According to reports from the UK by PSM3 magazine subscribers who have received their May issues a bit early, Rockstar Games may be experiencing "slight technical difficulties" when trying to run their upcoming Grand Theft Auto IV title on the Xbox 360 Core system.

The problem may stem from the fact that the less-expensive core version of the Xbox 360 has no hard drive, as opposed to the Xbox 360 Premium with shipped with a 20GB hard drive, and the Xbox 360 Elite which sports a whopping 120GB drive. On their hard-drive based models, Microsoft reserved 2GB for backward compatibility software, and another 4GB of space for use by running game titles for caching.

And therein lies the rub. Rockstar has already announced that they intend to have no load waiting while moving in and out of buildings, or between islands, and we all assumed that meant that they were planning to use the 4GB cache space to pre-load a bunch of content on the initial game load. But new rumors reveal that Rockstar may be trying to accomodate the Xbox 360 core owners and allow GTA IV to play without any hard drive whatsoever, and (according to PlayStation Magazine) this is turning out to be harder than originally thought. Another rumor from the same magazine said that the Xbox 360's DVD player was also holding back the capabilities of the game on that platform. Keep in mind, however, that the source of these Box-bashing rumors is a PlayStation mag, and Rockstar was officially "mum" when GameRadar contacted them for comment.