Send Custom Fortune Cookies to Facebook Friends with GTA: Chinatown Wars' App

With the successful Nintendo DS launch of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars behind them and the October PSP launch imminent, developer Rockstar has created a Facebook application that allows friends to send and receive fortune cookie messages through the social networking site.

The GTA: Chinatown Wars Fortune Cookie application supplies a randomly-generated selection of thinly-veiled insults in the form of 'fortune cookie' messages ranging from "You should travel more. People don't like you here" to "Yes, you do look fat in that." You can also write-in your own message if you choose.

Clicking each fortune flips the paper over to the back, revealing a Chinese word - we've come across such colorful ones as "female dog" (gau na) and "low life" (zeen yun).

It's not the most creative social networking tie-in to a video game that we've seen (and it deprives us of actually breaking open the fortune cookie!) but it does point to a larger trend of major publishers who have started to use sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to engage fans of their products -- EA created a Madden 09 quiz application for last year's big football title, and Ubisoft has developed TickTock, a game completely independent of the company's other IPs that tests you on your friends' status updates.