1P Start

Man it’s been damned hot here. So hot that I could barely make myself sit in front of the computer and write updates instead of looking at porn. Anyway… this week’s Rock Band DLC brings us more Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rush. The tracks will be available for As usual, the tracks will cost $1.99 (160 Microsoft points) each and are not available in a discounted pack.

The songs included in this batch are:

* “Snow” (Hey Oh) Red Hot Chili Peppers

* “Tell Me Baby” Red Hot Chili Peppers

* “Closer to the Heart” Rush

* “Working Man” (Vault Edition) Rush

You might have noticed that Working Man was already available before, well this version is a master recording with an all new special solo only found (currently) in Rock Band. So I guess that’s a big screw you to people who already purchased the song. Yeah it’s nice that they’ve finally got Rush Masters as a cover artist could never truly capture the annoyingly high squeal of Geddy Lee, but it sucks donkey balls that they’ve already released the song.

Videos after the break!

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If you’re a dedicated Halo player, Bungie has a treat for you with a free Halo 3 map available on Monday July 7th called Cold Storage. Expect the map to be cold. Bungie has also announced that the Legendary Map pack will also drop in price today from 800 MS points to 600 MS points. That’s 10 bucks to 7.50 to you people who use real money. While it’s not free, it certainly makes the maps more tempting to get if you haven’t already. There’s no word yet if they’ll ever drop down to free, but I think I’ll wait a little bit longer on this one.

I kind of fell out of playing Halo 3, but with a new map it might be what I need to get back into things.

While playing GTA IV (I’m so close to the end I can taste it), I thought that it was a shame that I wouldn’t get any “trophies” (aka Achievements on the PS3) for my hard work. I wondered what kind of trophies I was missing as I was doing all kinds off crazy stuff in the game. Then I was comforted by the thought that when Sony rolled out the trophies in update v2.40, I’d probably get all the trophies I had earned retroactively.

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If you’re dying for more Weezer songs in Rock Band, then this week should give you the fix you’ve been looking for. This week’s Rock Band DLC brings us three new Weezer songs from their newest CD (do they even make CDs anymore?). While this isn’t something that isn’t going to make me squeal like a pig, I realize that there’s more than a few Weezer die-hards that have probably pooped their pants by now. The three songs cost $1.99 (160 Microsoft points) individually, or $5.50 (440 Microsoft points) for the slightly discounted bundle.

The songs are:

* “Dreamin”

* “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived”

* “Troublemaker”

Videos and bonus thoughts after the break!

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This Tuesday Sony announced that the firmware update version v2.36 would be coming and it finally hit the Playstation 3. This PS3 update is supposed to help system stability for select titles. While that’s fine and dandy, that still means we have to wait for the version that’s really worth waiting around for: version 2.4. If you aren’t familiar with that particular software version number (and I don’t blame you if you don’t) 2.4 will finally makes the XMB, a.k.a. the Xross Media Bar, a.k.a. the menu that’s spelled like it’s Xtreme to the max, available in PS3 titles themselves. 2.4 will also bring PS3 owners Trophies, which is Sony’s answer to the Xbox Live Achievements and will also make it slightly less sucky than Microsoft’s Live service. The PS3 2.4 upgrade is something that Live users have had for years and Sony should have had on day one of the PS3 launch. I also wonder if not every PS3 game supporting Trophies will make them less meaningful as much as Achievements and more as an afterthought. The fact that Trophies are coming is a nice touch though, because right now I own both systems and those little points you get for accomplishments in games are incredibly addicting and will often sway me to play the 360 version of a game over the PS3 version.

So exactly when is update v2.4 coming? Well it’s next in the queue, but Sony isn’t saying when that will be. This is perhaps the best move on Sony’s part. It’s better to remain incredibly vague than to disappoint Sony fanboys if there happens to be a delay of some sort. Why nail yourself to a deadline if something goes wrong in testing? So everyone be patient and wait just a little while longer for better features on Home. May I suggest earning some Achievements on Live in the meantime?

Nintendo has always been the games company that puts fun above all else, sometimes at the expense of innovation, graphics, and moving the game industry forward. In that sense, you could say that Nintendo is the casual gamer to the hardcore gamer folk at Sony and Microsoft.

This generation has seen the casual gamer tag being applied to the Nintendo consoles more than ever, because both the Wii and DS have a much wider range of appeal than their competitors the PSP, PS3 and Xbox 360. But despite being inherently and unashamedly casual in their intent, I thought Nintendo would at least respect the more hardcore amongst us. But it seems not after comments from Nintendo of Europe managing director of marketing Laurent Fischer prove.

In an article about Wiiware, the downloadable games store for the Wii which features hundreds of small but highly playable games, NextGen.biz revealed that Fischer referred to the storage space problems on the Wii by saying how “geeks and otaku” were the only people who would want the issue addressed.

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In news that made me as giddy as a school girl, LucasArts is thinking about re-releasing some of their classic adventure games on the Nintendo Wii. Lucas Arts is quoted as stating:

“We have looked at it,” admits Norris. “It is something we are continually looking at - new venues to put out our library of games on. We’re not announcing anything about that because honestly I don’t know anything about it.”

“The cart size of the DS makes it impossible to put out ports of any of our old graphic adventures,” claims Gullett. “There’s literally not enough room on those carts to put the games out.”

“It could still happen,” rallies Gullet. “We’ve got a lot of pride in our heritage and it’s definitely something we’re still leaving open.”

If there was any way possible to do so, it must be done. Newer generations should be exposed to games like Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle (I still have my Corley Motors T-shirt). Hell, there’s even licensed games like Sam and Max Hit the Road or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis that need to see the light of day again. The Nintendo DS would be a fantastic platform for these kinds of games, but if the cartridge is too small then there’s not much you can do about that. The Nintendo Wii would be a decent way to play these games considering their point and click interface, so why aren’t these available as downloads on the Wii Virtual Console yet?

Thanks to: Gaming Today

This week brings another round of Rock Band DLC and Harmonix is really bringing the heat. First full albums and now this week there’s six songs from two artists. Too bad both of them pretty much suck, although corporate drones that like to get “crazy” on the weekends and angry kids not angry enough to listen to metal will certainly be happy. That’s right both Jimmy Buffet and Disturbed will be available for purchase this week by Xbox 360 and PS3 owners.

The offerings are:

* “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett

* “Cheeseburger in Paradise” by Jimmy Buffett

* “Volcano” by Jimmy Buffett

* “Indestructible” by Disturbed

* “Inside the Fire” by Disturbed

* “Perfect Insanity” by Disturbed

The Jimmy Buffet songs are master recordings, but with a twist. They’re newly recorded songs specifically for Rock Band. It’s pretty cool that he digs the game so much, but really what else does he have to do besides rake in a lot of cash? If you have no taste you can purchase the Buffet songs for $1.99 each (160 Microsoft Pretend Points) or $5.49 (440 Microsoft Imaginarium Points) for the pack.

The Disturbed songs are also master recordings, but not super special for Rock Band. What’s nice about their songs is that they will be available for a limited time at a discounted price. They will be $.99 per track (80 Microsoft Points) for the limited time, or $2.99 (240 Microsoft Points) for the three pack.

More thoughts and videos of the songs after the break!

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Over on Filefront I saw an interesting article highlighting the fact that the marketers around the new Penny Arcade game (Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness) have been using quotes that are a little less than complimentary in their ads:

The quotes don’t come from a gushing review, they are from a Penny Arcade hater by the name ddf on Wired’s blogs. In case you haven’t guess, ddf is the type of person that has absolutely no life and has the overwhelming need to tear the creative works of others down, because he (who are we kidding, this can’t be a she) can’t create anything himself.

Listen, I’m not a Penny Arcade fanboy. I like a lot of their strips and I bought the first two volumes of their comic strip collections, but there’s a lot of times they fall flat. I also find their commentary posts on their site both hard to read and smarmy. I can understand why people might not like them, but if you spend any amount of time actively trying to crap on them it’s a little freaking sad.

For the record this guy has a blog and yes he is a jackass on it. I’m not going to link to it in order to give him any kind of boost in traffic as a reward. If you’re curious though, here’s a tidbit of the kind of wit and substance that can be found there: “I hereby come out of my soap opera coma to coin the term “BioSuck” in regards to new lame FPS game Bioshock. Anyone using it from now on owes me royalties.” Uh yeah, because it’s so clever to put in “uck” after an “s” to mock something. When reading anything by this guy it’s nearly impossible to believe that he’s not some sort of plant created by the Penny Arcade crew to create some extra buzz for the game.

Grand Theft Auto 4 has now been out for 5 days, and with this being the first weekend since it’s release, I expect a lot of people will just be getting to grips with the game. So I thought we should take a look at what’s happened around the release, and how the game has been received in different quarters.

The sales bale began on Tuesday at Midnight, with many gamers queuing up at their local games retailer to be the first to get their hands on the game. 5 days later, and both Sony and Microsoft are already arguing over which console has seen the best return on the game. The only sales figures we actually have to go on at the point are from the UK, where the game sold 600,000 copies in 24 hours, making it the new one day record holder.

From the reviews of the game, it seems the PS3 version had a slight edge in the graphics department, looking sexier, and suffering from less frame-rate issues. Both versions have however shipped with bugs, with the PS3 reportedly suffering worse from Rockstar’s seeming inability to release a game without some sort of problem.

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I don’t know how this game passed by my attention thus far, but when my roommate downloaded the demo to Operation Darkness I thought, “Hey, a turned based 3D game based on WII that’s cool.” Sure, it was populated by douschebaggy looking anime characters, but I’ll take it because I have no other choice (check out my side rant below). What sold me though was that some of your soldiers are WEREWOLVES. It was like there was a scientific think tank put together to come up with a game idea that would make my head explode. I love me some werewolves, I love turn based strategy, and I love alternate history, but I love werewolves even more. The game seems to be pretty decent, but even if it turns out to be kind of sucky I’ll have to purchase it on principle alone. I need to encourage the development of more turn based strategy games that take place in significant times in history that features monsters of lore.

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No reason for this other than I like chicks.

Over on Gametap there’s a great article that delves into how achievements work and how they could be fixed. At first I thought the idea was silly, why would Xbox 360 achievements need to be fixed at all, they didn’t seem broken in the first place? However, the answer is that there is room for improvement and I’ve gathered my responses here. So here’s how it works, go there and read the article and come back here to read what I think and post your own thoughts. Got it? Good.

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If you’re like me and you still like playing Xbox games and either don’t have the original Xbox or your old one is broke then the limited amount of games available to play on the 360 is rather disappointing. The backwards compatibilty feature is underused, but at least they occasionally trickle updates for it. This round they added quite a few with the list following the break.

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Hey cheap-asses, remember that the Halo 3 Heroic Map Pack is now free so don’t forget to download it as soon as you can. I’d love to tell you how great or bad they are because I am indeed a cheap ass. I would love to download the Heroic map pack today, but my XBox is still not back in my hands after it’s unfortunate bout of the red ring of suck.

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Well, not quite on its own, but it can at least be the catalyst for a new baby to make its way in to the world.

A couple have met over Xbox Live, fallen in love, married, and now had their first baby together.

I’m sure this kind of thing has happened in PC gaming before, and also virtual world games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, but I’ve never heard about it happening in quite the same way as this one occurred.

Stacy and Mike Figueroa met while playing Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Lockdown over the Xbox Live network. Hatred rather than love for each other was the first emotion to surface though, with the pair starting off as online enemies, in different factions of the game.

After months of shooting each other, they ended up becoming team-mates, and then a little after that, they fell in love.

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