I’ll maintain a wait-and-see attitude on this one. Could be fun, could be ground-breaking, or it could be horrible and offensive. We’ll see.

From AfterElton:

Now Rockstar games, the company behind the GTA franchise, the gay-inclusive Bully and others, is releasing an entire GTA IV game centered around a gay character this fall for download and packaged with another downloadable add-on game as a standalone disc (all for the Xbox 360).

In the game, players will portray Luis Lopez, an assistant to nightclub owner “Gay” Tony Prince. Now, how the gay character will be handled (or, really, if he even is actually gay) is yet to be seen, but the fact alone that the massive, mainstream-targeted game company is putting the word “gay” in the title of a chapter of its most popular franchise is a bold marketing move, to say the least.

I’ve been playing this a little and its somewhat disappointing. The gameplay is the usual GTA style, but the gay portrayal is not the best. Tony himself is incompetent at best (although he does have some good one-liners) as a boss, and there is a lot of homophobic talk from Luis’ friends. Maybe that’s setting up for a change later, so I’ll have to keep playing to find out. One thing that really disappointed me was the dancing. You can go to Tony’s two clubs (one gay and one straight) and dance with someone on the dance floor, but it is a woman in both clubs.