Arriving out of nowhere and surprising everyone, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars has suddenly appeared as a game app for the Apple iPhone. Chinatown Wars received excellent reviews on the DS but had a hell of a time selling copies. End result: Chinatown Wars was one of the best-reviewed games for the DS and failed miserably on the platform. Some cited piracy, but I continue to insist that DS platform was not the correct machine for the franchise. With the Apple iPhone, Chinatown Wars should find the riches it deserved in the first place.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is currently available for $9.99.

5-Star reviews are already rolling in.

Rockstar San Diego is busily at work on their latest game, the western-themed Red Dead Redemption. Red Dead Redemption will basically be Grand Theft Auto in western times, a genre tried only a few times and never really done successfully. Hopefully, Rockstar can deliver where others have failed. These two new screenshots at least inform us that the game will certainly look great.

APB is the latest game under construction at Realtime Worlds, best known for Crackdown and its ruler, Dave Jones, who once made a little game you may have heard of called Grand Theft Auto. APB is a massively-multiplayer action game, though the word ‘massively’ may be pushing it, as APB is definitely a smaller scale than something like World of Warcraft.

Details on what we can expect in APB have been frustratingly meager, though this 20 minute video explains several dynamics of the game, complete with actual in-game footage.

Go Gamer has some great Gaming Accessories

It was only last week that useless video game analysts were debating the imminent sales numbers for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Would it sell 200,000 or 450,000? No, not even close. Chinatown Wars sold an embarrassing 88,704 copies. That’s pathetic and can only be defined as total failure.

If your cruise around various gaming sites and look at the comments pertaining to this story, what you find is a lot of people blaming piracy for the low sales. I’m afraid that analysis is just as off as those who predicted mammoth sales. People seem to think gamers just downloaded it and refused to buy it.

With that argument, Pokemon Platinum should have sold somewhere around 100,000 copies, but no. It managed to sell over 850,000 in the first week, single-handedly dispelling the “piracy” excuse.

So what explains the horrible sales figures? Probably a mix of factors, not the least of which is GTA fans are simply not using their DS as a platform. If Chinatown Wars had been released on the iPhone, or hell, even the PSP, it would have fared considerably better. What’s the lesson? The DS skews young and will forever skew young. Mature titles have no future.