German magazine Games Aktuell is the latest magazine to review Grand Theft Auto IV. Here is their verdict:

• Graphics: 9/10
  The gigantic size of the city makes you forget the few graphical imperfections of the game.
• Sound: 10/10
  Best GTA soundtrack ever, and probably the most compelling feature in the game.
• Controls: 8/10
  Far from perfect but a big step from the previous GTA games.
• Multiplayer: 9/10
  Great concept and innovative integration with the single-player mode.
• Gameplay: 10/10
  We can't score it 11/10...
• Conclusion:
  GTA4 is by far the best action game ever created.

UPDATE : This review is based on earlier preview sessions at R*. It's not based on the final retail version of the game. It still contains the review screenshots however (the same ones featured in OXM/OPM).

The other day you all may remeber that I posted some news about two TV adverts being made available for GTA IV on UK TV Channels, but they were only available in a lower quality and were quite rubbish really, but last night I managed to capture the 30 second clip in DVD quality.

Then a few hours later I received an email from a guy called George Block and he had managed to capture the 60 second clip in DVD quality and the best news is he has sent me this clip aswell, so they are both now available for direct download here by clicking on the source links above.

Thanks goes to George Block for the 60 second TV Advert.

Brandon Laurino of Konami Online has written another post on the PlayStation.Blog to address a number of questions people have had about the Metal Gear Online beta. The most pressing query being about a number of Metal Gear Online beta keys missing digits and, therefore, being unusable. People who are affected by this are advised to contact Konami Support, making sure to include your broken code and a return email address.

Laurino continues to answer more questions from users. While he does so we find out that Konami representatives will be participating in the beta themselves and that we should "stay tuned" for more info. This is also the case if you are after more details on the "gunmetal PS3" bundle which was announced last week. Funnily enough, though, no mention has been made of the fact that it is currently impossible to get a Konami ID from the website. The beta starts on Monday, so we're hoping that will be fixed before then. Otherwise Konami could have a lot of angry PS3 owners on their hands.

Along with the Audio Q&A from Gameradar is nine screenshots for the game, view them below.

View over 320 screenshots in my gallery

Vanilla Shake sent in the following information he gathered from what Lazlow said on the Opie & Anthony Show this morning:

• Jim Norton plays a worker in a porn shop. "That's a vintage bush" is a line he says.
• Here's a random line: "Eat my fat hairy fist!"
• There are over 100 radio commercials.
• Sometimes there are announcements in the subway about police harassing you and searching you randomly.
• There are Piswasser commercials mocking the Budweiser radio commercials played in America. Lazlow played one of them and it's sung by Anthony himself.
• You can go on different news websites in the game and read about different crimes you've committed.
• You can date girls you've met on dating websites.
• When you get shot in individual places, there will be different reactions e.g. if Niko gets shot in the leg, he will begin to bleed from there and he will also begin to limp.
• Recording sessions went on for weeks, ten hours a day, every day.
• There were a lot of weekends that were spent by Rockstar employees trying to make the game as great as possible.
• Lazlow says he prefers the Xbox version because of downloadable content: new missions, characters, comedy, etc.
• O&A admit that it's amazing and as Anthony puts it "everybody will have a blast playing."

The movies that we watch, the games that we play... they just wouldn't be the same if it wasn't for the audio. The Grand Theft Auto series is no exception; the ambiance of the city is as important to Grand Theft Auto as the Imperial March is to Star Wars. GTA IV aims to maintain this healthy balance of audio and visual, and on that note, I'm happy to say that GamesRadar has just recently posted a multi-page Audio Q&A for Grand Theft Auto IV.

The Q&A includes Matthew Smith, Craig Conner and Will Morton, all of whom are senior employees with the Rockstar North audio team. Some quotes that we found particularly interesting:

• "Stand in the street and you'll hear three different radio stations at any one time coming from passing vehicles, all sounding appropriately tinny or boomy, depending on the type of vehicle and whether its doors are open, its windows broken, etc."
• "It was our aim that you could place the player in a random position on the map, shut your eyes and listen, and be able to tell where you are, and what time of day it is, and I think we've achieved that pretty well."
• "For multiplayer, we balance [the sound of gunfire] so that guns only really sound dangerously beefy when they're at a distance you can be hit from, so it's intuitive what's threatening and what's someone else's private war."
• "It's difficult to quantify how many speaking parts there are, but at our last count there were over 740 unique voices in the game. There are over 80,000 individual lines of dialogue, more than 7000 of which are Niko's lines. If you were to listen to each line back to back, it would take over 29 hours. Also, these figures don't take the radio, TV, and mo-capped cut-scene dialogue into consideration."
• "We also decided to make the pedestrian dialogue more realistic in GTA4. As an example, peds in previous games would walk around and randomly chat to themselves if they weren't doing much else. In real life, people (generally!) don't go around talking to themselves, so we dropped this behavior from GTA4. However, we realized that the random chat of old GTA games was a good way for the player to pick-up on what sort of personality a ped has, so we created the cell-phone conversations in GTA4 as one realistic way of portraying personality."

Take Two Interactive just confirmed at the company's annual general meeting that Grand Theft Auto IV has gone gold. "Trucks are rolling next week and there will be a lot of them", the executive said, confirming that the game discs will be making their way to stores next week ahead of the game's release on April 29th.