1P Start

I know you really don’t care, but I do. After having my Xbox 360 RRoD on me once and then having the hard drive fail shortly thereafter, I might be having problems with the unit once again. This time I’m trying to play through Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga and on a certain level it just freezes for no reason at a random moment. I’d think it was an issue with that particular title, but when I was playing Call of Duty 4 I started getting these bizarre error messages saying the disc was unreadable out of the blue.

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On David Jaffe’s blog, the mind behind God of War said that creator of almost anything famous by Nintento, Shigeru Miyamoto, and legendary game creator Will Wright are not as well known as Steven Spielberg because there is no mention of him on box art.

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The Playstation Portable has been something of a failure for Sony so far. In every single territory around the world, it has been roundly beaten by the cheaper and more innovative Nintendo DS, although Japan continues to be Sony’s strongest supporter. But the lack of success in managing to get a sizeable foothold in the hand-held market means there is a question mark hanging over the little console’s future.

According to Zeno Colaço, a VP for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, talking to Pocket Gamer recently, the console is still subject to the 10 year hardware strategy that Sony seems intent on sticking with. But while that has proved a viable strategy for the PS2, which continues to sell in huge numbers for such an outdated piece of hardware, I just can’t see the PSP having that much life left it in.

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Metal Gear Solid 4 is now upon us, and it has been widely greeted as the best game ever to appear on any machine ever, which I think means it’s quite good. However, it is also relatively short, with many lucky PS3 owners having already finished it after clocking in 20 hours or so gameplay. While the more hardcore amongst you may be starting it all over again, many will now box up Hideo Kojima’s latest masterpiece and start looking to the future instead.

Luckily for those people, Metal Gear Solid 5 has already been mooted, although not officially announced by Kojima. Even though this fourth instalment is the last chapter in the Solid Snake story, it’s not the end of the franchise, or even the end of Big Boss.

In an interview with 1UP, MGS4 assistant producer Ryan Payton revealed some tidbits about the future of the franchise, and the possibility that the next game could well take the form of a prequel.

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Nintendo has always been the games company that puts fun above all else, sometimes at the expense of innovation, graphics, and moving the game industry forward. In that sense, you could say that Nintendo is the casual gamer to the hardcore gamer folk at Sony and Microsoft.

This generation has seen the casual gamer tag being applied to the Nintendo consoles more than ever, because both the Wii and DS have a much wider range of appeal than their competitors the PSP, PS3 and Xbox 360. But despite being inherently and unashamedly casual in their intent, I thought Nintendo would at least respect the more hardcore amongst us. But it seems not after comments from Nintendo of Europe managing director of marketing Laurent Fischer prove.

In an article about Wiiware, the downloadable games store for the Wii which features hundreds of small but highly playable games, NextGen.biz revealed that Fischer referred to the storage space problems on the Wii by saying how “geeks and otaku” were the only people who would want the issue addressed.

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The Halcyon Company is looking to make a couple of games based on works by author Philip K. Dick as well as making a few movies based on his work. They haven’t said specifically if they are making a Blade Runner game, perhaps Philip K. Dick’s most famous work, but they’d almost be fools not to. Although, I’ll admit it. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book that Blade Runner is based on, kind of sucks. I know I just committed a sin saying that, but it really wasn’t what I was hoping for when I picked it up. Any game based on it worth it’s salt would have to borrow heavily from the movie or else I’m not interested.

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Music and video games have been awkward bed buddies in the past, with artists not often being happy to have their songs license for use in titles in case they are somehow cheapened. However, this all changed last generation with games such as Grand Theft Auto using official tracks from established artists to add credibility and realism to the game.

Then along came Guitar Hero and Singstar and the friendship fully blossomed in to a symbiotic relationship where both parties began to benefit greatly. In an article on another site, I argued the case for Guitar Hero having helped the music industry more than the RIAA and other such organisations ever could, as the game actively got me in to a few bands that I had never even heard of before.

Rock Band was then shown to have massively increased digital music sales after fans downloaded songs by the featured artists after falling in love with the tracks from the game. And now that trend has been shown to be continuing with rock band Motley Crue having reportedly sold more copies of their new single through Rock Band than they have done so far on iTunes.

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Electronic Arts desperately wants to acquire Take-Two Interactive. It already wanted it before Grand Theft Auto IV was released but now that the game has made $500 million in its first week on sale, and proved once again the value of the franchise, EA are even keener.

Take-Two, who publish the Grand Theft Auto games, have already rejected a bid from EA back in February. So now EA are going hostile, and have offered the shareholders a $2.1 billion all cash offer. The shareholders have until May 16th to consider the bid and decide if it’s enough to warrant a mass sell out or not.

The problem is, EA doesn’t actually have $2.1 billion in the bank, and has had to take out a $1 billion loan to cover the costs of the investment if and when it happens. The huge financing will come from Morgan Stanley, the bank of Nova Scotia, and several other financial organisations.

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Last week saw various media types getting themselves in a tizzy over the so-called clash between the release of Grand Theft Auto IV last Tuesday, and the long awaited Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr. The argument was that the timing of the multi-format GTA 4 coming out was going to play havoc with the box office takings for the film, as millions of gamers would be too busy indoors playing the game to venture out to the cinema to see the film.

And surprise surprise, here we are the week after, and as well as GTA 4 selling in phenomenal numbers, the Iron Man movie did spectacularly well, taking $100 million in the States, and $200 million elsewhere in the world. The movie also ended up being the 10th largest opening movie ever, and the second biggest ever original (non-sequel) film, just behind the first Spider-Man movie.

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Grand Theft Auto 4 has now been out for 5 days, and with this being the first weekend since it’s release, I expect a lot of people will just be getting to grips with the game. So I thought we should take a look at what’s happened around the release, and how the game has been received in different quarters.

The sales bale began on Tuesday at Midnight, with many gamers queuing up at their local games retailer to be the first to get their hands on the game. 5 days later, and both Sony and Microsoft are already arguing over which console has seen the best return on the game. The only sales figures we actually have to go on at the point are from the UK, where the game sold 600,000 copies in 24 hours, making it the new one day record holder.

From the reviews of the game, it seems the PS3 version had a slight edge in the graphics department, looking sexier, and suffering from less frame-rate issues. Both versions have however shipped with bugs, with the PS3 reportedly suffering worse from Rockstar’s seeming inability to release a game without some sort of problem.

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Nintendo are having a good year. That’s a slight understatement but it’s the main thrust of the latest press release to come from the company’s headquarters, as it reports a massive surge in profits for the last twelve months.

Net profit rose 47.7% to a record high over the last fiscal year, after the phenomenal success of the Wii and DS, both of which have exceeded expectations, and beaten all rivals in their field.

The net profit for the Nintendo group as a whole was ¥257.34 billion, or $2.5 billion. So just a slightly successful year for the Kyoto, Japan based company then.

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As a gamer living in the UK I’m used to being treated as a second class citizen by games companies.

We in Europe tend to be the last to get consoles released, with the possible exception of Australia, and some games don’t even ever make it here. If they do, they tend to be priced extortionately higher than they are in Japan and America.

So it is with Rock Band. It’s taken six months to get here, it’s only initially being released on the Xbox 360, with PS2, PS3, and Wii owners having to wait until summer at the earliest, and it’s going to cost an absolute fortune.

Harmonix has made the ludicrous decision to up the retail price of the full package, that’s a copy of the game, a microphone, a guitar and drums, from the $169 it sold for in North America to £180. That’s the equivalent of $330, or double the price.

The company has spent the last few days trying to justify and explain the decision, but whatever excuses they may come out with, I just can’t see how such a differential in price can ever be justified.

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April Fools Day is always a torturous day for gamers, with a huge amount of fake or prank stories doing the rounds on the Internet. And this year has been no exception.

Here are some of the best from around the World Wide Web:

This YouTube video supposedly shows a mash-up between Assassins Creed and Metal Gear Solid 4. It’s rubbish of course, but at least we get to see some new gameplay footage from MGS4!

Blizzard announced a new hero class for World of Warcraft. Called the Bard class, this hero wields a plastic guitar and rocks their way through the game. This is in addition to the game coming to consoles, although as its only available for the Atari 2600 to start with, it’s not really that exciting news.

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Over the course of last week, the big rumour to hit the gaming websites was that a Nintendo Wii with a Blu-ray drive was on the way. Apparently it had been spotted in Tokyo, and was getting readied for an official release.

Of course, the whole thing was absolute bullshit. There was no truth in it whatsoever, and some of the game sites who took it seriously, and reported it as fact should be ashamed of themselves.

Of course, there are rumours which can seem feasible, and get reported as possibly having an element of truth about them, hell I’m sure even we here at 1PStart have been guilty in the past. But for various reasons, this was obviously a faked news report, and should never have been passed on.

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Gaming industry analysts are becoming more vocal, and consequentially, more listened to every month, with gamers hanging on every word some star names say. Michael Pachter, the analyst for Wedbush Morgan is one such name, and his latest prediction is about the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto game.

We all know Grand Theft Auto 4, or GTA IV if you’re down with the kids, is going to be huge, it’s almost guaranteed. It’s a game which is seeming to unite Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 owners across the divide that is the console format war.

Everyone is eagerly awaiting the release, which has now been confirmed for both systems on April 29th. Pachter believes that it will be by far the biggest game of 2008, selling an incredible 6 million copies in its first week.

According to NextGen.biz, he said:

“We think that GTA IV will generate around $450 million of the [Take-Two's] expected $1,073 million publishing revenue this year, and will generate an operating profit of around 30 percent, or $135 million. At the high end of company guidance, Take-Two will generate operating income of around $130 million, meaning that the game is responsible for 103 percent of overall company operating profit.”

That’s a pretty big claim, but it’s all part of Pachter’s continuing support for the Electronic Arts buy out of rival publisher Take-Two, which he seems to be all for.

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