Take-Two stock rises with release of L.A. Noire

For gamers who also play the stock market, Tuesday was a good day. After all, not only did L.A. Noire hit the market, but stock prices rose for studio Rockstar Games’ parent company Take-Two Interactive.

According to Conrad Zimmerman at Destructoid.com, the price of shares rose as high as 10% of their starting value on the NASDAQ, before finally settling on a price of $17.10 at the close of business yesterday, netting an overall 7.75% increase.

This is all due to the successful launch of Noire, which currently has a MetaCritic score of 92 for the Xbox 360 version. Even the picky French site GameKult.com had decent things to say about the gameplay differences between Noire and its other open sandbox gaming cousins:

Globalement moins drôles et plus répétitifs que les à-côtés d’un Grand Theft Auto ou d’un Red Dead Redemption, les délits de L.A. Noire ont tout de même l’avantage de faire découvrir certains coins un peu paumés de la ville et d’offrir des points d’expérience supplémentaires.

or:

Overall less funny and more repetitive than [the extra missions in] Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, the crimes L.A. Noire still have the advantage of discovering some bewildering corners of the city and provide additional experience points.

L.A. Noire is available on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Trisha’s Quote of the Day: PlayStation’s latest “game” gets rave reviews

The [Firmware] game features a robust moral choice system, where your actions really do affect the world. Do you accept the User Agreement, or don’t you? This was an agonizing decision, since you never know what could happen later. I remember that unbelievable moment in Firmware 2.0, where I accepted the User Agreement and the Kaz Hirai was harvested for delicious ADAM. Is that right? It’s been so long since I did anything but download Firmware on the PS3 that my memory is a little hazy.

—Jim Sterling at Destructoid makes the best of a necessary console update, in the wake of last month’s credit card security breach of the PlayStation Network.

UPDATE: And… apparently, the influx of PSN fans who updated their firmware and wanted to game crashed the network, forcing parts of it offline again. How is it that Sony didn’t anticipate that?