Chinatown Wars gets temporary cease-fire

Grand Theft Auto's much-anticipated debut on the Nintendo DS will have to be much anticipated a little while longer.

Speaking at the BMO Capital Market 2008 Interactive Entertainment Conference today, Take-Two executive chairman Strauss Zelnick updated investors on a number of the company's release plans, most notably Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Previously announced for release by the end of January, the game has been pushed back by publisher Take-Two Interactive into its fiscal second quarter, which runs from February through April.

That wasn't the only release calendar update for the popular criminal action series. The ever-shifting date of the first downloadable content pack for Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360 appears to have moved again. Zelnick said the publisher was aiming to have the add-on available at the end of the fiscal first quarter (which runs November through January), although he noted it might move into the second quarter alongside Chinatown Wars. Regardless, the downloadable content is "close to completed."

Running down some of the publisher's other products, Zelnick mentioned that the PC edition of GTAIV would be released early next month, which lends credence to recent retailer listings tagging the game with a December 2 launch. Finally, Zelnick noted that BioShock 2, Mafia II, and Borderlands were all slated for release in 2009, though he didn't specify if that was Take-Two's fiscal year 2009 (ending October 31, 2009) or calendar year 2009 for those projects.