold out though, as might be expected.

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It would appear that a teaching associate in the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of Arts, has created a 1:2.5 scale Gundam RX-78 (7.5 metres tall) lantern!

The reason for all the effort is the Taipei Lantern Festival , and the lantern -along with many others- will be on display until March 11th.

Links:

۞ Construction of Gundam lantern
۞ Finished Gundam lantern

Source: ANN

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Japanese music icon Utada Hikaru (Hikki) has announced on her homepage that she and her husband Kazuaki Kiriya have divorced. Watchers of the Japanese TV show Music Station also noted that on the March 2nd episode Hikki was no longer wearing her ring.

Lack of communication between the pair, because of their busy international schedules, is stated as the main reason for the split. Differences over the direction of their marriage have also been stated as a factor.

Utada and Kiriya were married in 2002, at which time Utada was only 19 years of age - while Kiriya was 34.

Source: Mainichi

Not everyone enjoyed the story of the first Appleseed movie, however no one can deny that it had absolutely amazing visuals. Work is currently underway on Appleseed 2, and a trailer has just been released for it as an extra on the PS2 game Appleseed Ex.

Appleseed was originally a manga created by Masamune Shirow (also creator of Ghost in The Shell); the film shares some of the characters from the manga, however the storyline is not directly related. The film will be produced by John Woo, the man who directed both Face Off, and Mission Impossible: II.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a copy of the trailer itself online, what there is however is a collection of screenshots taken from the trailer:

Via: ANN

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It would appear that the popular anime image sharing site Danbooru has closed down, with the message “Danbooru is dead” displayed on its front page.

If you would like to setup your own image sharing site you may still download the source code that drives Danbooru (TagBoard).

Moetry, a blog operated by Danbooru’s founder, has an entry on the closure; it doesn’t really explain much in regards to why the site closed though

Artist Eric Poulton has recently drawn a series of Starwars themed images set in a Steampunk context. By far my favourite of the collection is a picture of Darth Vader (below) with a steam powered cybernetic body and a steam powered light sabre.. sugoi!

Check out the full collection here.

Via: Digg

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