I’ve been sick with Grand Theft Auto-itis for the past day, and during my time exploring Liberty City, I’ve learned a couple of things.

1) Never try to do anything while drunk. It will end very badly. I know sometimes you go to the bar and park really far away. Rather than stumble that city block, you’d rather carjack someone and drive home. Well, don’t do it. This is instant death for two reasons: A) the police will catch you and you can’t stumble-drunk your way out of it and B) drunk driving is a pain. Apparently, cops don’t mind you driving like a maniac when you’re sober but if you start drink and driving watch out. They have drunk-driver radar.

2) If you ever need to jack a police cruiser, ambulance or fire truck, try dialing 911 on your cell phone. You get an automated voice,and you can pick one in a jiffy.

3) Toll booths are for suckers. Just cruise right passed them and get on with your life. Of course, you’ll be chased by police, but running out of that one-star wanted level is easy. Trust me, waiting for folks to go through is a waste of time.

4) Building up relationships is a good thing. Some of your friends have special abilities that get unlocked when you’re liked by them at more than 75 percent. Little Jacob, for instance, comes around and sells you guns on the cheap.

5) Keep your eye out for random encounters. There are characters located throughout the game that have fun side missions. This is a game that rewards exploration.

Grand Theft Auto IV is, in movie terms, a blockbuster.

What constitutes a blockbuster in the film world? A huge, anticipated movie, expensive to produce but also generating borderline obscene box office figures. Well, recent reports say both are true of GTA as well.

GTA IV is the most expensive game of all time, with development costing in the neighborhood of $100,000,000. By comparison Iron Man, the big-budget movie coming out this Thursday, had a budget of an estimated $186,000,000 according to IMDb.

Why would anyone spend that much to produce a game? Because the rewards are worth the financial risk. Bloomberg estimates the first-week sales of GTA IV to be $360,000,000. For the first week. By comparison the highest-grossing movie in American history, Titanic, made $600,779,824 in its entire run.

And people still talk about the gaming industry like it’s a semi-serious diversion for kids and social outcasts…

The PlayStation blog says Sony is adjusting prices for the Canadian version of its online store, and taking into account the weakening U.S. dollar, it is now leveling prices for the folks up north.

The update will happen Thursday, May 1. Oh Canada … they have it good up there. Well, except for the cold.

Attention Stargate fans! While most of the world is playing GTA you can head on over to the Stargate Worlds web site and throw your name in the proverbial hat for an invite to the closed beta. Sign-ups have begun but details are scarce.

While SG-1 and Atlantis were awesome (I know Atlantis is still on the air but I didn’t like the changes, which apparently makes me a shrill and ill-informed lemming) the Richard Dean Anderson vehicle that most deserves an MMO is MacGyver. This may be a good stopgap, though…

Grand Theft Auto Day is Jack Thompson’s Christmas.

Everyone’s least favorite overdramatic reactionary and crusader against things he doesn’t understand is, of course, at it again. How could he pass up such an obvious occasion to blame every single problem in all of society on a game?

Ars Technica has a report on Thompson’s reaction to IGN’s feature on “The Ladies of Liberty City.” Needless to say he takes one small part of the game presented without context and uses it to justify comparing Grand Theft Auto IV to polio.

Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio. We now have vaccines for that virus… The ‘vaccine’ that must be administered by the United States government to deal with this virtual virus of violence and sexual depravity is criminal prosecutions of those who have conspired to do this. If you doubt me, look at the aforementioned streaming audio/video. It will make you sick.

Naturally a video game must be marketed exclusively at children, right? It’s a video game. Adults don’t play video games! And the First Amendment? Outdated! The children are on the line! Ban all video games with any sexual content! Never mind all those R-rated movies and romance novels, those are different for some reason.

But wait, that’s not all! According to Wired, Jack Thompson has also sent a letter to Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick’s mom. Seriously. He sent a letter to Zelnick’s attorney written to his mother.

Taking your son’s thought, I would encourage you either to play this game or have an adroit video gamer play it for you. Some of the latter gamers are on death row, so try to find one out in the civilian population who hasn’t killed someone yet.

…

Your son, this very moment, is doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be “a Boy Scout.” More like the Hitler Youth, I would say.

That pretty much speaks for itself.

I’ve said it many times before, I’ll say it again: Parents, be parents. If you wouldn’t let your child see an R-rated movie with sex and violence don’t let your child play GTA IV. It’s that simple. Don’t assume all games are intended for children, don’t demand the government parent your children and whatever you do don’t listen to Jack Thompson.

Rockstar is going all-out with the PR blitz. I may not be playing the game, but at least now I have the Statue of Happiness here staring at me and reminding me that I’m not playing the game.

Sick of all the hype over GTA IV? Suspicious and annoyed about the flood of perfect scores? Determined to hate the game solely because everyone else seems to love it? Well here at Gamester, in an effort to be as fair and balanced as possible, we cater to your needs too. Here’s the bad things people have been saying about the most hyped game since the last Halo installment:

1) Joystiq has compiled a “negareview” or the game. Here’s some highlights:

• The plot is far more simplistic than San Andreas.
• The world is much smaller than prior installments.
• There are fewer weapons and vehicles this time around.
• Camera movement during combat makes it harder than it should be.
• The writing is sub-par and the acting is flat.
• Cover mechanics don’t work.
• Frame rate issues abound.
• It’s just GTA again with prettier graphics.

2) Kotaku reports the game is having Bully-style freezing issues. Rockstar has since confirmed the problem but says at this point that it’s only affecting 60 GB PS3s, though reports vary. The issues in Bully were just frequent enough to be frustrating, multiply that over the number of GTA copies being sold and it becomes a PR-killing epidemic that may make CNN.

Update: Joystiq relays a suggestion from the PlayStation.com forums that to fix the problem you delete all data, including the install and save games, and start from scratch. This is yet another reason I don’t like standard hard drives in consoles that let developers force installations.

3) Also according to Kotaku someone got stabbed in a GTA line. Logic says that if you get enough people in one place one of them is going to be crazy and violent, but Jack Thompson would blame the violent nature of the game.

For those who like undressing video game boxes to see what’s underneath all that plastic and cardboard. Here it is video game porn for all those fanboys out there. This is what you get with the Grand Theft Auto IV Special Edition. I picked up the Xbox 360 version. Very nice.

More video game por … unboxing photos on the jump

I swear ever since I started this gig I’ve been waiting in lines. There was the epic PlayStation 3 line. Then there was the Wii one. Six months later, I’m in line for an iPhone. Last night, I was in another one in downtown Berkeley. I was one of the folks waiting to get his or her copy of Grand Theft Auto IV.

As for as midnight launches go, it was pretty quiet. The crowd was mostly adults. All of them were much older than 18 and we just hung out and smoked cigarettes. Of course, confused people asked what we were standing in line for. We told them.

Someone apparently ordered a pizza, and when the driver came by, he was looking for the person who dialed. No one stepped up. He offered the pizza for half-price. Unfortunately for all of us, we were broke. We just spent our money on GTAIV.

The night was pretty eventful. The good folks at the downtown Berkeley Gamestop had a raffle, gave away posters and stickers. I missed the big giveaway earlier in the night. Some Rockstar representatives hung out and gave away T-shirts and other swag.

As midnight drew closer, there seemed to be more and more people dropping in. By 11:36, there was more than 50 people, freezing out here in the middle of April. When the employees finally let us in, it was joy to get out of the cold, get the game and drive home.

Right now, I’m content and so far I’m liking the game. It takes some getting used to. There’s a lot of detail in the world. Driving is totally different. There’s more weight to the cars if that makes sense. Moving around there’s a distinct momentum. Anyway, back to playing. Unboxing shoots soon to follow.

A few days ago I posted EA’s mock draft. I’ve been asked how they did so I’ve scored them: They got 7 of 31, about 23%. By comparison ESPN’s Mel Kiper, the most famous draft expert in the world, only got 6 of 31 (19%).

I’m officially impressed. This may bode well for this year’s football games.

Scorecard past this link.