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Harmonix's Rock Band 3 hit US shelves earlier today - and there was DLC waiting at home for day-one consumers.


A three-pack of The Doors' songs has been made available for free to fans during the first week of launch (Oct. 26-Nov. 1).

The free pack, available through the Rock Band 3 in-game Music Store, includes Light My Fire, Riders on the Storm and Touch Me.

As already announced, an additional nine-pack of songs from The Doors was released today, available for purchase.

More DLC coming to Rock Band 3 in the near future includes tracks from artists including Billy Joel, John Lennon and Bon Jovi.

The game has won handsome reviews. Xbox World 360 gave it 95/100 calling it "close to pefection. It's out in Europe and the rest of the world on Friday.

Meanwhile, Harmonix and EA has revamped the game's official website. When players link their RockBand.com accounts to their Rock Band 3 profiles, all their gameplay goals and achievements will be published to a personalised "My Gameplay" page on RockBand.com.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...VG-General-RSS ...

The internet swung its fists around like Lady Macbeth on her sixth Stella last night when it was speculated, by analysts and journos alike, that Apple was going to make a sensational unsolicited takeover bid for... something.
That’s right; something. It could be EA, city analysts said. It could be Sony, others claimed.
And then, in what I’m sure is irrefutable evidence that there’s a complex and beautiful inherent logic to all of this, analysts started making completely different predictions.
Wait! It could be Netflix, they said. Hang on, what about Disney? Facebook, they screamed, it must be Facebook. Oh, that means Twitter too, innit.
Never doubt the sheer insatiability of market speculation. By the end of the day, we had one analyst, whom I’ll spare the mention of, suggesting Apple could be buying Adobe.

Sod it, why not? Apple has $51 billion in its iPhone-hugging pockets. That’s enough to match the GDP of Bulgaria, with spare change to buy Manchester United, the Dallas Cowboys, the New York Yankees, Real Madrid and – perhaps if he has no issues selling himself – Tiger Woods.
So why shouldn’t the analysts go a bit crazy? Why stop there? Why not predict Apple buying Nestle, claim ownership of the Catholic Church and acquire a 51 per cent controlling half the moon? (The shiny half, naturally.)
Of course, that’s only part of the reason why the markets suffered a spot of post-recession stress disorder last night.
Not only is Apple richer than Jesus, it’s also a company with interests in music, film, smartphones, PCs, apps, social networks and, of course, games.
It meant there was whole village of possible buyout targets that the analysts could throw their grenades at. But a games company? Let’s not be cruel.
Those predicting Apple is going to buy a games firm have published their spiel, I suspect, with little consideration for the manner in which Apple has invaded the games market, where it has succeeded and how it has rewritten the rulebook.
Apple’s made over $330 million from app and game sales in less than two years. And it’s doing this with a Greenspan-esque lighter-than-light-touch approach: No exclusivity deals, no timed DLC packages, no studio buyouts, no messing. It simply approves games, takes a 30 per cent cut, and watches them either sink or swim on its oceanic App Store.

Why Apple would like to risk making its own games in this money-making equation is quite beyond me. It’s like a casino owner deciding he can make a pretty penny if he spends a week or two on the roulette table.
Not wishing to talk the games industry down, but the publishing and development sectors are brutally factionalised, with firms often saddling frightening levels of debt just to nod ahead of the pack.
Sales are utterly unpredictable, too. While the likes of Just Dance and Aliens vs Predator jumped atop the charts, the heavily-promoted Enslaved and MMA made little more than a dent.
The last two years alone have seen old empires Midway and Atari fall off a cliff, and the biggest games studio in Scotland evaporate after spending five years on developing a game.
As much I like to visualise Apple announcing a game company acquisition (surely it would come with a ‘magical’ video of the lucky game company boss talking the usual bollocks to the background music of some acoustic-guitar-pop), the likelihood is slim.
Valve, however, might be an option. Steam is a digital buoy keeping the sunken ship of PC gaming away from deep waters. Bringing that exclusive to Mac would deliver immediate schadenfreude.
But I’m not especially convinced that Apple is going to procure anything at all, really; at least not anything as well defined as the big companies that are being cited.
Apple doesn’t build on existing businesses. It’s got to the stage it’s at today by, quite uniquely, building everything from scratch.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...y-a-games-firm ...

The iPhone 4, iPad and iPod Touch take the top three spots on kids' Christmas wish lists, research has found.
According to the Duracell Toy Report, around 39 per cent of the five to 16-year-olds who took part in the study are asking for Apple gadgets this year.
17 per cent of five to eight year-olds, 50 per cent of nine to 12 year-olds, and 66 per cent of 13 to 16 year-olds put the Apple items at the top of their lists.
In fourth place was the new Kinect for Xbox.
The report also revealed that modern children had on average of 39 toys or gadgets to play with - more than twice as many as their parents did at the same age.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/34990...hristmas-lists ...

via Eurogamer


An Xbox 360 demo for Game Republic's Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom is available to download now.

Queue it up here so it's sitting pretty in your Xbox 360 harddrive when you get home. But know this: it weighs in at 237.4 MB.

What is Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom? It's described as a "new fusion of cooperative stealth and action".

You play a hero alongside the AI-controlled monster Majin. You have to combine your talents to overcome obstacles and horrible beasties. There are "over 30 hours of gameplay" on offer.

Christian Donlan went hands-on in May. "Can Game Republic hit the sweet spot between something tender and something thrilling? Can the developers offer a simple fable that still has room for a bit of substance along the way?" he asked. ...

via MCV


Microsoft is unlikely to pillage its back catalogue of Xbox titles for the high definition remake treatment on Xbox 360.

The admission comes from Microsoft Game Studios VP Phil Spencer, who told IGN: “I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea. I'm going to think about it from the customer's perspective, and are we really delivering something of value to the customer at a price that they want?
The assertion flies in the face of what is increasingly becoming an established tactic in the industry. PlayStation platform holder Sony has already released an HD re-working of its God of War duo from PS2, and has further projects on the way.

Ubisoft, too, is to resurrect both Beyond Good & Evil and Prince of Persia for modern consoles while Sega is also revisiting some of its Dreamcast library and releasing them on Xbox Live and PSN. ...

via IGN


Travis Touchdown, the foul-mouthed, beam katana-wielding anime enthusiast, is officially coming to the PlayStation 3 next year. The original No More Heroes, which hit the Wii in 2008, impressed gamers with its over-the-top sense of style, gruesome boss fights, and hilarious video game references. Now, the action is making the jump to the HD space with No More Heroes: Heroes' Paradise, exclusive to the PlayStation 3 in North America.

Heroes' Paradise will once again put players in the boots of Travis Touchdown as he fights his way to the top of a ranked assassins association. Heroes' Paradise will include new bosses not available in the original Wii version, as well as PlayStation Move support to keep up the tradition of motion-based attacks.

Heroes' Paradise is scheduled to launch sometime next year. ...

Grumbling over the prospect of spending $150 on a Kinect sensor? At least you didn't have to drop $30,000 to get your Sonic Free Riders on. The NYT reports that the first Kinect prototype cost Microsoft that much to build -- which kind of makes the fact that Microsoft was able to get that technology into a $150 box (on each sale of which, the Times' Ashlee Vance notes, MS will profit) a bit more impressive.

The article provides a tidbit of new information about how the device recognizes people. In the case of identical, identically-dressed twins, the Kinect's software will evidently distinguish between the two by asking each to identify him or herself. "'If it can't disambiguate, we say, 'Please tell us if you are A or B,'" Xbox director of incubation Alex Kipman said. "Then, you end up with the equivalent of a different bar code." You'll be able to turn your family into bar codes on November 4.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/10/25/fi...rosoft-30-000/ ...

The studio behind the God of War PSP games is working on a brand new story driven action adventure that's based on an in-house intellectual property, Eurogamer has learned.

Independent studio Ready at Dawn – the developer behind upcoming PSP game God of War: Ghost of Sparta – said fans can expect a reveal "soon".

"We haven't narrowed down mechanics," RAD co-founder, creative director and ex-Blizzard staffer Ru Weerasuriya told Eurogamer this afternoon.

"I love playing story driven games. I love movies. I love things that involve me from start to end and give me a complete experience.

"That's where our heads are. It's definitely that kind of game we're going to make. We're not going to go off and make an open world, or an MMO, like everybody expects ex-Blizzard people to do.

"We know what we'd like and we know what we're good at."

Sounds a bit like Naughty Dog's stupendous PS3 exclusive Uncharted 2, doesn't it?

"It's the kind of game we're going to make," Weerasuriya said. "I'm just glad they did it first. It should prove to everybody it's doable and it's worth doing that kind of stuff."

So, which platform is RAD creating its next game for? While the PSP seems like the obvious choice – the California studio's games include PSP games Daxter, God of War: Chains of Olympus and God of War: Ghost of Sparta - Weerasuriya confirmed Ghost of Sparta is "our last PSP game".

"I can tell you it's going to be whatever platform our engine runs on," he said. "Right now our engine runs on pretty much anything that's available out there."

Weerasuriya was talking about the Ready at Dawn Engine, the studio's in-house cross-platform tech used to create Ghost of Sparta.

"It gives us the choice to move where we need to move for the games we want to do. The most important thing is not the platform. It's the game. We know what type of game we want to make. It's what we've built our skills around: character driven, story driven action adventure games."

Eurogamer's Ghost of Sparta review has just gone live with a 7/10.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...me-from-own-ip ...

EA is set to release a Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit demo this week. Xbox 360 owners can play from tomorrow and PS3 owners the day after.

But note that the demo will disappear on 9th November. Why? Because of online features that presumably clash with what the live servers will offer when Hot Pursuit launches on 19th November.

Specifically, you can test the game's social network Autolog, which provides updates and challenges and keeps you abreast of what your friends are up to.

It's one of the more ambitious features of Burnout maker Criterion's new game

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-demo-tomorrow ...