Ever since the release of Grand Theft Auto 3 people have been asking when the multi-million selling Rockstar North title will head to London.

However, there would be a lot of problems with London being the backdrop for one of the most expansive and controversial games of all time. And, yes, we know the original Grand Theft Auto had a London 1969 mission pack – but we’re talking new, not top-down GTA and modern-day London.

Here are hecklerspray’s top 10 reasons why GTA London would never work:

10 – Rockstar North

Rockstar North is a Scottish company. This is the same country that sells ‘Anyone But England’ T-shirts. Are they really going to set their top selling title in an English city? No.

9 – Boris Johnson

The new-style GTA games all feature a political figure of some sort. Imagine having to listen to this floppy haired buffoon as he tells you to, “ruddy well sort out that ruffian!”

8 – The Daily Mail

Could you imagine what the Mail would have to say about a GTA London game? My guess is ‘New Liberal Game Results In Immigrant Teen Pregnancies’.

7 – Transportation
Public transportation has always been a way of travelling across the game map in a short space of time. GTA London would have to feature engineering works and make you top up your oyster card every time you wanted to travel. Plus at some point you’d be expected to drive one of the godforsaken bendy buses.

6 – The Congestion Charge

Every mission costs you £20 and if you forget to pay it your wanted level goes up at the end of the day, without any warning.

5 – Cyclists

They’ll be even more annoying than they are in real life, if that is even possible. Every turn you make will result in the death of a cyclist, causing your wanted level to go up.

4 – Traffic Calming Measures

Speed cameras, speed bumps and traffic jams – three things London is renowned for. Would it even be worth stealing a car in Grand Theft Auto if you couldn’t actually go 10 yards without hitting a traffic jam, snapping the suspension or being gatso’d?

3 – Weapons

In order to accurately reflect London life GTA London would have to feature a distinctive range of knives: lock knives, butterfly knives, samurai swords etc. Guns would obviously only be available in Hackney.

2 – The Police

They don’t have guns. What are they going to do when they come to arrest you? How do you know whether or not they’re an actual police officer or one of those PCSO things that can’t actually do anything?

1 – Londoners

Crime wouldn’t even register on a Londoner’s radar unless they were the victims, or they read the Daily Mail and are now afraid to go outside. Your character will be shoved, abused and hunted by marauding teenagers wielding baseball bats when the sun goes down while everyone just walks past with their heads buried in a copy of the Evening Standard. The game would play more like a survival horror than a sandbox game.

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Apologies to those who missed last week’s Guff – we know how much you love it and how it ranks amongst the most-viewed pages in hecklerspray history, but the hive mind went on a road trip. By train.

So, back to normal service it is. Hey – aren’t these things that happened over the last couple of weeks in gaming funny! Ho ho ho.

Seriously though – that whole PEGI/BBFC furore has produced some amazing bitchiness and a lot of people who didn’t care about the whole thing reacting in a way that suggests they still don’t care about the whole thing.

What a (two) week(s)!

In a nutshell: games in the UK were rated by one of two boards.

Either by PEGI (the Pan European Game Information ratings system), who would slap some easily-ignorable signs on a box to advise people on whether they should buy the game for their kids or not. These were not legally-enforceable, so an 18-rated game could be sold directly to a child.

Or by the BBFC (the British Board of Film Classification), who would put big, nasty signs on, the same as those you see on DVDs. These were legally-enforceable, meaning little Johnny couldn’t buy Grand Theft Auto himself. This meant his mummy would just buy it for him, then complain to the Daily Mail when the game swore/had violence/prostitutes were present/anything else happened that they would have been warned about would they have paid any attention to their child’s activities.

Basically, these two entities didn’t get along, and it was decided that one of the two should take over the reigns, rating all games released in the UK and telling you idiots out there whether something is appropriate for you or not.

The winner was PEGI, possibly after some kind of censorship-off where they saw who could fuzz-out the (in)appropriate parts of a woman’s anatomy fastest.

Hilariously, the BBFC commented after losing, saying:

“The BBFC has always supported PEGI and wished it well, but it continues to believe that it satisfies these requirements better than PEGI.”

Or: ‘they may have won, but we don’t care – we’re better. We don’t even care. We didn’t want to do it anyway. Rating games is for fat idiots.’

Petty, petty censorship children. You have to love it.

The main problem with all of this, though, is that everyone in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is an idiot, and these new certifications will either be completely ignored, totally misunderstood or not trusted by the populace.

Which would make them – as anyone who has worked somewhere that sells games or DVDs knows – just as useless as the current ratings system, legally-enforceable or not.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what they’ll make of the game based on Lars Von Trier‘s new film.

Slightly obese humourist Ricky Gervais has landed a role in the new GTA game, due for release on April 29.

The man responsible for some of the decade’s greatest television has teamed up with the creators of the decade’s greatest computer game, in what has been described by one man as ‘a slightly interesting event – I’ll probably have a look’.

Ricky will appear as himself, performing three minutes of new material, as well as some jokes from his recent Fame tour, in the Liberty City Comedy Club.

Make no mistake about it, that’s a tough crowd – one poorly-timed dance routine and Ricky could soon find himself on the receiving end of the old ‘rocket up the arse’ heckle.

And once they reveal the ‘get all weapons’ cheat, well, it’s gonna be some kind of therapy-heaven for all those lost-souls that didn’t quite get The Office.

You know who you are – the ones of you who say Two Pints Of Lager is a brilliant sitcom (they really exist, you know) and who ask questions like ‘who’s better; Sasha Baron-Cohen or Avid Merrion?’

To these imbeciles we say: why not watch this instead? It’s far more up your street.

Ricky said:

“It’s a first – which always interests me. It’s seriously a big deal, though. Games have outsold Hollywood for the past few years, so it’s nice to be a small part of that. It was shot in New York, and I got to wear a tight lycra suit as part of the digital process. That wasn’t so good.”

Gervais also told Shortlist magazine that he appears elsewhere in the game too, but refused to say where.

The refreshing human being is currently directing his first film, about a world where there is no human gene for lying, as well as keeping us up to date with his attempts to get a certain fucking orange-headed friend out of podcast retirement.

Read it here.

Read More – Grand Theft Auto IV Stars Ricky Gervais – Telegraph