| Title | Grand Theft Auto IV just won't be the same without New York Groove |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | News |
| When | April 10, 2018 |
Grand Theft Auto IV's ten-year anniversary is coming up. On April 26th, the Niko Bellic crime drama marks its decade of Liberty City mayhem by quietly losing some of its licensed music..
Surely this is only for people who buy a new copy of the game, right? I won’t lose music in the single player game I already own. I think Vice City and San Andreas lost music in the new ports they did, but if you can track down the originals, they still have all their music.
If you have a disc-based copy you should be ok but I wonder if they’ll modify any digital copies we own, like Steam and Xbox Live and PSN?
From the article:
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So it sounds like digital versions might be losing their songs. :( What’s with the system messages to download songs on PS3 though?
I have the disc version of the base game, but I have the two DLC digitally. Those two added a lot of great music, and I still haven’t played much of the DLC yet. Maybe now is the time to head back in before the music dies?
Once again, really wish people would make “life of the product” license deals on this stuff. I do have disc copies of the 360 version of both main game and the DLC, so while the game is barely playable with a gamepad, I guess I could fire it up just to listen to the radio. Then again I probably won’t notice. Never got into the game enough to really get into its music, though I am sure the choices were impeccable as usual.
This was me with the DLC. I never got into those enough to really have a chance to listen to their music much. As for the main game, yeah, the choices were amazing. GTA V is the only GTA game in which the music didn’t do much for me. GTA IV was Rockstar’s usual music choice magic. There’s an ambient music station that’s perfect for just exploring the city at night. It’s just so chill. And the only song I was familiar with on that station before I played the game was the song from Phillip Glass.
Even the rap station, which is not normally my genre, has just some amazing songs that were written specifically for GTA IV, I believe, that fit it to a T. Just amazing music all around in this game. Later in the game, when I’m going around the city on a motor cycle, trying to find all the jumps in the city, it’s a perfect time to just enjoy all the music they put into the game.
GTA V had Def Leppard’s “Photograph” though, which is probably the greatest butt rock song ever made.
It had some great songs, I won’t deny that. But unlike previous GTA games, it just wasn’t a home run. In GTA IV, I never really felt like skipping a song. They picked such great tunes that I learned to like all of them. Even the weird ones on the fringe radio stations. GTA V had several stations where I was just perplexed. I kept listening to it, thinking I would eventually warm up to the music, but aside from a few songs here or there, I never did.
is there any precedent for this? I thought existing purchasers/downloaded/installed people were grandfathered like with GTA SA etc.? or are they releasing an “update” that removes tracks?
I think they removed songs in an update with San Andreas? IDK, I haven’t played it in ages.
I heard they replaced the Steam version of San Andreas with the remaster that was developed for iOS. Is that just a nasty rumor?
Ironically for my post title, New York Groove is not one of the songs that was removed. That said, the confirmed list of impacted songs is disheartening.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/12210/discussions/0/1696045708644250230/
RIP Vladivostok FM, especially King Ring which was a featured song in the game’s marketing.
Man that sucks. So many of those Vladivostok FM songs are what I associated so closely with the first 3rd (Brooklyn part) of the game.
Plus these:
Liberty Rock Radio
The Smashing Pumpkins - 1979
Stevie Nicks - Edge of Seventeen
Electric Light Orchestra - Evil Woman
David Bowie - Fascination
Black Sabbath - Heaven and Hell
Will really be missed too. I listened to these a lot, especially in the New Jersey portion of the game.
I’ll miss these too, since The Journey was the ambient radio station that I listened to the most while playing GTA IV:
The Journey
Terry Riley - A Rainbow in Curved Air
Michael Shrieve - Communique: 'Approach Spiral
But at least I still have Michael Shrieve’s album I bought based on that song being in GTA IV.
Vice City had such an awesome soundtrack, it was fun to just drive around listening to the radio. I never really liked any other GTA’s soundtrack as much as that one.
The big difference to me is that even though I loved Vice City’s soundtrack, it was because I was already familiar with ALL the songs. There was not one song on that soundtrack that I didn’t know. And that was really cool, it helped put me in that time and place. By contrast, the San Andreas soundtrack had several songs that I got introduced to (like Eminence Front by The Who) that have since become favorites of mine. And then GTA IV had a soundtrack where I’d heard almost none of the music before, except for Phillip Glass, and songs on Liberty Rock Radio. Everything else was new to me, and it was really, really good. The only other games that had that were Rock Band 1 and 2, I think, where I was introduced to a huge swath of new music all at once that was all so good.
