GTA 'Hood Launches

Face it: you can't get enough GTA IV. You've been pouring over screens, watching videos, foaming at the mouth over reviews, and today, you'll actually be able to play it. Life is sweet, and IGN wants to make it that much sweeter.

We're launching Grand Theft Auto 'Hood, a community-driven website that will provide you with all the secrets, missions and real-life rewards for your new favorite game.

A site unto itself but similar to our Super Smash Bros. World, GTA 'Hood thrives on your input and uses it to create an interactive map, mission lists, mission rankings, a Wiki, screens, videos and more. Anyone can check the site out, and anyone with an IGN username can click over and add locations to the map, let the world know what he or she thinks of a mission, and even level-up.

That's right; level-up. Every contribution you make to the site earns you points and helps you rise from the low-level Associate to a GTA Boss.

However, the coolest and most useful feature for those of you tearing the plastic off your copy today will be the Google Map of Liberty City. At first glance, the map looks like the foldout you get with GTA IV, but beyond being able to zoom in and out, you can modify the feature to show a ton of icons from twelve Legend categories such as Points of Interest, Shopping, Secrets and more. This means that you can filter that basic map to only show you pigeons and hidden packages, or body armor and fire stations, or whatever you want.

Better yet, when you find something spectacular, you can click "Add Marker" and share it with the world. The discovery will be available for everyone to see -- after it's approved -- and it'll be logged in your profile so everyone who visits the site will know who the first person was to find the ghost of CJ under the Liberty City Bridge.

Once you complete a mission, you can click over to the 'Hood and add the feat. If the Niko task is already on the record, you can rank the escapade's Difficulty, Fun Factor, Time it Took and Action Ranking. Rather than be a boring one to five scale, the categories have personalized ratings -- the action goes from Bambi to Kill Bill. The site will then be able to rank the missions so everyone can see where people are struggling and enjoying themselves.

If the Grand Theft Auto phenomena is new to you, the 'Hood's Wiki will bring you up to speed on the series as far as story, screen, videos, cheats and more. You'll even get points for your profile if you add to the documents.

Basically, this thing is the Holy Land for everything GTA related. It's going to pull pertinent stories so you don't have to worry about missing something from the standard IGN pages, we're going to be adding the ability to rate vehicles, and the amount of input you're going to have is limitless. If you dig this series, get over to our site.

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