Joining the likes of Blizzard and Ubisoft, Rockstar has created its own games launcher allowing players to access its PC games from one place, regardless of what digital store you bought them from. The Rockstar Game Launcher is available to download right now, and also lets fans buy games directly from the developer via its shop. For a limited time, as an incentive to install the launcher, you can claim a free copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas when you download it, which will be permanently ...

Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency channel has returned to the world of video games for the first time in a couple of years with the release of Queer Tropes, a new three-part miniseries. This trio of episodes sees host Carolyn Petit examine the ways video games have portrayed queer and trans characters over the years. As you might expect, there are plenty of awful examples from the past which portray LGBTQ characters in a negative light because of their sexuality or identity - and use queer s...

There is a familiar pattern to media coverage whenever Rockstar publishes a game. There is talk about how the developer has used its newest game to iterate upon and redefine the open world genre. There are almost always articles on how various Hollywood films influenced Rockstar's development process. And there are at least one or two polemics that attack the developer for transgressing established norms about what can and cannot be done in video games. This last type of essay inevitably conclud...

One of the things I love most about old school games are their cheat codes. I have fond memories of spamming "motherlode" into the Sims to make it rain simoleons - while codes in other games gave you invincibility, new characters and even (somewhat infamously) unlockable blood and gore. GTA San Andreas was no exception to the rule, and the game is stuffed full of classic cheat codes allowing players to mess around. When you wouldn't want to activate these, however, is right in the middle of a wo...

I have enormous respect (and a fair amount of adoration) for the people who make unofficial patches for ageing games. With each generation of hardware and each new operating system, we lose a few more games, and these dedicated folks are working hard to keep that number as low as possible. One of these long-running update projects is SilentPatch, a combination patch for Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and San Andreas, three games that share an engine. It updated again just yesterday, and while the...