It seems when the companies behind new and exciting products keep schtum, the community speaks on their behalf, and in the last week or so none other than four new rumours have sprung up.
Last week, Jeux-France posted what it claimed to be the first GTA4 screenshot running on a next generation console. The image, depicting a trendy looking apartment block or two, a few pedestrians and an impressive looking sky was oddly devoid of traffic. Accompanying the dubious screenshot came a news article, claiming that the highly anticipated title would span an area six times that of San Andreas, deliver some 350 vehicles and have multiplayer capabilities.
"It"s a fake," boomed Rockstar, "It appears Jeux-France got duped."
Excitement arose once more when SPOnG.com posted news of an Xbox360 and PlayStation 3 compatibility that could possibly allow gamers to play Microsoft games using their PSPs and DSs. Unsurprisingly both SCEA and Microsoft denied the claims. Bearing in mind that both consoles will utilise network capabilities, the possibility of file sharing between the two platforms is very real - which could explain the source of the rumour.
Yet more 360 hardware grilling came from Anandtech, when the site"s owner - Anand Lal Shimpi - published a now missing article. "Right now, from what we"ve heard, the real-world performance of the Xenon CPU is about twice that of the 733MHz processor in the first Xbox," he claimed.
The hardware guru came to this decision after research led him to believe that both Sony and Microsoft weren"t being completely honest about how powerful their new consoles are. Highlighting the 360 as the main culprit, he went on to speculate; "game developers will most likely only be using one of [the 360"s three 3.2Ghz] cores for the majority of their calculations."