Rockstar has just issued the final character trailer for the second Episode From Liberty City. It introduces Luis Lopez, the playable character and personal bodyguard to Gay Tony himself.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is out today as a download via Xbox Live or on disc in the Episodes From Liberty City bundle with The Lost And Damned.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony arrives this week as the final planned release of the GTA IV saga that began in the spring of 2008. It follows the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC GTA IV and the 360-only GTA IV: The Lost and Damned, two releases that only avid franchise gamers would recognise as restrained. The trailers and talk issued by Rockstar Games prior to the release of Gay Tony implied that this third installment, this new adventure starring bodyguard Luis Lopez committing crimes for Liberty City’s most warped and wealthy citizens, would return GTA to the dam-detonating, beach-partying gameplay eccentricities of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

That wildness appears during some glorious moment but never quite takes over Gay Tony, which proves to be closer in tone and style to GTA IV than San Andreas. The new episode introduces some strong new ideas to the series, demonstrates Rockstar’s medium-leading sophistication in character creation and makes a case for no GTA ever having a single lead character again.

Loved
I Know These People: I don’t think I know any cold-blooded killers or pill-popping gay nightclub owners who have crossed the mob, but I know suave players who get all the girls and I know people who are crushed with stress about money. I don’t know anyone who has encased their phone in gold nor done the same for their Uzi. But that quality of just not knowing when to stop buying and flashing fancy things is a familiar and sometimes hilarious human quality. Rockstar’s characters in Gay Tony—like so many of their GTA heroes, villains and passers-by—feel fascinatingly unreal both because they are colourful and because they stand out from most video game characters by exhibiting recognisable human traits. The Gay Tony cast is distinct and fun to be around. I cared what happened to these folks.

I Know This Place: GTA IV and its expansions may play differently in your world, but for me they bring a city I know well to virtual life with sometimes shocking specificity. In Gay Tony I was assigned in just one mission to parachute onto a building — one that was a replica of a skyscraper I used to work in. In another mission I was brought to a nearly perfect recreation of Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers driving range and made to stand in almost the same spot where I witnessed Tiger Woods drive trick shots, except that in Gay Tony, I was doing the golfing and the goal was more brutal than promoting an EA golf game.

Even if you’re not someone who would recognise the hundreds of New York City landmarks recreated in Liberty City—not just the signature skyscrapers but the slopes of certain streets and style of certain signs—you will hopefully feel the ways Rockstar uses Gay Tony to once again exploit the emotion of real geography. A leap from the equivalent of the Empire State Building—or a nervous wait to see whether the car that escaped your helicopter by driving into a tunnel under the Hudson River emerges on the other side in New Jersey—still has the texture and tension of something that feels realer than what so many other games offer, without feeling any less fun.

In The Sky: Of the two most commendable gameplay enhancements that Gay Tony offers to the GTA IV structure, the affairs in the air are the more likely crowd-pleaser. Luis can buy single-use parachutes to jump off any building or access 15 pre-determined locations that enter him into challenges to parachute from buildings, helicopters or even off a motorcycle that is driven off a skyscraper roof. In multiplayer, players can release smoke, the better to show their trails and attract gunfire from their so-called friends (A parachutist can’t fire back).

Gay Tony also puts the player in control of more and deadlier helicopters than what the series has had before, allowing for the mayhem some players found missing from parts of the earlier GTA IV releases. Of course, the peanut butter and chocolate here is leaping from a chopper with a parachute, landing wherever you want.

In The Club: Not since Shenmue asked players to enjoy driving a forklift has it been so hard to believe a video game’s implication that menial labour would be fun, but Rockstar somehow figured out how to make nightclub management a joy. You can try this task almost any night at Tony Prince’s straight club, the Maisonette 9, and indulge in what feels like a laboratory experiment of GTA style and gameplay. You’ve got the soft-scripted gameplay of having to walk from lookout-point to lookout-point in the cramped club searching for trouble and then tossing said trouble out the front door. You’ve got the edginess of occasional sexual interludes while you go about this task.

And, best of all, you’ve got the winning twist: The seemingly random call from a co-worker that assigns you an emergency tougher management task that might have you racing to Tony’s gay nightclub to rescue a rapper from being outed by the paparazzi or to the Bronx (aka Bohan) to get a sandwich for the do-nothing starlet whose assistant calls you for an update every minute. The collision of pop culture, crazy people and intermittently bawdy and violent content is GTA in a capsule — or in this case, in a club.

The Right Zaniness: The hyped return of a usable military tank may have thrilled the GTA fans looking for San Andreas wildness, but Gay Tony’s armed vehicle feels like an obligatory throwback rather than a joyous reintroduction. The choppers are more fun to use. But even better than seeing Rockstar mine from their past — and sometimes they do it splendidly as is the case with the group dance-numbers in the clubs that briefly turn Gay Tony into a Bollywood flick — are the new attempts at colourful chaos. I welcome the missions that riff about Twitter or that threaten the life of—gul— a blogger.

Johnny And Niko: Few moments in The Ballad of Gay Tony are as powerful as the appearances of Niko Bellic, this man who, GTA IV players know well, has a history, a life that sawed deeply through the streets of Liberty City. To see Niko just standing in a scene—on the side of a Gay Tony enemy—hints at the power of a GTA game that encompasses multiple playable lives. The Lost and Damned’s Johnny Klebitz makes his own return as do other side-characters from the other games. In many cases, these appearances help flesh out the character of the characters or offer a new vantage from which to view a familiar event, rewarding returning consumers. But it is the appearance of those who I once played as that had the strongest impact on me and made me yearn for a GTA city in which I could be a part of more criss-crossed lives.

One Magic Moment: The randomness of the series’ gameplay system has provided any of us GTA gamers a moment that felt magically unique, when a traffic pattern converged or an exploding car ricocheted in just this one way that created an unforgettable spectacle. Here is my magic moment in Gay Tony, one of my favourite random GTA experiences ever: A mission that I won’t spoil left me accused of a murder I did not commit. Chased by a crowd of civilians, I stole a car and sped off, police in pursuit. The radio was tuned to the game’s new Self-Actualization station a thematically peculiar offering of relaxing new-age songs. As I peeled away and sirens blared behind me, the zen chill-out sounds of that station suddenly seemed perfect as I tasted something I’d never experienced in a GTA before: Innocence amid the fury and chase of wrongful accusation. I had to relax. Everything was going to be all right and those sirens, if I just gained enough speed on the highway, would fade away.

Double Delivery: You’ve been reading a review mostly of $US20 The Ballad Of Gay Tony, which you can download to an Xbox 360 and play in conjunction with the base disc. But for just twice the price you could play this game off of the Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City disc, get the equally-meaty and interesting Lost and Damned GTA episode and not even need the full game. Given how much we also liked that other episode, that’s an unusually helpful way to experience a load of single-player bonus content that would normally have required the purchase of the base game. (Note that, however you play, you access GTA IV and either of the episodes separately from a menu screen — you can’t hop from one to the other while inhabiting the digital city.)

Hated
The Unchipped City: Much still feels progressive about Grand Theft Auto, but the immutability of its metropolis does not. In an era in which less-polished open-world games such as Prototype or Mercenaries 2 can react to player mayhem by letting a building hit with a rocket be destroyed and stay that way, it is jarring to see not one brick of Liberty City ever be shaken from its foundation. Even mid-mission environmental changes, such as the destruction of a huge crane, appear to be undone after a mission ends. Rockstar inadvertently winds up effectively conveying the powerlessness we citizens of massive cities might feel to leave a mark on our hometowns, and the technical and gameplay systems that could support any level of destructibility might not mesh with the values of detail and character the developers employ. But just as Gran Turismo’s cars finally took a dent, it’s tempting to desire that Rockstar’s cities best budge someday.

Mum: Well, I actually liked Luis’ mum. And his neighbourhood friends were interesting too, but the game’s early promise to tug Luis between the high-roller life of rich people crimes and poor people struggles too quickly evaporated when the mum missions abruptly ended.

Minor Multiplayer: GTA IV multiplayer is changed in small, good ways for The Ballad of Gay Tony, adding kill-streak benefits of extra money won in deathmatches and fuelling car races with frighteningly fast Nitrous boosts. The multiplayer, overall, however, still feels skippable. Some may value its openness as a call-back to a time of lest scripted Grand Theft Autos, but it’s hard to imagine the simple, do-it-yourself mayhem of GTA as it is currently presented in multiplayer having the tug on gamers’ playing time that the deep single-player content exerts, to say nothing of competing multiplayer experiences on Xbox Live.

I have left so much out, thanks to Rockstar’s generosity of content and my desire to leave some good things unspoiled. There are gameplay surprises and lengthy side-activities that I have left unspoiled. And somehow I resisted raving about Princess Robot Bubblegum, nor the new radio stations. Plus, in a console-GTA-first, missions can be re-played on-demand so that players can strive for time, score and side-activity goals. Value-shoppers would find plenty to like in Gay Tony. More importantly, so would fans of well-made games.

Gay Tony is not quite as unhinged an escapade as its superb trailers may have led players to believe, but it is an entertaining and colourful adventure with some great explosive moments and as strong a spine of gameplay and side activities as Rockstar has produced this generation. The entire GTA IV experience might be too much and a shade too similar to take in over a single marathon session, but paced out over its multiple releases, it’s gone very well and ends strong.

(Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony was developed by Rockstar Games and published by Take Two Interactive for the Xbox 360 on October 29. Retails for 1600 Microsoft Points over Xbox Live ($US20/$AU26.40, a copy of GTA IV required) or for $US40/$AU52.80 as one half of the Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City disc (also includes Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, GTA IV not required). A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played all main story missions and several side missions. Completed 62.29 per cent of the game over the course of more than 12 hours. Died 32 times)

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That’s how the British Board of Film Classification describes the potentially objectionable content in next week’s downloadable episode for the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV. The potentially spoiler-filled rundown, as spotted by Eurogamer, is full of things that just might give you the vapours, the likes of which you’ve never seen in your computer games, I mean, my goodness.

The BBFC’s saucy description of the naughtiness of Gay Tony reads notes sex scenes that are “quite strong, but always masked and the characters concerned are invariably fully clothed” meaning no nudity.

However, “In cut scenes the Luis Lopez character is seen to be on the receiving end of oral sex (slumped on a chair with a woman’s head buried in his lap). The same character engages in sexual intercourse on at least two different occasions. For example he stands between a woman’s raised legs and thrusts into her and he also bends a woman over a desk and thrusts into her from the rear.” How ribald!

Of course, there’s mention of the excessive violence and the flaccid penises that you may also take offence to, but that’s all *yawn* pretty much expected at this point. But that thrusting! It sounds so delicious.

EPISODES FROM LIBERTY CITY – GRAND THEFT AUTO THE LOST AND DAMNED – GRAND THEFT AUTO THE BALLAD OF GAY TONY [BBFC]

Rockstar Games goes far enough to call the additions a “complete overhaul” to GTA IV’s multiplayer modes. With new “tighter” deathmatch maps, kill streaks and kill assists, it may be justified in making those claims. We’ll know for sure if Grand Theft Auto IV’s multiplayer suite is worth revisiting on October 29 (but watch for our review to hit just before that).

For now, enjoy the fantasy of parachute enabled multiplayer mayhem.

The “coming winter 2009″ release date at the end of this Max Payne 3 teaser video—too slick to not be official, we think—may not be accurate, but the rest of this bullet-filled clip is right on point.

That time code running in the bottom left leads us to believe that this brief teaser wasn’t quite ready for prime time—and Rockstar Games officially has no comment on the authenticity of the thing—but it certainly looks like the real deal. Sharp as a tack, no matter how you may feel about the newer, balder, paunchier Max.

Max Payne 3 is still scheduled to hit the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sometime in the first half of 2010 as far as we know.

A total of 250 new Gamerscore points can be yours upon the release of Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City or the downloadable episode, which follows the adventures of Luis Lopez, the man employed by the eponymous Gay Tony. If that’s all you care to know about the expansion, tread carefully. The full list of Achievements is potentially spoiler-filled.

Gone Down – 5
Complete all base jumps.

Diamonds Forever – 5
Complete the Trinity.

Four Play – 10
Hit a flag with a golf ball four times.

Bear Fight – 15
Win the L.C. Cage Fighters championship.

Catch the Bus – 15
Dance perfectly in both Tony’s nightclubs.

Snow Queen – 20
Complete 25 drug wars.

Adrenaline Junkie – 25
Freefall for the longest possible time.

Maestro – 30
Finish the Ballad.

Past the Velvet Rope – 45
Score 80% or above in all missions.

Gold Star – 80
Score 100% in all missions.

Those who have played Grand Theft Auto over the years know that 2008’s adventure of Niko Bellic was, relatively speaking, one of the calmer GTAs. Ballistic bank heists and motorcycle chases in subway tunnels notwithstanding, Niko didn’t parachute from skyscrapers or drive military vehicles down Broadway. That, with style, is where the next GTA IV episode comes in.

I played and watched a few missions from Rockstar Games’ next and final extension of Grand Theft Auto IV at the company’s New York City headquarters yesterday. The new episode, which Rockstar says will be similar in size to the last one, offers a few notable game design tweaks but will most likely stand out to series fans as a modern way to reintroduce some of the eccentricities not seen in a console GTA since the PlayStation 2-era Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Bodyguard Luis Lopez, star of the Ballad of Gay Tony, is committed in this episode to help his friend and employer, the beleaguered nightclub owner, Tony Prince, resist the encroachment of some crooked gangsters. That’s the set-up for a wild ride.

Rockstar is pitching this episode as an experience on the other side of Liberty City’s velvet rope, an indulgence in the excesses of the super-rich and likely not-so-nice. So it was no surprise to hear that there’s a champagne mini-game in Gay Tony, nor to witness a mission that involved stealing an attack helicopter from the back of a yacht before using said chopper’s rockets to blow up some boats—nor to try a mission myself that had Luis walking along the top of a moving, elevated subway, using a shotgun with explosive shells to eliminate swarming police helicopters. That last mission’s motivation? We’re doing it to steal a subway car for a rich guy who wants to build a re-creation of Liberty City in the Middle East.

San Andreas would let you eat enough burgers to make its hero slovenly. It would hide a big purple sex toy for you to find and use to bludgeon people. There isn’t any sign that Gay Tony is taking things quite that far. Instead, the new episode defines its colourfulness within the lines of Liberty City’s demented wealthy. I witnessed one cut-scene that had Luis considering a job for a man with so much money that he has a super-hero costume, a TV running the end-credits of GTA IV and a big bird sculpture in his penthouse apartment…a man who has people upstairs making noises Luis mistakes for the filming of a pornographic movie…a man who delivers a life lesson that culminates with the instruction that an individual must always do what money dictates even if that dictation involves the loss of one’s own legs.

For this eccentric cast Luis might machine-gun his way through the upper floors of the MeTV building, where, instead of my old MTV offices from my last job, we find on one high-rise floor the offices for the crooked owners of Liberty City’s hockey team. Extra credit goes to the gamers who can shoot one of these no-good franchise owners in such a way that he crashes through a window and down many stories to the Liberty City version of the patio outside my old company’s cafeteria. And more extra credit to the gamer who can follow that with a parachute jump out of the skyscraper and onto the back of a flatbed truck.

Rockstar’s previous episodic expansion of GTA IV, The Lost and Damned, expanded the gameplay options of the base game by allowing and encouraging players to ride through the city and fight with a gang of other characters providing back-up. The twist in this episode is that Luis’ missions will include optional goals—ideal completion times, ideal damage taken, bonus objectives like shooting that guy out of the window or landing on that truck. A mission can be completed without them, but Rockstar is enabling and encouraging gamers to re-launch the missions after having completed them, as players could in the DS’ Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, and to strive for those goals. Rockstar reps couldn’t tell me what the rewards for perfect completion might be.

I used to work with a guy who was almost depressed about the lack of access to a military tank in Grand Theft Auto IV. He liked the new game but missed the older games’ wildness. It’s for people like him that Rockstar is now promising in Gay Tony access to an armoured personnel carrier with a 50-calibre gun, more advanced and devastating helicopters and even a more potent arsenal of firearms, which will be made available to Luis early in the episode. But I think the addition that will most excite my former co-worker is Luis Lopez’ parachute. Find a high spot in Liberty City, equip the parachute and jump. Players can experiment with it freely, though be warned that it can’t be used infinitely. You’ll need to replenish your parachute supply. Gay Tony will also provide access to 15 parachute-jumping challenges, five of which involve trying to bullseye a target after leaping off a building, five of which involve leaping from helicopters and five of which involve leaping from motorcycles.

Rockstar estimates that this new episode will be similar in size to the previous one, The Lost And Damned, an episode that took me 12 hours to reach its narrative conclusion. The new game won’t have any new multiplayer modes but will support existing ones. The radio stations will be beefed up once again, with more music, new DJs and new talk. There will be new in-game TV programming. Some missions will intersect with the previous GTA IV releases, allowing gamers to again encounter Niko Bellic and Lost and Damned protagonist Johnny Klebitz. Some side missions will be randomly generated, enabling Luis to do tasks for people who hang out in Tony’s clubs. The story missions will have a more Algonquin/Manhattan focus than those of Lost and Damned.

Rockstar always keeps some secrets out of its GTA previews. That headline-grabbing full-frontal nudity in The Lost and Damned was not featured in any preview I got of that episode. Who knows what other eccentricities will be in this one. But what I’ve seen so far of what Rockstar says is this last-planned GTA IV episode is wild enough to wrap the saga of Grand Theft Auto in entertaining and eccentric fashion.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony will be available on October 29 both as a $26.40 download through Xbox Live or on a $69.95 Xbox 360 standalone disc called Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City that also included The Lost and Damned and does not require ownership of GTA IV. As with the previous expansion to GTA IV, Rockstar has only announced this new episode for the Xbox 360 and gave no word that it is ever coming to the PlayStation 3.

Chinatown Wars is the new version of Rockstar’s 2009 return to top-down Grand Theft Auto gaming, rebuilt for Sony’s handheld. The DS version was the best-reviewed game on Nintendo’s portable (Read our GTA: Chinatown Wars DS review to see why).

Rockstar Games presented the PSP game to me as a more ergonomically friendly version of Chinatown Wars. I had played through the DS game happily and comfortably, with my thumbs on the d-pad and buttons and stylus cradled in my left hand, ready to be used at a moment’s notice. But some people literally couldn’t handle it. They’d have benefited from a third hand or the dexterity to wield their DS stylus with their teeth.

Chinatown Wars PSP, the Rockstar rep showing me the game told me, was engineered to allow players to keep their hands in constant contact with the PSP. No reaching for another control instrument for this game.

I expected that added comfort to come at a cost. I believed that the DS’ touchscreen gameplay, which I had found more charming than gimmicky, would not make a successful transition to the PSP.

The PSP has no touch screen, yet Chinatown Wars DS had included a lot of smartly-made touch-screen snippets that zoomed in during typical chaotic GTA action to force momentary concentration on a more focused goal: Flicking change into a toll booth; shocking a heart to keep it alive; smashing the window of a sinking car; rummaging through trash to find a gun.

The folks at Rockstar told me this content was adjusted for the PSP version, not cut. For proof, I asked if I could hotwire one of the game’s cars. I moved GTA CW protagonist Huang Lee toward a car and had hm break into it. If this had been the DS game, the lower screen would have switched to a close-up view of the dashboard and a touchscreen challenge would have begun to twist wires or punch in a code to deactivate the alarm system. On the PSP, a small comic-book-panel inset box emerged on the left side of the system’s screen, right next to where my thumb was on the analogue stick. Rotating arrows showed me which way to turn the stick to unscrew a panel on the dashboard and how to twist two wires together to get the car going. The interface was smooth. My apprehension about converting touch-based challenges to stick-based challenges diminished greatly.

I drove through Liberty City to see the sights. The metropolis is rendered as it was on the DS, still top-down, still with extraordinary detail and vertical depth, just in widescreen with better textures, sharper resolution and improved lighting.

The game’s map and missions haven’t been changed, the Rockstar rep said. But I found that the game will play a little differently. Interface tweaks enable the player to throw grenades while still maintaining control of their car. The presence of the mini-map on the same screen as the one your character or car is on is also a game-changer. I found Chinatown Wars DS hard to play without the option turned on to render GPS routes as coloured lines on the city’s roadways. Without it, I could barely tolerate having to glance away from the top DS screen where the action usually was in order to look at the lower screen to view the map. With the PSP’s mini-map on the same screen as the action, that aggravation is remedied — though I like the GPS option enough that I’d probably still use it.

Rockstar is adding six radio stations to the PSP game, though sticking to the all-instrumental style of the DS release. New rampage and other variations on Chinatown Wars’ side missions have been programmed for the PSP release. The most prominent of the new content may be the addition of video documentary maker Melanie Mallard. I played one of her missions, keeping her alive while Lee raided a drug warehouse. The first game had very few moments of indoor action; this new mission was full of it, playing out almost as a GTA-ized ode to Gauntlet. Mallard hung back with her camera; Huang Lee had to make sure she didn’t die.

The iPhone/iPod version of Chinatown Wars wasn’t announced yet when Rockstar showed me the PSP iteration, so I don’t have details on how its controls and content compare to the DS and PSP games. I also wasn’t able to get a clear answer from Rockstar yet about when the PSP version was greenlit. It is attractive enough and has tight enough controls that it doesn’t feel like a rushed port, whether it was one or not. What it does feel like is an appropriate modification of an entertaining and content-rich game, a return to GTA’s top-down roots that can soon be enjoyed by non-DS owners.

I had expected something a little clumsy with the PSP version of the game. Instead, GTA: Chinatown Wars, at first play, appears and feels to be smooth. The game will be out as a disc or download game for PSP on October 20.

Last week, the studio behind both the renowned Grand Theft Auto series and more eclectic are such as Bully and their very own table tennis game, let me visit to witness a session of Beaterator. The application—they don’t call it a “game”—is a September-slated portable digital music studio that traces back to Rockstar’s 2005 Internet application of the same name.

The hook is that Beaterator is digital music creation made easier. The fantasy is to be Timbaland. The superstar producer doesn’t just lend his name and cartoon licence to the game. He presides over the catchiest tutorial video I’ve witnessed in a … an application. It seems, at first, that Timbaland is simply talking to you, telling you how Beaterator works, but with a sample here, an echo of his voice there, a building beat beneath it all, you realise he’s made music out of talking. And suddenly it seems like we all have a shot at this making-music thing.

The Timbaland tutorial presents the program’s sections: Live Play, Studio and Song Crafter.

Live Play is the most graspable mode, the most visually appealing and the one most suited for those of us who have never dug deeper in making music than messing around with Nintendo’s Electroplankton or the drum fills in Harmonix’s Rock Band. Timblanad stands in the centre of the PSP screen. The four corners display four possible sound and beat samples out of the programs’ several thousand available. In total eight tracks are in play in this mode. Selecting what to play on any of them involves picking from four randomly offered samples presented by Beaterator. Selecting a corner and pressing one of the PSP’s four face buttons kicks in a beat or some sort of loop. The user can layer in up to eight, switching tracks in and out and narrowing their offerings by choosing from a musical style like, say, hip-hop. Beaterator smooths the timing of the loops, linking the user-selected samples and sounds into an on-beat, on-rhythm mix. The idea is that you’ll tap around and come up with something catchy and unique.

Studio lets you manipulate the song you’d made. Each of the eight tracks can isolated and have its levels raised or lowered. The song can be sped up or slowed down. While there’s greater manual control of a song in this mode, it struck me that Studio is the wading area that is meant to prep users who aren’t ready to move into the deep end of the Song Crafter.

This third mode, Song Crafter is essentially a PSP-ified ProTools or other computer audio mixing program. A song’s tracks are represented as color-coded portions of horizontal lines. Those chunks can be chopped up, copied, deleted or moved. New samples can be brought in, including audio captured via the PSPgo or PSP 3000’s mic or through a .wav file. So, yes, you can sing or rap to your creations. The option in Song Crafter appeared to be deep, offering an 88-key synthesiser keyboard for composition, an interface for creating and manipulating drum patterns, an interface for adjusting things like “Decay” and “Detune.”

The Rockstar rep who showed me Beaterator and managed to make a catchy enough song during our brief demo said that some of Beaterator’s deepest options are too esoteric even for him to use. But he presents the complete package as an effort by Rockstar to lessen the intimidation factor for creating music.

Rockstar plans to support Beaterator with downloadable content and is working out plans to enable exporting and uploading of songs. A simplified version of the application was also recently announced for the iPhone and iPod Touch. According to Rocktar press materials, that version won’t have the advanced song-editing options of the PSP release.

It’s hard to judge how successful Beaterator will be in the hands of PSP users. I’m used to judging Rockstar creations by their gameplay and fun. What I saw looked thorough and smart, but it’ll be for PSP owners to decide whether they have an appetite for making music or a hidden desire that everything from Guitar Hero to Wii Music failed to satisfy.

To make music, with the help of a video game platform, this is your next shot.

The PSP edition of Beaterator launched on September 29 for $US39.99.