Kotaku, I understand the exclamation point joke you wanted to make but let stupidity committed during a crime pick itself off. Don't help them especially when they don't even read :(

Owen, if you were to review a game, and you found that it was very adequate and fun but not really your cup of tea, you could end the review with:

"It's good... But it's not Owen good!"

THANKYOU

This article is Owen good!

@Bernard McGraw: For God's sake, stop the puns. This man can't take it all his life.

@okenny :):

It is funny though...expecting criminals to obey your requests.

"Here ya go guys, just don't play it while on Xbox Live!"

"Yeah...maybe we need to reintroduce ourselves. We're criminals...and we break the law."

@Bernard McGraw: Dad used to end his sports column at the UNC school paper with "That's all the Good sports for now."

It seems like we should pirate the game. Am I right? I is a crime drama, and well being a criminal yourself will most assuredly put you into the GTAIV mood.

So, while others are playing San Andreas, or reading the articles about the game, step up, be a man.

Just smile and think of the irony, I know I will

@Owen Good: Absolute gold.

Heh, I wonder what happens when MS start seeing people connecting to Live the 28-29'th (or whatever the date is) who have already completed the game or have a bunch of achievements that would take at least 30-50 hours to get >:D

@Owen Good: I like it.

As if one warning in Caps Lock wasn't enough.

R* deserves to get a baseball bat and beat the living s*** out of iCON.

"Guys, go out and buy this one! Rockstar deserves it!"

Wow...I never thought I'd see the day.

As if R* wont make money hand over fist with this game. Hell, its based on crime. Consider the piracy a tax for making such a violent, crude game.

/troll :P

@Albanian_Killa: He's a pirate - with A HEART OF GOLD.

@Albanian_Killa: You might see it but i don't bet it will ever happen.

hehe "bushlovers"

thank you kotaku!

@Islandkiwi: you gotta remember that criminals dont wanna get caught doing what they are not supposed to be doing. so they would do well to head the advice not to play while on xbox live

@Bernard McGraw: Aren't the Crecente puns plentiful enough? :p

This must be console gamers first foray into piracy.

This type of gibberish in an .nfo file is nothing new.

That aside, there's nothing Microsoft can or will do about people playing it early. What they can do, is scan the few who are playing online with a modified firmware on their xbox, and ban them. Which is probably easier to do, when only a fraction of people have the game at the moment.

If you own a legit copy, your chances of getting banned are nil.

I had Halo 3 about a week early, beat it, and received about 600 messages from friends asking how I had it. Nothing happened at all.

@ShaggE: There's no such thing as enough awful, awful puns.

@Bernard McGraw: Seconded!

Lol.. my boss had me come into work early yesterday (I work at a Game Crazy) so that we could go out to the local Walmart and Target to see if someone was dumb enough to put some copies out. No luck but it was worth a try. We didn't bother with the Game Stop as the manager knows us too well, and would never give us one. Especially since we're her only real competition in town.

@RYAMATSU: Because we all know the only sensible answer to piracy is violence.

@stryker1800:

...you are aware many people have already shown up on Live playing this, right? It may have been good advice, but as I hinted at earlier, criminals are notorious for not doing what they're told.

What sort of dumbass plays a pirated game online before it has released? You *might* be lucky and your game is indistinguishable from a retail version, or it might not be and you may as well kiss your XBL account goodbye.

@DrXym: The thing is, it *is* indistinguishable from a retail game. The most Rockstar will do (and I hope they do this) is disqualify early players from certain leaderboards (such as the "first player to 100%").

In fact, that's all they can do without being unfair to people who have to wait. It has nothing to do with it being a retail or pirated game.

I don't understand the need to pirate something that is $60. If you can't afford that then you have other priorities in your life that need to come before gaming.

Argh.....matey.

I think it's funny that he refers to Americans as "bushlovers" when it could be argued that we hate him more than anybody else on the planet.

People are already playing it while connected; besides the obvious leakage of the game a few stores have broken the street date.

so you guys won't buy it on xbox, what a shame to steal a copy, rrr.

@Maaxxx: I won't be getting it on xbox, I rather purchase it on ps3 even without dlc, I just play the game, and yes im going to buy it at a good price.

I'm just wondering why everyone is practically bursting to play this game, and will go so far as to spend hours and hours downloading a copy, burning it to disk(s) and playing it on the game. Let alone that, why are people going to midnight launches? It's *GTA4* I promise you they've probably printed more copies of this game than the Bible, it's not like you're going to run out of them. Just go that morning or afternoon.

On another note, this is one of those times where I'm glad I don't care about multiplayer enough to even have my internet cable plugged into the 360 90% of the time. I'm an Elitist Achievement Whore, but if my game has an online achievement or multiplayer achievement that I can't have my roommate help me do, I don't even bother with them. Dealing with the...*CREATURES*...that inhabit Xbox Live is not something I would ever subject my worst enemy to. And that's saying something.

So while I'm looking forward to playing GTA and having fun getting the achievements, if it ever requires me to go online I don't even consider it worth doing. Because honestly...it's really not.

@PathRifter: A good number of those "creatures" on Live are your Kotaku brethren, and are pretty fun people to play with. Really!

I don't use Live often, because of timing more than anything, but the majority of people that I've gamed with have been decent people.

I guess these people don't realize that even if you disconnect your 360 your going to end up earning achievements in the game (completing the first mission gets you one) and these achievements are tagged with the date and time your earned it. So unless they are planning to never reconnect their Xboxs and miss out on the great multiplayer, they are sort of fucked. I'm fully expecting microsoft to take a stand against this, if nothing else it will get them some good media coverage.