In the works since November of last year, Rockstar has finally launched the friend and message wall portion of Rockstar Games Social Club.

Announcing the launch of the Rockstar Friends System and Message Wall – brand new features exclusively for Rockstar Games Social Club members to come together, interact, and talk trash - regardless of the platform they enjoy our titles on.

The Rockstar Friends System now allows Social Club members to create a custom Friends list based on either:

* Friends lists taken directly from platforms you have linked to the Social Club.
* Your specific Social Club nicknames and/or console identifiers (such as a Gamertag).

Linked Rockstar Friends can then interact via The Message Wall, Social Club’s unique verbal and visual means of mouthing off to your Friends.  Communicate, decorate and/or desecrate each other’s Walls at will.  Each message you send is accompanied by a sticker “envelope” of your choosing that gets posted to your Friend’s wall.  Pick from our collection of hundreds of stickers for the right grafitti graphic to match the tone of your note.

So link up with your Chinatown Wars DS-playing friend, your Midnight Club LA PS3-playing friend, and your Grand Theft Auto IV Xbox 360-playing friend – drop a steaming one on each of their walls and tell them how much they suck.  It’s social networking - the Rockstar way!

Source: Rockstar Games Social Club

Rockstar has silently updated the pages for the two features that have been taunted since the revamp, Message Wall and Friends system. The pages reveal more details on what we can expect the features to offer. They also reveal that both features will launch before the end of this month.

Friends System:

Message Wall:

Rockstar has released an update for Midnight Club: Los Angeles today for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems. The patch brings some AI balance on both consoles. The 360 version of the update includes support for leader boards for tournaments, better multiplayer match searching, and the much wanted streaming and performance fixes. As far as I can tell in my 10 minutes playing with the 360 patch, I have yet to see any draw in. Midnight Club: Los Angeles wasn't the only thing that got updated today, Social Club also received an update today adding back ZiT and LAFM. Social Club also gives us hints that Midnight Club Los Angeles will be getting two new sections on Social Club. Sorry PC folks, the update today hasn't added any of the sections such as Blotter and the Marathon for the PC version Grand Theft Auto IV. More than likely Social Club will have those sections added when the much awaited PC patch comes.

Today, Rockstar has revamped Social Club to version 1.1. However, this update seems like a 2.0 update due to the many changes that Rockstar has made:

• New section just for games
• The news now has it's own section
• You can now pick a nickname for use on Social Club
• A friends list is coming soon where you can message your other friends
• Message Wall is coming soon. We're not quite sure what the message wall will be. Perhaps a forum for fans to talk to eachother?
• There is now a platform chooser under the games section when you check your stats, and;
• Perhaps the most significant change is the site has been redeisgned, and is no-longer based entirely as an animated Flash website, which does make it significantly faster and easier to navigate around

There are a couple of things that people may not like, one the fact that they will have to relink their XBL/PSN accounts to Social Club, which really isn't a hard thing to do at all and secondly, anyone that was going to use ZiT and LAFM will have to wait untill the features are relaunched. Overall, Social Club seems to be shaping up to be a...social club!

Official Site: Social Club

Rockstar has launched a new feature called Social ClubTV. You may have guess what it does already, it's the part of Social Club that lets you upload videos from the new video editor in Grand Theft Auto IV for PC.

In addition to the Social ClubTV site, Rockstar also launched the PC section of the Grand Theft Auto IV website. The section includes new screens and higher quality versions of older screens.

 Links: Social ClubTV & Grand Theft Auto IV

A new feature for the Grand Theft Auto IV section in the Rockstar Social Club has been released today, it is all about celebrating those wealthy seven–figure Grand Theft Auto IV players.

The wealth of a member us decided by the single-player missions completion, won races, side-missions and "dropped" money you've picked up on the streets. The Millionaires Club has lanuched, so be sure to login to your account and check it out, perhaps you are one of them...?

Also Rockstar has let word of a new attraction/feature soon to be available in the Social Club, entitled "VIRAL INFECTION". It has something to do with zombies and "how far the infection has spread". Nothing more is known, however given the statement from Rockstar and the fact it is relation to zombies, our money is on it being a calculation of how many GTA IV players have been turned into zombies (click for more info on zombies and GTA IV)...

Social Club Home: http://socialclub.rockstargames.com/

Rockstar has just launched pre-registration for Social Club. If your not sure what Social Club is, Social Club is a new service from Rockstar that will be included in the upcoming Grand Theft Auto IV and Midnight Club: Los Angeles. Social Club will provide leader boards, exclusive contests, etc. According to the site, a card game called "Beat It" will be coming soon to the club. Also, if you sign up before the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, you will be entered to win a portrait of you drawn by the art team at Rockstar. If you want to sign up, the link is below.

Pre-Registration: Social Club

After being delayed for two days, originally planned for opening on April the 15th, today Rockstar's Social Club will open it's doors for registrations. Be sure you register up for your chance to enter competitions and of course, extend your GTA IV gaming experience. With future games also using this Social Club, it's a registration you MUST have, there really is no reason not to register. Weather your purchasing GTA IV or not, there will be Midnight Club LA which will no doubt also make use of the Club.

It is unknown when today the Social Club will officially open, however we suspect before this-afternoon.

What is the Social Club? If you missed the news, here's some small snippets:

• The LCPD Police Blotter will feature a map of Liberty City that tracks the criminal activity of the many players connected to the internet. It will feature information such as the more dangerous areas of town and which weapons are more common the others.

• The Story Gang will be a leaderboard that will not only show who completed the main story arc of the game first, but also how long it took. People who become a member of this club will receive special online widgets and merit badges.

• The 100% Club will be extremely popular as it will show who out of the millions of players will reach 100% completion first. The first 10 people to do so will be sent an ultra-rare commemorative 'key to the city' to mark their accomplishment! Later on it will rank members based on who will be able to get to 100% in the shortest amount of time.

• The Hall of Fame will recognize those elite players who have reached the top of various different statistical leaderboards, and will also contain a personal awards display of awards earned in Social Club competitions and via reaching various in-game achievements.

• The Liberty City Marathon will be a ranking of special physical milestones achieved in the game, from the number of miles walked, driven, or swam to the number of bullets fired and stunt-jumps jumped. Other events will be added as time goes on.

Register at: http://www.rockstargames.com/socialclub/

Rockstar Games have updated there Social Club page with a notice saying 'Pre-Registration Begins 4.17.08'. SC was originally going to be open to the public today but instead the flash front page came up with that.

If you don't know what Rockstar Games Social Club is, here are a few snippets of what going to be in-store for us.

• The LCPD Police Blotter will feature a map of Liberty City that tracks the criminal activity of the many players connected to the internet. It will feature information such as the more dangerous areas of town and which weapons are more common the others.

• The Story Gang will be a leaderboard that will not only show who completed the main story arc of the game first, but also how long it took. People who become a member of this club will receive special online widgets and merit badges.

• The 100% Club will be extremely popular as it will show who out of the millions of players will reach 100% completion first. The first 10 people to do so will be sent an ultra-rare commemorative 'key to the city' to mark their accomplishment! Later on it will rank members based on who will be able to get to 100% in the shortest amount of time.

• The Hall of Fame will recognize those elite players who have reached the top of various different statistical leaderboards, and will also contain a personal awards display of awards earned in Social Club competitions and via reaching various in-game achievements.

• The Liberty City Marathon will be a ranking of special physical milestones achieved in the game, from the number of miles walked, driven, or swam to the number of bullets fired and stunt-jumps jumped. Other events will be added as time goes on.

But that's not all that will be added, in the future there will be more added by Rockstar to cover other games respectively. Our guess is Midnight Club: LA will be the next to use the site along with some features coving it.

 Source: Social Club

When we predicted a possibility of Rockstar Launching Community-Centric Site at the start of this month we didn't expect to have it both announced and written about on the same day, only 2 weeks ahead. Today Rockstar announced their Community-Centric Site, called Social Club, which will make it's first deybue in Grand Theft Auto IV. Only hours later Yahoo compiled an article coving how using the Community Site will allow you to download music which can be played on your mobile in GTA IV.

Advertised throughout Liberty City, the cheekily-named "ZiT" technology is built into the game's mobile phone interface system. As players cruise around the world listening to the in-game radio, they can at any point 'mark' a song by opening their phone and dialing the number ZIT-555-0100. Gamers will then receive a text message with the song and artist names, and if they're registered at the forthcoming Rockstar Games Social Club community site, they'll find an e-mail waiting in their inbox with a direct link to a custom playlist on Amazon.com. All songs tagged "ZiT" will be stored here, available for preview and purchase at Amazon's going rate of $.89-$.99 per track. Best of all, those MP3s are free of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) limitations imposed on files downloaded through Apple's iTunes store and thus can be imported into any computer or digital device with no constraints.

We all know Music plays a large part of the Grand Theft Auto series, as well as gaming in general. With a soundtrack boosting over 200 songs, Grand Theft Auto IV has the attention of many record executives. Rockstar aren't just offering well-knowns either, most of the music in GTA IV as well as available for purchase through ZiT is music thats either unknown or was written exclusively for GTA IV.

None of those tracks, however, are accessible outside the game, and that's where GTA IV's model really takes off. Rockstar has boldly proclaimed that GTA IV's soundtrack is "the biggest in the history of entertainment," and with over 200 tracks, we're not prone to argue. In addition to high-profile tunes from popular artists, the developers are aiming for music geeks by handpicking rare, hard-to-find songs such as Electrick Funk's 12-inch treasure "On A Journey" and Elton John's "Street Kids" off his relatively unheralded Rock of the Westies. Some artists have even contributed brand new songs written exclusively for the game, including "Vagabond (Liberty City Mix)" by the Greenskeepers and "War is Necessary" from iconic rapper Nas.

So don't be planning on illegally downloading any of the tracks, you'd be wasting your time, and at $1 max. for one song, why on earth would you both? Your internet to complete your illegal download would cost more!

Source: Yahoo! Games