During the first week of February 2009, we were again contacted by Mike Torok inviting us back to New York to experience The Lost and Damned a week before it is released. Despite receiving only a week's advance notice, this time we at least knew ahead of time what hotel we were staying in and where we would be playing the game, but that doesn't mean they didn't have any surprises in store for us.

We stayed in The Standard, a fairly new hotel in Manhattan's Meat Packing District. When I say fairly new I mean it's actually still being built - floors 10-18 are still under construction. In fact, Google Street view shows the early stages. Immediately I realized that this hotel would be, in my opinion (and despite not being a fully functional hotel for the time being), nicer than the Hotel on Rivington. Not to say THoR is a bad place - both are fantastic - I just preferred the overall style of The Standard and thought the rooms were much more visually appealing. Since this isn't a hotel review, I'll get into what you came to this page to read about (after of course I show you a few examples of the level of hospitality Rockstar continues to show us)


After checking into the hotel and gathering with Adam, Casey, Kyle, Jevon, Blair, Chris, and Simon, we all got into a huge van which took us to Don Hill's, a bar on Greenwich Street which was closed for our private event for three days. The setup was very similar to the penthouse in Rivington last year: 8 networked consoles connected to 8 plasma televisions, but in an atmosphere that fit in with the theme of The Lost and Damned. We played a little bit of single player, during which time I noticed the missions are much more varied than the missions in Niko's story. I actually would have liked to see Johnny as the main character of GTA4 and Niko be the add-on. We played the new multiplayer modes for the next three hours. Some are similar to the current modes but with a biker twist, and some are completely new.

When 6:00 came and it was time to drop the controllers, we were told to line up by the back door. Mike Torok emerged from the darkness of a storage room with a pile of squarish cardboard boxes and began opening them. Inside were Xbox360 Elite consoles, each custom painted glossy black with The Lost and Damned box art on both sides, and serial numbered out of 190 units, one for each of us. We also received a very sturdy Rockstar Games tote bag (which made lugging the Elites around the streets of New York a bit easier), a few more t-shirts, a Rockstar logo sweatshirt, a shit-ton of stickers, and a GTA IV pool cue complete with Rockstar Games pool cue chalk (no detail is spared). We piled into the same van we had arrived in, but less half the cubic feet than before thanks to our mound of goodies, and went back to the hotel.


We dropped off the swag in our rooms and met back in the lobby at 7:30 to go to dinner. Kat and Mike (a different Mike, we met like five of them) from Rockstar brought us to Hill Country Barbecue for dinner. After eating we listened to Mike tell us what it's like to work with the team at Rockstar for a little bit, then we left and walked a few blocks to the Empire State Building to go up to the observation deck. Thankfully there were no lines since it was late at night (do not ever go during the day unless you have more than 3 hours to kill...I learned this the hard way the first time I went there). After that we needed a way back to the hotel. Our options were either to split up into 3 separate taxi cabs and pay $10 for each fare, or pay a guy with a limousine $30 to take us all back at once. We opted for the equally priced limo.

Our second trip to New York concluded with a visit inside Rockstar's fifth floor offices on Broadway. The Americans (myself, Casey, Blair, and Kyle) arrived around noon, just as the others were leaving. We were brought up to the fifth floor and led to a conference room adorned with framed San Andreas artworks on the walls and Nintendo DSlites on the table. After being shown a demo of some of the new features in Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars on Rockstar's custom-built giant DS with laptop-sized screens, we were allowed to play a 4-mission build of the game for ourselves to experience how using the stylus is incorporated into the mini-games that you've all read about in reviews. Assembling a sniper rifle and filling glass bottles with gasoline to make molotov cocktails were just two examples, but browsing through the stats screen we knew there were dozens more: planting bombs on car engines, tossing coins into a slot to pay a toll, and hotwiring cars just to name a few. You can even use the DS's WiFi to upload your stats onto the Social Club, and even trade money, weapons, and drugs with other players, essentially becoming a medium for buying and selling in-game equipment outside of the game.

The entire world is in 3-D, and unlike any top-down GTA of the past. The city is modeled after GTA4's Liberty City, minus Alderney. The use of the dual screen is very handy, with the GPS and stats on the bottom screen, leaving the entire top screen unobstructed for roaming around the city. The wanted system is completely different than any other GTA game as well. Instead of using the search radius system like in GTA4, you must disable a certain number of chasing police cars in order to remove stars from your wanted level. Disable is not the same as destroy, which would kill the cop inside the car and just add more stars instead. Once you get down to one star you can avoid causing further trouble and it will eventually go away. Our time actually playing Chinatown Wars was slightly limited, and there were only four missions to try, so I can't give a full-blown review, but I will say that this brief experience with Chinatown Wars - a game I initially had no intentions of buying or even covering - has made me purchase a Nintendo DS and eagerly await March 17.