Patrick Brown is up to his old tricks again. He's been focussing on Max Payne 3 related artwork as of late, but today he's produced this fantastic piece of artwork for Grand Theft Auto, showing all the protagonists of the series. Click the image below to see it in full.

From the man himself:

I've been wanting to do my classic GTA legends for a while, I can't believe it's been 3 and a half years since my last one. SO here we go, I've got 10 protagonists here including Albert De Silva from the upcoming GTA V, they're all just having a good time in (the new) San Andreas at Albert's mansion on the hills of Vinewood... looks like Niko can't handle how good GTA V looks compared to IV

I couldn't be more excited about this game! You can expect a lot of artwork from me based on GTA V

Here are the protagonists from left to right:

Toni Cipriani - Liberty City Stories

Claude Speed - GTA III

Carl Johnson - San Andreas

Niko Bellic - GTA IV

Victor Vance - Vice City Stories

Johnny Klebitz - Lost and Damned

Tommy Vercetti - Vice City

Luis Lopez - Ballad of Gay Tony

Huang Lee - Chinatown Wars

Albert De Silva - GTA V

We should probably point out that Albert De Silva isn't actually 100% confirmed as the protagonist of GTA V at the moment, it's simply based on some assumptions and a "leak" at this point. You can see more of Patrick's amazing artwork on his DeviantArt page.

Popular GTA IV modding tool OpenIV has finally reached a 1.0 release today. The main new addition in this update by GooD-NTS and the rest of the team is support for opening and viewing Max Payne 3 textures and collision bounds objects.

Other changes in this release include:

• new texture viewer
  
• improved GTA IV vehicle rendering
  
• simple text-based format for easy WPL editing
  
• many other improvements and bug fixes
  

The video below demonstrates some of the tool's features. Download links after the video.

Download: OpenIV 1.0

[OpenIV.com news post]

Making the rounds in the news today and this past week have been stories regarding the supposed release date of GTA V, following the leak of a Rockstar North employee's CV. Understandably this spread like wildfire after the CV revealed GTA V's release date to be October 2012. Why is this a problem? Well, the CV isn't real. We've heard from an actual Rockstar source that it's a falsified document. And upon further investigation this appears to check out. The "leak" appears to originate from a so-called "fansite", which consists mostly of completely made up information on GTA V.

The site in question is GTA-V5.com, owned and operated by one Dan Neil. Before moving to this domain, Neil had previously written at least two articles on his blogspot site consisting of fake information and claimed it was leaked from Take-Two ^{[1] and [2]}. We should point out that Neil's blogs are plastered with advertising, including promises of a free copy of GTA V, alongside other questionable affiliate based adverts from a UK company called JeebiesFreebie.com, which we would advise you all to stay away from; we don't think you'll be getting any free games. Update: Another site, GTA5videos.com, may also be responsible for some of the rumours being created.

Creating a CV containing non-public information and using a real employee's name and details is a downright stupid idea. This could easily land the employee in hot water with Rockstar, who at the time of the leak, may not be aware it's not actually real.

Unfortunately given the nature of this information, a number of major gaming news outlets picked it up causing it to spread even more. Rather amusingly, Neil also reported on his blog that Rockstar Games took down GTANet, the largest GTA fansite, following the leak being posted on GTAForums. It is laughable that anyone would believe this - Rockstar would never take down legitimate GTA fansites, especially not those they officially recognise and invite to events. The real reason the network was down was simply due to some issues that occurred from a server migration, nothing more, and at the time of posting this, appears to be back online. The likes of OXM and MCV and indeed a number of other reputable networks don't seem to care much for journalistic integrity these days, and it seems that sadly they'll post anything any random newly created blog gives them.

So folks, if you do see some rumours being posted that are reported to have been "leaked" from a Rockstar/T2 employee, please apply some critical thinking and look at who originated the leak. Hint: If it's from some ad-filled blog, it's not going to be real.

And one final note, Take-Two are at E3 mainly for the new Borderlands game, not GTA V.