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The Fake News, Courtesy of Rockstar Games (video)

Thursday, Feb 19, 2009

If there’s one thing Rockstar Games knows how to do, it’s get its product noticed; anyone who’s been following the rollout of their just-released expansion to massive 2008 hit Grand Theft Auto IV knows that such a maxim even applies to downloadable add-ons. 


What Rockstar has here is a news brief from “Weazel News”, the fictional news station dreamed up for the Grand Theft Auto universe.  It functions well as a trailer because it sets up the story of the add-on in a fairly unconventional way. Where it slips is in the bookended news flashes, whose juvenile brand of sub-Onion humor simply exists to make teenage boys guffaw and their moms gasp in horror. Granted, this sort of “shock” humor is par for the course when it comes to Rockstar, but at least they’re presenting their game in a way that sets it, and them, apart.


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