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The Onion just kills me. When they are on, there isn’t a funnier website around. Whether it’s Pau Gasol Googling “Lakers + Celtics + Rivalry” or a report from the fictitious city in Grand Theft Auto.

To wit:

“I was shot 14 times on my way to work today, including twice by police,” said one Algonquin-area resident. “That is unacceptable.”

Many blame the LCPD directly for the increase in criminal activity, citing the department’s lax procedure for arresting criminals, which involves taking 10 percent of the suspect’s money, confiscating his weapons, and simply releasing him from custody later that day. Outraged citizens say this is not enough, especially in a city where assault rifles can be found on factory roofs and grenade caches are located under the globe at the old World’s Fair site.

“The police just let them go, and 20 minutes later they’re shooting at the very same criminals from helicopters,” veteran crime reporter Mike Whiteley said. “That is not proper law enforcement. We may be seeing a return to the bad old days of 2002, when the police, the FIB, and even Army tank battalions would leave countless bodies on the streets while attempting to capture just one man on some sort of joyful mass-destruction spree.”

Perhaps even more alarming, city records indicate that more than 75 percent of perpetrators in mass-murder or vehicular-manslaughter cases escape, usually by simple methods such as driving into a car-repainting facility. Criminals have even eluded pursuit by walking into their apartment and going to bed for six hours, after which the search has been called off.

I guess $2 billion dollars doesn’t buy what it used to.? EA, one of the world’s largest videogame companies, made an offer to buy Take Two Interactive, which besides their sports properties is also the maker of Grand Theft Auto, however that offer has been rejected.

Take Two would like to wait until the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, probably to get maximum dollar on any take over bid.? EA runs their company like city-states, with each division having autonomy, however, it remains to be seen if Take Two will become part of that.

Take-Two called EA’s offer “highly opportunistic” and an attempt to take advantage of its upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto IV.

The company said it had offered to enter a dialogue with EA on April 30, a day after Grand Theft Auto IV’s scheduled release.

Speculation is that EA doesn’t even want Grand Theft Auto, though that makes for a nice consolation prize.? This is all about the sports franchises.? If a buyout does go through, then EA Sports would essentially have a complete monoply on the sports gaming industry.

The video game industry has been around for almost 30 years now, and only recently, say within the past six years, has the acceleration of the video game technology resulted in some mind blowing stuff. In an odd way, much like the movie industry, video games have been awaiting their watershed moment. Coincidentally it took almost 40 years from the time the motion picture was invented until Orsen Welles delivered cinema’s undisputed masterpiece Citizen Kane.

What that has to do with Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto IV is only tangent. But after watching this trailer, and with the launch of Nintendo’s Wii, it seems as if within the next decade that the video game industry will also too have it’s watershed moment. When the possibilities of the medium are unleashed upon an unsuspecting generation, forever altering the course of the medium.

Because, this looks amazing. Irregardless of whether or not you agree with the ultra-violent storylines and the controversy surrounding the Grand Theft Auto franchise, the makers of this game have clearly taken a giant leap forward in terms of graphics and immersion into a fictional world. One can only imagine the possibilities.

Grand Theft Auto IV drops on 10.16.07