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" In the pullulating world of video games \u2014 they outsold DVDs for the first time last year \u2014 most of us would rather spend a half-hour convincing ourselves Kurt Warner can outgun the Steelers defense in Madden than a night convincing a half-dozen engineering students to follow formation on the otherworldly battlefields of Halo. Mainstream online gaming has heretofore forced geeks into further pariahdom, because Bluetooth headsets and downtime should never be combined \u2014 let alone for the sake of alien warfare. But as Christopher Nolan&amp;#039;s new Batman films proved in legitimizing the superhero movie and saving the Hollywood box office, sometimes it takes a story \u2014 not just a franchise \u2014 to take geekdom mainstream. Now Rockstar Games, having already taken a sawed-off shotgun to single-title sales records with last year&amp;#039;s Grand Theft Auto IV, has figured out how to save downloadable gaming content: with an epilogue. Truth be told, The Lost and Damned (available for Xbox Live on February 17) is more of a prequel-turned-choose-your-own-adventure \u2014 a $20 &amp;quot;episode&amp;quot; picking up an intersecting subplot before GTA IV begins and spinning it into some ten or twenty hours of Easy Rider-cum-Warriors bedlam. And it all takes place within the expanded architecture of the original game \u2014 the unexplored New Jersey to GTA IV&amp;#039;s New York-esque Liberty City (a backdrop so life-like I even spotted the storage place on my corner in the boondocks of Brooklyn). Beyond the violence, which is almost laughable given the grown-up and heady games available, this add-on spends a good deal of time fleshing out the moral battle over the New Jersey drug trade between two competing gangsters. It&amp;#039;s not quite Tony Soprano and Phil Leotardo, but the intricacy of scenes shot from GTA IV&amp;#039;s alternate angles and of six fully developed characters for what&amp;#039;s supposedly the equivalent of a DVD extra \u2014 not to mention the mini-games for arm wrestling, bowling, standup comedy, and lots of bourbon \u2014 hints at the future of gaming on demand. Just don&amp;#039;t wear that Bluetooth headset. RELATED STORIES: REVIEW: Grand Theft Auto IV and the Never-Ending Story STEPHEN MARCHE: GTA IV and American Blood Lust PROFILE: The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5595/gta-4-download-013009/>