Grand Theft Auto IV Rumors Confirmed: Delayed

Boo!

Speculation has long been reporting that Rockstar’s upcoming iteration of its Grand Theft Auto series is likely to be delayed until next year due to financial reasons, and about ten minutes ago, Rockstar confirmed it: GTA IV will hit shelves not in two months, but in eight. April of 2008 is the new target month, and really, that’s not cool. They recently denied a rumor that it’ll be delayed, saying that the game is well on-track for its October goal- they could have at least given us a “we can neither confirm or deny”, instead of leading us in a different direction.

The game looks to be fantastic, and will be released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, now in April of 2008.

Update: Rockstar says that the game was almost entirely delayed due to technical reasons, not financial. Whether or not that’s true, who knows, but that’s the official stance on it.

NCAA 08 Football uses real time weather

This post was supposed to go up yesterday, but due a communication error it never appeared. Sorry for the confusion and delay.

Weather in NCAA 08 FootballEA announced yesterday that NCAA 08 Football can use real-time/world weather stats from The Weather Channel to determine the kind of weather that will be used on the field. So if there is a huge snow storm in NYC, you can go check out how the footballers would play under these conditions. This feature allows games to be played in rainstorms, intense wind or just on a good old sunny day.

This feature can be turned off, but I really can’t see why you would want to. The option to choose live-time weather is only enabled when the user is online (not necessarily playing online though). EA didn’t specifically mention if all copies of the game have this feature but we would assume so.

Should make the game much more realistic. I wonder what happens when you play during a hurricane..hm.. The weather doesn’t seem to affect the fans, just the players it seems.

NCAA 08 Football is currently in stores for the Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2 and PS3 consoles.

Sony releases PS3 1.90 and PSP 3.52 firmware updates

Today, Sony released updates for PS3 and PSP firmware. The PSP firmware only includes security upgrades and support for more titles on the playable network.

The PS3 firmware update has more features then the PSP update. The new update includes messaging smilies (emotions), support for custom wallpapers for the XMB (Cross Media Bar). New AVCHD video playback (whatever that is) support from external devices, better DMB hard drive game sorting. It also includes improved CD audio quality from HDMI or digital audio out. A cool new eject disk function (an option you can do via the controller), and 1080p24 HDMI output for Blu-Ray media.

So nothing super exciting, but nonetheless some new features.

Sony attacks the Xbox 360

Sony marketing VP, Peter Dille, attempted to put glory to his Blu-Ray playing Waffle Iron, the PS3, by stating that HD-DVD was going to be obsolete (but we all knew that, that’s how the lifecycle of technology works) and went far enough to attack the Xbox 360.

The Sony VP “questions” Microsoft in the console market and points out that it has no running ground. “They’ve never made a dime in this business.” Which can be debatable. His next points of why the Xbox 360 is failing are quite amusing. Peter deems the Xbox 360 having an “inconsistent design” and goes on to describe that “some have a hard drive, some don’t, and none of them have Blu-Ray, and the HD-DVD will be out of business in a matter of months. Is this a ten year product?”

10 years? Really now? Sony has never had a console in the market [without a successor] for longer than 10 years. The PlayStation lasted about 5 years before the PlayStation 2 was released. And the PlayStation 2 was obsolete in 6 years.

In order to impress all Sony fanboys, and to make himself flamebait, he stated that the Xbox 360 “doesn’t even work”. Wow. Let me check that. Surprise! My Xbox 360 turned on! Amazing!

“I don’t think that’s a ten year product. You could disagree with me, or they could disagree with me, but I’d put that up against the PS3 any day.”

But he surely would never put any other Sony product (the PSP, PS2 or PSX) up against anyone.