Harmonix reviews Rock Band Network’s opening act

GDC 2010: Developers deliver a post-mortem on their indie-friendly user-created-song service, just weeks after taking the long-awaited project live in North America.

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Harmonix reviews Rock Band Network’s opening act

PlayStation Store Update: Testing Mega Man [North America]

This week, on the North American PlayStation Store: Mega Man 10, some new duds for MAG players and a big bundle of Resident Evil 5 zombie dirtbike goodness. More

Green Day: Rock Band tour kicks off June 8

Band-specific rhythm game gets simultaneous worldwide launch; North America-exclusive premium edition gets DLC voucher, free song export.

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Green Day: Rock Band tour kicks off June 8

Final Fantasy XIII Releases in North American Stores Today

Square Enix, the publisher of Square Enix interactive entertainment products in North America, announced today that the eagerly anticipated 13th entry in the series, Final Fantasy XIII, is now available at retail outlets across the big nation.

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Final Fantasy XIII Releases in North American Stores Today

The 10 Most Avidly-Played Wii Games In America (As Of March 1) [Wii]

At last, a new game on the list! Welcome back to Kotaku’s monthly look at the 10 most avidly-played Wii games, our so-called “measure of pleasure,” that charts which Wii games collect the least dust. Lego Star Wars has fallen to #11 thanks to the arrival of Harvest Moon: Animal Parade . People sure do like playing their Harvest Moon games a lot. (Click the chart to enlarge) For many months, the same games have appeared in this top 10, based on data pulled from Nintendo’s official tracking service of Wii users (full explanation of where the numbers come from below). The lack of a new entry has been disappointing, but understandable. These top 10 games each average more than 40 hours per person who plays them. Any new games have a long way to go before they reach that threshold, and some just don’t have enough content to come close. New Super Mario Brothers , for example, is only at 22 hours per player as of March 1. The surprisingly hot-selling Just Dance has been played, on average, just over five. The news this month, though, is that a new Harvest Moon, subtitled Animal Parade, has given its players enough of a fever. It cracks the top 10, with a 43-hour, 59-minute average playing time. Animal Parade knocks Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga off the list. That game ascended to an average playing time of 43 hours and 52 minutes, but was passed by the Animal Parade rocket. Expect Lego Star Wars, which continues to post steady play-time increases, to return in a few months, passing the stagnating or declining likes of Rock Band 2 or The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. Those games are hovering at close to 46 and 47 hours per player, respectively. In The Margins -One game that continues to bear watching is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Reflex Edition . The online multiplayer of Call of Duty: World at War has helped that 2008 Wii game to post high numbers on this chart. The 2009 Reflex edition isn’t Top 10 material yet, but in the past four months it has shot up from about 17 hours per player to 32.5, gaining 5.5 of its hours in just the past month. It has a shot of making this list someday. -Slow and steady but never successful enough to make the Top 10, Mario Kart Wii is about to reach the 37-hour mark. It hit the 36-hour mark over the New Year, making it one of the most-played games on the Wii. That is a great feat for any top-selling game, given how prone the top-sellers are to having some consumers drag the average playing time down. -No one asked, but Jeep Thrills rose from an average playing time, as of February 1, of 3 hours, 32 minutes, to, a month later, 3 hours, 35 minutes. Who even knew there was a game called Jeep Thrills? Where’s all this from? (AKA an explanation of the above chart for stat junkies only) : In a move somewhat surprising for the generally secretive company, Nintendo makes all of this data public. Any Wii owner can download the Nintendo Channel to their Wii and begin browsing for games. Any game that has been played enough times has usage stats listed for it, contributed by anyone who chose to share their data with the channel. The sample size that the channel tracks is pretty good, though it is obviously biased toward users who hook up a Wii to the Internet. We calculate that sample size by looking at Wii Sports usage numbers, which show that more than 98 million sessions of that game have been played by Nintendo Channel users as of March 1 (up 4 million in the last month), for an average of 29.66 sessions per player. That divides to more than 3.3 million Wii Sports users whose gaming has been tracked by the channel. Since almost all Wii Sports owners in North America would be Wii users, we will venture that as many as 3.3 million people have contributed stats. That is up from the 3.2 million people when these numbers were run for February 1. (October 09 data is not included on the chart due to a problem with Nintendo’s data reporting in the previous month.)

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The 10 Most Avidly-Played Wii Games In America (As Of March 1) [Wii]

How To Score Your Red Dead Redemption Preorder Bonus [Preorder Bonus]

The results are in for Rockstar’s choose your own Red Dead Redemption preorder outfit , but you’re not getting your Deadly Assassin just by entering a code. This here’s the Wild West, and you’re gonna have to jump through some hoops. Not only does the Deadly Assassin outfit look damn fine, it also allows your character in Red Dead Redemption to use his Dead Eye targeting feature twice as often in combat, which sounds like a mighty nice bonus. The sort of mighty nice bonus you’re going to have to work for. Here are the steps you’ll need to take to obtain that handy getup. Win a Duel in Armadillo – Travel to the town of Armadillo, and accept the challenge to fight a duel. Just make sure to win. Capture or Kill Mo Van Barr – While in Armadillo, find the wanted poster for Mo Van Barr, accept the Bounty Hunting mission and bring this notorious member of the Walton Gang to justice, dead or alive. Solve the Mystery of the Missing Townsfolk – People have been disappearing for weeks from the outskirts of Armadillo. Track down the clues, solve the mystery and live to tell the tale. Search Coot’s Chapel – Find the ruins of Coot’s chapel in the wilds of Cholla Springs, and search it for treasure. Complete the Twin Rocks Hideout – Find the legendary criminal hideout of Twin Rocks, located North of the town of Armadillo, to complete this final challenge. Once you do all that, you’ll be the finest looking hombre this side of the Mississippi, and a deadly shot to boot. Red Dead Redemption will be released on May 18 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

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How To Score Your Red Dead Redemption Preorder Bonus [Preorder Bonus]

My 10 Years With The PlayStation 2 [Happy Birthday PS2]

On March 4, 2000, Sony unleashed the successor to their wildly successful PlayStation on an unsuspecting world. Ten years later I’ve still got PlayStation 2 games on preorder. And to think I didn’t even care until 2002. In 1999, I was still new to the internet video game press business, but that was okay, as it was still new to itself. I hooked up with an outfit called Videogamers.com (now very, very defunct) the year before, mainly because I lived in Atlanta, home of E3 1998. A year later, E3 returned to its Los Angeles home, and rather than have the show covered by the members of our staff that lived in L.A., me and a sixteen-year-old named Joshua flew across the country on our own dime to cover the show. Perhaps I, at the age of 26, was there to represent the more mature face of Videogamers.com, a site where I was the only writer old enough to legally drink. At one point my editor-in-chief showed up at our hotel, and I had to run down the street to buy him beer. Good times. While Sony announced the next PlayStation months before E3 1999, they didn’t bring much to the show, outside of upcoming releases for the original PlayStation. There was an impressive demonstration of the console’s new Emotion Engine chip, recreating the ball scene from Final Fantasy VIII. The company also had Gran Turismo 2000, the game that would become Gran Turismo 3: A-spec, playable on the show floor, but it wasn’t running on anything resembling a PlayStation 2. If I recall correctly, and it’s been quite a while, they had Plexiglas cubes with the console’s guts inside of them. Cubes that would, on occasion, overheat. The game looked astounding, but Gran Turismo was never a franchise that got my motor running. Sony had big plans, but it wasn’t Sony’s year. It was Sega’s. It was the Dreamcast’s year. It was the year Soul Calibur was all over the show floor, with arcade cabinets on hand to demonstrate how much better the console version looked. Sega announced a release date of 9/9/99, and a price of $199, much less than the debut price of its predecessor, the Sega Saturn. I fell in love with the Dreamcast. Hell, everyone there fell in love with the Dreamcast. By the time Sony released the PlayStation 2 in Japan, ten years ago today, I was content to sit in my living room, clunky-yet-comfortable Dreamcast controller in hand, listening to the reassuring and extremely loud whir of that console’s GD-ROM drive. That’s not to say I didn’t feel a strong desire to possess a PS2. As the console’s October 2000 release in North America approached, I began to experience the feeling of my stomach twisting in knots that I’ve since come to associate with the possibility of not having the latest gaming technology the moment it hit store shelves. I was reading everything I could about the console, poring over screenshots and what passed for internet video in 2000. Commercials like these did not help. It got so bad that come October I was desperate to own Sony’s lovely new black and blue console. Unfortunately Sony had other plans. Sony launched the PlayStation 2 in North America on October 26, 2000. No, let me correct that. Sony released approximately a dozen PlayStation 2 consoles in North America on October 26, 2000. Or so it felt. Parts shortages kept Sony from bringing sufficient numbers to the market to meet demand, and those that did show up at retail were grabbed by rotten bastards and sold on eBay for over a thousand dollars a pop. The console’s solid launch line-up didn’t help my cravings. As a fighting game fan, the lure of Tekken Tag Tournament, Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore, and Street Fighter EX3 had me shivering with (mostly unfounded) excitement. Rockstar had Midnight Club and Smuggler’s Run. Namco brought Ridge Racer V. EA was there with SSX, which was probably the best game out of the bunch (we miss you SSX!). Unreal Tournament and Timesplitters scratched the first-person shooter itch. KOEI released Kessen, for some odd reason. There were even four role-playing games released during the console’s launch window, though none of them was Final Fantasy, so no one particularly cared. And that really was my saving grace. There was no PlayStation 2 Final Fantasy title at launch. If there had been, I would have robbed a church, or sold my nephew on the black market, just to fund an eBay purchase. I suppose I have Square Enix to thank for not writing this article from prison. Between some amazing Dreamcast games and the November release of Final Fantasy IX for the original PlayStation, I managed to curb my impulses. In December of 2000, I re-discovered EverQuest, which didn’t go so well for me . So when and why did I finally cave and buy a PlayStation 2? Once again, it was all Square Enix’s fault. On December 20, 2001, the company previously known as Squaresoft released Final Fantasy X for the PlayStation 2. Unfortunately I was too poor at the time to justify the purchase of a bag of rice, much less an entire video game console, but a few months later I scraped up enough cash to pick up a used system and a copy of Final Fantasy X. It was Final Fantasy X that reignited my love of console gaming, after a little over a year spent living on EverQuest and Mountain Dew. I played the game to completion over the course of four days, and then I scraped up some more cash and went back to the game store to make up for lost time. The PlayStation 2 led to the purchase of an Xbox (Halo) and then a Gamecube (well I already had the other two, might as well). Those were the days of the console switch box, when I didn’t have a TV riddled with connectors for everything from my iPod to my toaster. My game collection grew to staggering proportions, but for the lifespan of my Xbox and Gamecube, the PlayStation 2 titles were always the most plentiful. The PlayStation 2 will always hold a special place in my heart, as a gamer and, more importantly, as a hardcore role-playing game fanatic. Like its predecessor, the system was a haven for RPG titles. The Gamecube had a handful of solid RPGs. The Xbox had Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Dynasty, and Sudeki, which Maxim rated 5 out of 5 stars, establishing the men’s magazine as a really bad place to get game reviews. The PlayStation 2, on the other hand, seemed to have a different RPG coming out every week. Strategy RPGs, turn-based 2D RPGs, real-time 3D action RPGs – even some of the most obscure, esoteric Japanese titles made it to North America on the PlayStation 2. I’ve got at least thirty PS2 role-playing games in my living room, and I’m nowhere near completing my collection. The real beauty of the PlayStation 2, however, is that fans of any genre can make the same claim (though the Xbox might have a lock on the sports category.) Over the years the console has seen enough shooters, puzzlers, platformers, shmups, sims, strategy games, action-adventure titles, racers, and fighters to keep any gamer satisfied. And now the console is a decade old. Ten years later, I have a PlayStation 2 in my living room and my bedroom, though they are both the streamlined slim models released in 2004. I’ve still got memory cards for the console lurking in every darkened corner of my apartment. Many have moved on to the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii, but few (outside of those with the backwards compatible PlayStation 3 60GB model) have put their PlayStation 2 out to pasture. The new releases have slowed to a trickle, but they’ve yet to stop. Ten years, and I’ve still got a PlayStation 2 game reserved at my local game store. Will my purchase of Sakura Wars: So, Long My Love be the last game I purchase for the PlayStation 2? Somehow I doubt it. [ E3 1999 image courtesy of Giant Bomb ]

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My 10 Years With The PlayStation 2 [Happy Birthday PS2]

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is Now Available in Retail Stores

DICE, an Electronic Arts Inc. studio, today announced that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the Xbox 360 video game console from Microsoft is now available at retail stores in North America at a cost of $59.99; a launch trailer.

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Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is Now Available in Retail Stores

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is Now Available in Retail Stores

DICE, an Electronic Arts Inc. studio, today announced that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the Xbox 360 video game console from Microsoft is now available at retail stores in North America at a cost of $59.99; a launch trailer.

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Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is Now Available in Retail Stores

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is Now Available in Retail Stores

DICE, an Electronic Arts Inc. studio, today announced that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the Xbox 360 video game console from Microsoft is now available at retail stores in North America at a cost of $59.99; a launch trailer.

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Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is Now Available in Retail Stores

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