9) New Phenomenon- GTA 4

The lastest in the GTA series GTA 4 will offer gamers a gaming experience like never before, both being more 'realistic' as well as offering a number of additional features making use of new technologies. This game is relevant as it has alot of features that mhas not been used in any other game yet.
Features including theuses of other technologies include:
1) Players will be able to purchase real world MP3 tracks through GTA IV's in-game mobile phone, Following a partnership between Rockstar Games and Amazon.com (convergence). However, this service will only be available in the US for now.
2)Rockstar Games Social Club is a web site that will display the gameplay statistics of registered users and feature competitions and awards based on player activity within the game. The Social Club web site was announced on the twenty seventh of March this year and launched on the seventeenth of April at http://socialclub.rockstargames.com/. This makes more of a community for the customers and works to advertise to the audience.
3)GTA IV will be the first game in the GTA series to include online multiplayer on a console, allowing upto 16 players to explore the city at once.

Why this game is revolutionary in gaming and animation:
1) 'The game uses Rockstar's own RAGE game engine in combination with the Euphoria game animation engine. Instead of pre-written animations, Euphoria controls the way the player moves, enabling character movements to be more realistic. The Euphoria engine also enables Computer generated pedestrians etc to react in a realistic way to the player's actions. The game also uses middleware from Image metrics to facilitate intricate facial expressions and ease the process of incorporating lip-synching.'


This new technology should evolve console games to the next level making them more realistic. However this does have it's pitfalls as the game series is already deemed contreversial, and has been accussed as the source of some youth crime.Therefopre as the game becomes more realistc it may pehaps be banned like another Rockstar game, 'Manhunt', which was dubbed a murder simulation. As well as this it may well encourage more examples of convergence between games and websites such as Amazon.com has with GTA 4 to mutually benefit both parties. The game is now also alot more interactive than ever before and may encourage other game to use the same new technology to acheive similar results.