A world-shaking sensation is in the works

When argo001 let slip that he was working on a secret project, I already knew it couldn't be anything ordinary. Then I heard that the sequel to the (so far) world-famous trilogy was in the making, and I immediately demanded to see pictures. I was right: when I looked at the screenshots, which were still very much beta, I saw it right away: this is more than ordinary, this is downright world-shaking. Before I get to GTA: Vice City Deluxe 4 itself, let me tell you a little about its background:

• The first part of the Deluxe series has almost fallen into complete oblivion. What we do still know about it is that foreign authors got tired of having to insert every new vehicle into the game one by one, so they made a summary patch that squeezed all of them together, and the modifications could simply be installed from there.

• The second part, Deluxe 2, was already developed by a Hungarian team (the then still nameless predecessor of the Star & Star Games modding team), and they released it (as a kind of Christmas present) on 16 December 2005. Compared to its predecessor it was a real leap forward, although fewer ramps were added to the game, and there were fewer stunt opportunities. argo001 and his enthusiastic team completely tuned up the graphics engine: among other things, the blur known from the NFS series was added to the game, and the lighting became much nicer too, all of it given the GTA III texture. On the downside, the textures of the people didn't turn out so well, as they glittered and sparkled as if they had just been freshly polished. The creators replaced about 50 cars, all of which came from GTA III, and they also hid a ton of small, humorous things.

• The final part of the Deluxe trilogy (back then it seemed it would stay just a trilogy, since another modification, independent of Deluxe, was also in the works, but sadly it never came out) was a kind of expansion for the second release. The team, by now running under the name Star & Star Games, replaced all the cars with newer or different ones, but unfortunately the significant graphical improvement didn't happen: they didn't manage to fix the "tin man effect", and they didn't manage to improve the graphics engine much either. Slightly more ramps were added to the game, and the number of humorous things grew as well. Even though, like the previous part, it had no installer file either, Deluxe 3 was a huge success: in Hungary alone the mod counted nearly 30,000 downloads, and worldwide tens of thousands of people could call this great modification their own.

And that brings us to now... The fourth part is coming! And the fourth part brings a real breakthrough in the history of PC GTAs! We get more than 25 original vehicles for our Vice City, a new color scheme and atmosphere come to the streets of VC, more realistic than ever, and in the spirit of user-friendly thinking, the fourth part of the series will have its own installer. These are just a few minor details, but of course I don't want to spoil all the fun.

Under the agreement made between Star & Star Games and codenamegta.hu, from today, among Hungarian-language websites only the sites of Star & Star Games and codenamegta.hu may publish information about the Deluxe series! So it's worth visiting the site often if you're after exclusive Deluxe news, info, secrets and screenshots