The Games News

If you ever wanted to be a Rock Star and play the drums or guitar (bass included!), look no further.

On 20 November “Rock Band” will be released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 (later in the year there will also be a PS2 version), and we finally have an official playlist for the game.

1960s
Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter”

1970s
Aerosmith “Train Kept a Rollin’”*
The Who “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
Boston “Foreplay/Long Time”
Mountain “Mississippi Queen”*
The Police “Next to You”
David Bowie “Suffragette City”
Black Sabbath “Paranoid”*
Blue Oyster Cult “Don’t Fear the Reaper”
The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop”
Deep Purple “Highway Star”
KISS “Detroit Rock City”
Molly Hatchet “Flirtin’ With Disaster”
The Outlaws “Green Grass & High Tides”*
Sweet “Ballroom Blitz”*

1980s
Rush “Tom Sawyer”*
Bon Jovi “Wanted Dead or Alive”
The Clash “Should I Stay or Should I Go”
Faith No More “Epic”
R.E.M. “Orange Crush”
Iron Maiden “Run to the Hills”*
Pixies “Wave of Mutilation”

1990s
Foo Fighters “Learn to Fly”
Metallica “Enter Sandman”
Nirvana “In Bloom”
Stone Temple Pilots “Vasoline”
Weezer “Say It Ain’t So”
Smashing Pumpkins “Cherub Rock”
Radiohead “Creep”
Beastie Boys “Sabotage”
Hole “Celebrity Skin”
Garbage “I Think I’m Paranoid”
Soundgarden “Black Hole Sun”

2000s
The Hives “Main Offender”
Queens of the Stone Age “Go With the Flow”
The Strokes “Reptilia”
Jet “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”
OK Go “Here It Goes Again”
Nine Inch Nails “The Hand That Feeds”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Maps”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “Dani California”
Coheed & Cambria “Welcome Home”
Fallout Boy “Dead on Arrival”
The Killers “When You Were Young”
New Pornographers “Electric Version”

(Unless marked with an asterix, the songs will use the original master recording performed by the original artists)

There’s more, if 45 songs weren’t enough for you; there will be 13 songs available as unlockable content, although no details on these songs exist.

Xbox Live Arcade subscribers will get some new titles and half-price games after the usual XBLA Wednesday update.

Microsoft representatives have announced the arcade conversions of Cyberball 2072, a futuristic robot battle football game, where you have to score a touchdown while the ball gets hotter and hotter, and SNK’s classic fighting game Fatal Fury Special, where Joe Higashi and the Bogard brothers, amongst other fighting titans, must compete against “the ruler of the underworld, Wolfgang Krauzer”.

Microsoft also announced a special limited time Labor Day weekend special, where they will offer Small Arms, the now-classic Zuma Deluxe puzzle game(both for 400 points/5 $), Gauntlet from Atari and Dig Dug from Namco for just 200 points(2.5$). This limited time offer is going to take place between Sunday, September 2, 12.00 a.m. GMT and Monday, September 3, 11.59 p.m. GMT.

At this moment, Fatal Fury Special is going to be priced at 400 points(5$), but no pricing has been announced yet for Cyberball 2072.

During the final months of the development of Halo 3, the testers have begun testing the multiplayer aspect of the third and possibly final game in the series. Most of the testing has been on non-HDTV screens on a usual 4:3 480i NTSC TV screen. With the majority of the testing using non-HD definition, this means that Microsoft and Bungie are making sure that Halo 3 will be great for everyone, not just the lucky ones that possess HD. I am curious to see how the game will turn out. As an avid player of the first and the second Halo games alike, I played the multiplayer version to a point of insanity. It, in my opinion, is one of the greatest first-person multiplayer modes ever created. The hope that they continue their testing on the multiplayer and make it their top priority until the release of the game is one of my greatest concerns. The storyline of the game started on a downfall during the middle of Halo 2 while the multiplayer stole the spotlight. For college students and gamers alike, let’s all hope Halo 3 will live up to the hype.

In the upcoming months, both of Microsoft’s greatest competitors are releasing their next-generation systems to compete and possibly deter Microsoft’s seemingly relentless onslaught of the video game industry. Both of the competitors, Sony and Nintendo, will be ecstatic to hear that Microsoft has had no interest whatsoever of dropping the price of the Xbox 360.

With the Xbox Core system at $299 and the Premium system at $399, Microsoft has sold millions of the Xbox 360 while the people who buy it seem to aimlessly shell out the cash (or credit) to buy one. With the price of the Wii officially at $250 and the PlayStation 3 at a indecisive $599, the Xbox 360 stands right between both and should continue to sell the system with but a slight drop in sales due to the release of the two newer systems. With no price drop in sight for the Xbox 360, it will be interesting to watch the developments come mid-November.

During Microsoft’s recent adventure to E3, the computer giant posted a new high score for bandwidth used: Over 600 Terabytes. Not 600 Megabytes or 600 Gigabytes, but a whopping 600 Tera (or Trillion) bytes. Microsoft posted these totals based on the seven million game demos, trailers, videos, and other content downloaded from Xbox Live during the week of E3, with the Halo 3 trailer covering over 2 million of those downloads. The sheer numbers alone (which I will remind you again was OVER 600 Terabytes) is such a staggering number, that I couldn’t even begin to think of how to fill 600 Terabytes worth of space. However, here are a few things that could possibly fill 600 Terabytes worth of space: 600,000 copies of Lord of the Rings or 200,000,000 copies of a single average mp3. This means that you would need about 200 iPods to hold that data. I think Apple would love the idea of Microsoft purchasing 200 iPods, but we won’t hold our breath for that day.