With the next-gen console war in full swing, who knows when we can expect Mario popping up on YouTube saying, “Itsa me, Grand Theft Marrio! HooHooooo!” Lucky for us, Rockstar’s giant isn’t scheduled for release on the Wii. As for Sony and Microsoft, the cheapshots have begun to rain down over which system is better suited for the blockbuster title.

Sony started marketing GTA4 that it is “meant to be played” on the PlayStation 3, not the Xbox 360. The original saying appeared on the Amazon website, the Mecca of online shopping. Despite the obvious conclusion the campaign leads to that Amazon is showing favoritism towards one console or the other, the guys at Joystiq discovered that Sony indeed paid for the publicity.

Since then, the motto has been updated by Amazon to reflect a less abrasive approach that reads “Experience Grand Theft Auto IV on the PS3.” An Amazon rep said that the wording on the website was “a campaign paid for by Sony” and that Microsoft will be “doing something similar next week.”

Although the game seems to be on equal levels thus far, Rockstar president Sam Houser took shots at the Xbox 360’s hardware difficulties his developers had when making GTA4. Houser said that a lack of storage space on Xbox 360 discs compared to the Blu-Ray disc the PS3 utilizes were “problematic” as well as Microsoft’s optional hard drive strategy.

“One of the problems with the 360, and it affects games like Grand Theft Auto if you think about how much content we put in the actual machine, is the fact that they don’t have a significantly larger storage medium than the previous systems. It’s a slightly bigger DVD disc,”he said.