well its about 15 days and counting till this monster of a game rewrites video game history. Who's ready?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R83ACc_EACk&feature=user 
You'll rarely hear a gamer say that a game doesn't need multiplayer. It's the wave of the future, the icing on the cake of countless shooters and racers...
But when it comes to Rockstar's feature-rich Grand Theft Auto IV -- a game so completely packed with single-player content, we're surprised they managed to flatten it out and squeeze it onto a disc -- it's reasonably safe to say that yeah, it doesn't really
need multiplayer. Only one of the previous GTA games truly let players compete on the mean streets together, yet still the franchise has sold a mind-numbing 65 million units. So why bother adding multiplayer to a game that quite clearly doesn't need it to compete?
Because it's awesome.
Emulating the creative problem-solving that makes playing around in the open-world solo game so addictive, GTA IV's multiplayer transforms familiar gameplay styles into brand new experiences by taking full advantage of the huge sandbox world that is Liberty City. It will undoubtedly change the way you think about GTA...
...playing through four multiplayer modes: Team Deathmatch, GTA Race, Cops 'n' Crooks and Hangman's NOOSE, each of which offers a unique way to blaze through Liberty City.
Using their ever-handy in-game cell phone, players can hop into multiplayer games without backing out of the single-player campaign and wading through countless menus. The only additional step is to create a multiplayer character, tweaking a handful of attributes - including gender, ladies - to lend some personality to your online avatar. Regardless of which mode you choose, the goal is the same: acquire cash by performing well, which over time will boost your overall GTA IV online ranking (it currently maxes out at level 10).
Supporting up to 16 players,
Team Deathmatch is the most straightforward of the lot, pitting two teams of troublemakers against one another in a classic fragfest. The host can choose from one of several Liberty City locations as the primary map, but in the spirit of the franchise, there are no invisible boundaries hemming you in. As such, the strategies are as open-ended as the game itself. So while you might start out gunning at each other on a smallish island, you can, say, swim across to the mainland, snag a helicopter and fly right back to deliver some aerial vengeance without technically breaking any rules.
That's because there sort of aren't any, a fact made evident in
GTA Race. At first blush it seems like a typical street racer: the host picks the car class, up to 16 players choose their favorite models, and off they go zooming about Liberty City in a lap-based checkpoint rally. Or at least that's how things begin, because once players realize they�??re not stuck in their vehicles, the racing takes a turn for the deliciously chaotic. Mired in last place? Then let your gold medal dreams die and embrace the role of spoiler by, for instance, littering a chokepoint with a bunch of trucks to create an impromptu vehicular logjam. Provided the host has allowed weapons (and what good host wouldn't?), you can use a rocket launcher to leisurely pick off the chumps trying to sort through your barricade. It's a rude but effective way to get back into the thick of things, though if the race itself just doesn't seem winnable at all, you can easily spend the remainder of the rally as a mad bomber.
If busting bad guys is more your speed, there's
Cops 'n' Crooks. It's a bit like Team Deathmatch, but here one side plays as the cops tasked to track down and wipe out the crooks, who in turn try to reach a far-off extraction point. Again, the strategies are limitless. Do the crooks all pile into one car and hope whoever's driving can handle the pressure, or do you split up and keep the cops guessing? We tried both, and frankly, few things are cooler than packing four uzi-toting criminals into an SUV, shooting out the windows and screaming through Liberty City as a four-armed, bullet-spraying thug tank.
On the other side of the law, the cops have to quickly prioritize which crooks to go after and which to track down later. Considering it takes place in the same wide open Liberty City as you�??ll find in other modes, that can be a tall order, but handy features such as the ability to set waypoints on the fly for the whole team to follow make working together more manageable.
Fans of such cooperative hi-jinks, rejoice: GTA IV will also ship with co-op modes for up to four players, essentially story-driven missions separate from what you'll find in the solo game. We played through
Hangman's NOOSE, in which we were tasked to escort a high-ranking crime boss from an airport to an extraction point. What they didn't mention, however, was the seemingly endless supply of SWAT units swarming the scene.
The most logical solution was to steal an armored car and hightail it out of there, which is precisely what we did on our first try. As an added twist, though, all players must survive and reach the extraction zone to win, so when one unnamed member of our team (*meekly raises hand*) accidentally flipped the car, it sort of put a damper on the plan. Subsequent play-throughs lived up to the game's "go anywhere, try anything" premise as we commandeered cop cars, jacked helicopters and even puttered down the highway in a golf cart in an effort to complete the objective.
There's no doubt about it - GTA IV's free-form multiplayer packs a wallop, and we've barely scratched the surface. Rockstar's yet to release a final multiplayer mode count (the rumor mill has churned out numbers ranging from 12 to 20), but with only three weeks left until the game ships, expect a few more surprises in the extremely near future.