Steve Dottoli has been sentenced to two years' probation and will have to serve six months on home confinement and pay a $2,500 fine.

Dottoli, who worked at a compact-disc processing plant in Pitman, was stupid enough to steal a copy of GTA: San Andreas (prior to it's release) and email images of the manual and packaging to Neil, who was then stupid enough to post them on a GTA fansite he was working with at the time.

Source: Joystiq (Thanks to Jordan for the heads up)

Rockstar have announced the release of a special (Hot Coffee free) edition of GTA: San Andreas (PS2) featuring The Introduction DVD and Rockstar's debut documentary Sunday Driver.

In addition, Xbox owners will be able to buy a Grand Theft Auto "Trilogy Package", a package containing all 3 titles from the GTA3 trilogy: Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Both items will be in stores on October 18th. View the related Take-2 press statement here.

Source: Next Generation

Resident modding and programming super-genius Steve M got a hold of the writer at The Inquirer who started the below, would-be controversy. When asked to point out sources to back up the story, the response was as follows:

So, judging by the complete lack of any factual corroborating, one can only assume The Inquirer saw the pic from Hot Coffee or the cynical remark at the bottom, and jumped the gun when drawing a conclusion before press time. 'Tis an honest (if not utterly silly) mistake, but, hey, it's the intarweb, what else is new? ;)

Thanks to Steve for getting to the bottom of this. And thanks to Aaron from The Inquirer for sorta clearning this up. It's almost too bad really, I was kind of hoping for some nice fake screens to laugh at...

It's all lies, ladies and gentlemen. We asked Rockstar about the situation and here is their response:

And as for this:

This, apparently, is the image they claimed to be GTA4:

This image has been on intraweb fansites for at least a few months now, and it's quite obviously fake...

...and quite fucking obviously lacking sex scenes.

I present to you: Spurtster (also known as Hot Ride) by Rollies77.

Download it here.

Related Link: GTAForums Topic

Some months ago (yes, it's been months) I posted an email that was sent to Patrick by a certain indy game developer named Joe Laurino. Considering the amount of time that has passed between then and now, I'd have thought that the amount of hatemail he's been getting would have died down - however, that seems to not be the case. For example:

Touching.

Anywho, Joe Laurino has gotten the message - he apologized for his actions back in the middle of August, and has once again asked me to pass on his request that the emails stop pounding in.

To everyone who has shown their support for Patrick and his innocence in the whole Hot Coffee deal, I offer my deepest gratitude. You guys really proved that when a treasured member of the GTA community gets hit, the entire community stands strong to defend them. Wewt-Wewt and all that good stuff.

Now, I'm mainly neutral in this matter (albeit a bit biased), so I'm not ordering/demanding that anyone do anything. It's your choice. I'm just passing on the request from an individual who has been feeling the burn for the past two months.

Take2's always-interesting 3rd quarter meeting was today, which could only mean one thing: Vauge info about an upcoming GTA title. Since they give the bare minimum ammount of details needed to keep their stockholders happy, there's really not much to report. So, I'll just cut to the chase and paste in bits from the press release which pertain to R* and let you draw your own conclusions...

Read the rest of it right here.