Grand Theft Auto IV

Let’s hear it for the humble in-game map, the stoic orientation-enabler of our favourite medium for decades. But not all maps are created equal. In fact some maps are so amazing that they’re amongst the very best parts of their respective games.

No seriously. And even in good games.

There’s an old adage that sex always sells, and conventional wisdom holds that that’s especially true for videogames – but is it really? We take a look at sales figures and chat with a marketing professor to find out…

This week PC Gamer is showcasing one of its favorite absurd mods: the GTA IV no friction mod, which causes cars to careen through Liberty City like children learning to ice skate. We challenged three editors to survive the onslaught of slippery metal doom, which you can see in parts one , two, and three, and today we're presenting the outtakes, because we couldn't help but to record as much of this madness as our hard drives could take. Check out the introduction above if you haven't seen it, and watch our montage of car vs. human lunacy inside...

It's tough to avoid rush hour traffic when it's slipping and tumbling off the road like the cars themselves are drunk, but it's damn fun to watch people try. In parts one and two of PC Gamer's GTA IV no friction mod footrace, Evan Lahti and Logan Decker attempted to traverse Liberty City's hellishly dangerous streets, and in part three, former reviews editor Dan Stapleton sets off on his own white-knuckled journey. Watch the introduction above for the back story, and see Dan's run inside...

In this edition of PC Gamer Plays, we mod GTA IV's physics to make cars careen through Liberty City like poorly-constructed paper airplanes and challenge three editors to avoid being squished, splattered, or flung into walls like failed trapeze artists. Yesterday, Senior Editor Evan Lahti battled the metal horde, and today it's Editor-in-Chief Logan Decker's turn to flirt with hilarious ragdoll death. See the introduction above, and watch Logan's nerve-racking attempts inside!

In this edition of PC Gamer Plays, we ever so slightly tweak GTA IV's car physics and challenge three editors to go for jogs through Liberty City. No problem...as long as they can dodge a maelstrom of frictionless automotive projectiles which scatter bloody ragdolls like confetti at the worst parade ever. Watch the introduction above and continue reading to see the first deadly installment...

Game music has been a passion of ours roughly since, oh, 1985, but in the past 10 years, it’s come to mean something more. Don’t get us wrong, we still love the beepatronic music of the 8- and 16-bit periods (and the wave of chiptune artists it inspired), but the past decade has also seen licensed music become a surprisingly important part of gaming. Sometimes, this just means a selection of familiar hits to accompany our music games, but every so often, a game will use licensed tracks to careful, brilliant effect – and in the process, will expose legions of gamers to music they might never have heard otherwise.

What follows are the games and franchises that have been the most influential in bringing strange and terrifying new musical styles to gamers’ ears – and in the interest of making this our most self-indulgent Top 7 since that other one, we’ve asked a handful of our editors to explain what made each one important to them personally...

There’s not long to go now until Rockstar finally unveil their Grand Theft Auto 5 trailer – unless you’re reading this afterwards, in which case disregard that first bit. Let’s be honest, we’re properly excited. Like groin tingling-ly so and by the amount of activity in our Twitter feed we can tell we’re not alone. 

We’re so pumped for the debut of GTAV that we’ve scoured the interwebs in search of the old, initial trailers for previous iterations. We remember GTAIV’s ‘things will be different here’ trailer with the first glimpse of Niko Bellic from yesteryear but how many of you remember how you felt when Vice City and San Andreas were aired?

Click inside to jog your memory and find out what we think these past trailers mean for GTA V's debut.

As we inch closer to the 10-year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III this Saturday, we’ve done a lot of reflecting about the era of gaming that it ushered in, and how it changed the way developers look at games. But aside from standardizing open worlds and giving us and a decade of morally ambiguous gaming, GTA as a series has told a lot of fascinating stories. And a big reason those stories were so fascinating was their cast of larger-than-life scumbags, psychos and sociopaths, most of which were not only memorable, but surprisingly complicated underneath their cartoonish exteriors.

With that in mind, we roped together a few of our editors and wouldn’t let them leave until they’d told us, in their own words, which ones were their favorites...

Look at games! The sky. The trees. The grass. The water. All of these things look real. And games will continue to get more real-looking as technology throws us ever closer to a promised land of perfect visual fidelity. Just this week, for example, Rockstar's LA Noire will introduce character faces so real - so mind-bendingly authentic - that they may cause some God-fearing types to be sick over themselves.

But here's the actual reality. There are things in games that will never be realistic. Mostly because it would be stupid if they were. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that these are The Top 7... things in games that will never be realistic.