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Speaking at the European PlayStation event at E3 2008, Sony’s David Reeves has revealed Europe will be getting the Platinum games label as detailed in Sony’s press conference. Priced at £19.99/€29.99 the label will include at launch Resistance: Fall of Man, Heavenly Sword, MotorStorm, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Ratchet & Clank 3, Virtua Tennis 3 and Assasins Creed.

Speaking about the announcement David said “If you’re a longstanding PS3 owner with gaps in your collection – or perhaps you’ve just joined the family – the PS3 Platinum range is your chance to pick up some of the very best games at a wallet-friendly price,”…”With great titles spanning a huge breadth of gaming experiences, this August is a great time to be a PS3 owner.”

(Source: Eurogamer)

Only 17 tickets remain for the retro video games gathering Fusion 08. Being held on the 19th and 20th of July at Leamington Rugby club, the event is set to feature a collection of classic games from years gone bye both on home consoles and arcade, mixed with the consumption of alcohol. One half of the Oliver twins, Philip Oliver of  previous Codemasters dizzy fame will be lending out his rare original PACMAN cabinet to the event for the duration of the weekend.  Also set to feature are MAME cabinets, a pinball machine, a number of 8 bit retro computers, classic consoles and more.

For the non retro gaming fix there will be 10 networked Xbox 360’s to play Call of Duty 4 and various other games on local LAN play. Various competitions will be held over the two days along with a raffle for 2 JAMMA arcade machines. The event kicks off at 11 am on the Saturday and runs until midnight. The Sunday runs from 11am - 5pm. Some classic games developers wil also be in attendance at the event such as Archer Maclean of IK+ fame, and Jon Hare, one of the two founding members of Sensible Software. If your still making up your mind on wether to attend then decide fast before all tickets are gone. For full details and to buy tickets head on over to the official website. Tickets are prices at £12 including postage with Ticket sales and bar venue costs, being donated to the Everyman charity.

Just when you thought episode five of the ButtonBandits.com podcast was never going to materialise, along comes this post to put your mind at rest! Recording of the latest episode took place today and features non other than your favourite hosts Frosty and GiantHaystax. The latest episode contains all of your favourite features such as another one of our secret industry insider’s giving their views on the latest gaming rumours floating around the Internet. This week we also try out a experimental new feature called the three minute review. Meanwhile the Game over feature contains an announcement about the what will be happening in the future to your favourite podcast (that’s this one). For the ultimate audio experience, don’t miss episode five, set to be released any day now!

MCV reports that ChartTrack have announced GTA IV has smashed UK sales records selling 926,000 copies in its opening week on sale, raking in a cool £40 million.  631,000 copies were sold in the first 24 hours. The record was previously held by GTA: San Andreas on PlayStation 2 which sold 677,000 copies in it’s first week on sale. It should be noted the GTA IV figure includes an extra 3 days worth of sales due to the game being released on a Tuesday (San Andreas was released on a Friday).

Unsurprisingly the game has knocked Call of duty 4 off the top spot as the most played game on Xbox Live over the last 7 days according to Major nelson on his blog. He also reports on his weekly podcast that over 2 million achievements were unlocked across Xbox live within the first 24 hours of the games release making a combined Gamerscore of over 15 million.

Microsoft have wisely decided not to release a game this week on Xbox Live arcade. As Xbox Live director Major Nelson put’s it “My guess is most people will be busy with another game this week “. Elsewhere in full price games releases, everyone has avoided the week with only Sega giving it a go with their Iron Man game being released on all formats to tie in with the release date of the movie.

Following on from the problems Xbox Live has experienced in recent times during high profile games releases, Microsoft’s General Manager of LIVE Services Operations, Derek Ingalls says this time the service is going to be be ready.

In an interview with Kotaku he states “we are preparing for a spike that could be much larger than what we saw with the launches of Halo 3 and Activision’s “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.”. Xbox 360 owners will remember the significant problems the service experienced over the Christmas period where it struggled for around 2 weeks before beginning to get back to normal. Derek says “Last holiday we weren’t properly prepared… So we are going the extra mile with Grand Theft Auto IV”. Check out the full interview over at Kotaku.

Most if not all shops now have their stock of GTA IV sitting in the warehouse. There seem to have only been very isolated cases of retailers breaking the street date and these are by mistake due to uninformed staff at random supermarket branches. Of the usual suspects for early release, Indi games shops are mostly holding firm, Asda has the game out but with 29th of April stickers, Sainsbury’s has a blank space where the game should be, it doesn’t seem to exist in Morrisons and finally in Argos the tills come up with a message saying not to sell until 29th if you try and buy it at both self service and staff manned tills.

Online it seems all retailers are being closely watched and have been given specific instructions to post out copies from Monday onwards. Unfortunately it seems the pirates can play the game this weekend while the law abiding have to wait until Tuesday.

Ricky Gervais can be found in the comedy club inside GTA IV performing a 3 minute routine reports CVG. Ricky performs jokes from his recent Fame Tour as well as some new material. Speaking about taking part in the game, he said “It’s a first - which always interests me, It was shot in New York, my favourite place in the world, and I got to wear a tight lycra suit as part of the digital process. No, hold on, that wasn’t so good.”. “Unfortunately they captured the whole horror, except I look slightly tougher. It is seriously a big deal, though. Games have outsold Hollywood for the past few years so it’s nice to be a small part of that.”.
 

Ricky tells CVG that he also appears in another part of the game but is not revealing where or in what kind of role.

Alright lucky listeners it’s that time of the week again! It’s the latest installment of the Button Bandits Podcast! With, as always, your hosts: Frosty and Giant Haystax!

This weeks show features all of the great regular features such as calling our industry insider for the latest exclusive news.

We also discuss:

• - National Newspaper offers cash for anti-games stories
• - Fusion 08
• - National Paper slates games - Times, Telegraph
• - Author’s Book gets bad reviews
• - BBC Games Teletext dies
• - Rock Band Price
• - PlayStation 3 Iplayer
• - Camping out for GTA

So download,stream or subscribe in itunes. Have a listen and come join the fun!

Warning: Explicit Lyrics

A message on the games pages of the BBC’s Ceefax service reads “We regret to announce that the games review page will no longer be updated”. It appears as though Ceefax’s games output is to come to an end as the message is displayed on both analogue and digital versions. Ceefax’s games content has long suffered to make a name for itself in the shadow of The rival teletext services Digitiser and later GameCentral.

At it’s high point Digitiser attracted viewing figures of 1.5 million. In 2002 Digitiser was replaced by the GameCentral pages and while not atttracting the same kind of viewing figures as Digitiser, it’s believed that it still manages to attract a size-able audience to this day. Viewing figures for the BBC’s games pages are not publicly available. ButtonBandits have contact the BBC for comment about the announcement as well as to ask what, if any coverage of games the BBC has planned for the future.