Do you shop at Whole Foods? Live in gentrified Brooklyn? Read the Sunday Times with no seething sense of rage? Then Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City isn't for you. But fear not, Conan O'Brien and his pals at Late Night have developed a kinder gentler version. Sample clip after the jump.

Grand Theft Auto IV is not so much the apotheosis of modern console entertainment as the first post-modern video game. While it provides the usual bloody entertainment, the latest installment of Rockstar's hit title is also a fully-imagined alternate world-complete with a witty satire of 21st century media. Serbian hardman Niko Bellic, the game's central character, can browse a self-mocking version of photo sharing site Flickr ("perfect for hopeless losers who like to spend days categorizing, alphabetizing and organizing their online galleries") and scour the missed connections on Liberty City's craplist.net ("sorry for checking out your 13-year-old daughter"). Most absurd of all are the mock cable shows-though they contend with their real-world equivalents. The newscasters of Weasel News are even more rabid than Bill O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox News. If you have a friend with a Playstation, get them to show you I'm Rich, a celebrity show which in this episode profiles a cocaine heiress called Chloe Parker and as absurd as Paris Hilton. A campy British narrator-resembling that of the Daily Show's John Oliver-provides the voiceover.

In the harbor of Grand Theft Auto's Liberty City, there's a statue. It differs from the Statue of Liberty in New York in two respects: the landmark's name is the Statue of Happiness; and it contains at its heart... a beating heart, chained to the exterior walls. The makers of Rockstar's hit game are twisted-and brilliant. (More pictures at Games Radar.)

Restaurants and bars in Liberty City are like other landmarks based on places in New York, the real-world city on which the universe of the latest Grand Theft Auto game is based. The names, locations and designs are all slightly off, like a riddle made for trivia-night nerds. Ed Levine has risen to the challenge. Liberty City's rowdy Steinway (here's the video) is pretty clearly based on Astoria's Bohemian Beer Garden. But Levine, a food blogger, has identified possible models for half a dozen virtual eateries and drinking holes-even this bland and Starbucks-like coffee shop which he places in a gamer's version of Midtown's Rockefeller Center. [Serious Eats via Kottke]

I wish Stomp disappeared a few years ago so we could be ironically nostalgic about it by now, like the Spice Girls, Ninja Turtles, and Taft. But instead it's still around so everyone knows it kinda sucks but everyone also likes it as a guilty pleasure (right guys? right?). Because then I could just link to the Stomp-like animation "Play" by Cookie Dough Records. But because I need to cut that with some irony, here's Grand Theft Auto IV's version of Stomp, "Banging Trash Can Lids For An Hour." The animated ad is embedded below.

If you're taking the day off to explore Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto's revamped version of New York, keep us in mind. We're looking for Gawker-worthy gameplay from the videogame—Niko beating up an annoying hipster would work for instance, or a clip from I'm Rich, the celebrity gossip show-in-show. Send to tips@gawker.com.

When Rockstar Games in 2005 shipped an installment of its Grand Theft Auto videogame series with an embedded, but hidden, sex scene, an international controversy ensued, with Wal Mart, Target and other retailers pulling the game from shelves and the nation of Australia outright banning it. Since then there have been several hooker scandals, including those involving Congressmen David Vitter and Duke Cunningham and of course former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Two seasons of the stripper-suffused series Sopranos came and went on HBO. The Times decided we were fast becoming a nation of whores. And now the new GTA is out, and the sex scenes, mostly involving prostitutes and strippers, go graphically and erotically far beyond the 2005 game, and aren't even hidden. (Video after the jump.)

"A... thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun. It... sets a new standard for what is possible in interactive arts... I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City's bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City is right outside." [Times]

This fictional ad for the "Steinway Beer Garden" in "Dukes" is maybe supposed to be the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden in Astoria. Oh, and it's from the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto IV. Warm Beer and Misogyny! What New York—and video games—are all about.

A gamer with an early copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, the videogame set in a hyper-realistic version of New York City, has already tried out the one new feature we were most intrigued by. Niko Bellic, the hot Serbian immigrant at the center of Rockstar's videogame, can now stumble around intoxicated, and make drunken booty calls. View a clip by clicking the thumb; the longer gameplay is at Gametrailers.com. And here, if you missed them, are screenshots of Liberty City, the alternate New York City in which the fifth borough is not Staten Island but an industrial wasteland loosely based on New Jersey.

The Liberty City of Rockstar's crime-celebrating Playstation game, Grand Theft Auto, was always based on New York. In the videogame's fourth outing next week, the city is much more fully realized-but intriguingly off-kilter. For example, Liberty City (like the metropolis upon which it is modelled) has five boroughs. Broker is the equivalent of Brooklyn, Queens is Dukes, the Bronx is Bohan and Manhattan is Algonquin. And the fifth? Staten Island was too dull, so the makers of Grand Theft Auto have annexed New Jersey, renamed Alderney. (Both Jersey and Alderney are islands in the English Channel.) As you can see from these screenshots from the game below, Liberty City is recognizable, but altered, disturbingly. Of course, the screenshots we want are from the live gameplay. The central character of Grand Theft Auto, a tough immigrant called Niko Bellic, has in this latest version of the game the ability to perform new actions, such as calling women for dates. He can also become intoxicated, causing him "to stumble and the camera to blur and bounce about". Any GTA fans: please send video of a drunk Niko on the equivalent of the Lower East Side. After the jump, spot the differences between the real New York, and Grand Theft Auto's vision of the city.

Oh the steamy summer of 2005, otherwise remembered as the "Hot Coffee" scandal. Take-Two Interactive ushered in a new wave of videogame scrutiny after shipping Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas with a sexual intercourse minigame hidden in the code. (Players had to actively hack the game to get to it.) Grandmother Florence Cohen filed a class-action suit. Take-Two (Rockstar's parent company) has finally quit court and is offering anyone offended by the minigame is offering an exchange: the old, hacked version of San Andreas for a new, sex-free, copy and $35. Because virtual sexual encounters in a M-rated game (over 17) are the only thing about Grand Theft Auto which could potentially damage a 14-year-old.