"For Those About To Rock......."

....We give you a Price.

Well, almost.

Amazon.com have Rock Band listed as $169.99, released on 20/11/07.

Linkage! Clikkit bitches!

Amazon.co.uk and Play do not have a price or date as yet.

This should mean about £99.99 in the UK but will probably end up being £119.99 to £139.99.

Still, should be better than we were speculating the other week.

The set only contains one guitar though, along with microphone, drums and game.

Should be supported with down-loadable content in the future.

Metallica have, apparently, signed up to allow quite a few of their tracks to be used, as well as Enter Sandman which is on the game disc.

Looking at the included tracks, there's lots there worth playing, in my humble rock-addled view.

And with Guitar Hero III out soon as well, my pants are near saturation!

( "Nurse....Nurse....I'm wet again. Please change me!" )

I'll still be beaten by Mrs. Cookie, though.

Who would have thought that she'd turn out to be such a wizard on the (plastic imitation) guitar?

PlayStation 2 Modchip on a Memory Card

Make: is saying that 34 quid gets you a modchip that fits into a PS2 or PSTwo memport.

Memor32

TITWTWB - 11 November

Ok... Here we go for another TITWTWB (pron. tit-wut-wub). The games vying for our 10-second-spanned attention this week are here.

First up is the mighty midget; Nintendo's tiny trojan - the DS. Only one title jumps out at me this week for the DS, and it's not Animal Paradise ("Animal Paradise allows you to make friends with and earn the love of 18 different types of animal on your uncle's farm." - I think I saw the film at a party once.) This week's eye-grabbing title for the DS is Mario and Sonic at the Olympics, the two world famous characters together at last ready to battle it out at the Olympic Games. There's no real word on whether this is a straight-faced Track And Field game or if you're going to be firing off spin attacks in the 100 metres and munching performance enhancing fungi in the middle of the high jump event. As with last week's Beowulf and Simpsons, I'm wary of event specific tie-ins, ever since the KP Skips-inspired Clumsy Colin Action Biker game on the Spectrum.

The obvious choice for the PC next week is Crysis from Crytek, the makers of Far Cry, on an all-new CryEngine 2. There aren't any online reviews for this yet, just a couple of mag reviews, both in the 90s. What we can see is that the graphics are gorgeous. The gameplay is mooted to quite open-ended, allowing you to approach levels in a variety of ways, employing various tactics, enhanced by nano-suit and weapon mods. Some superb enemy AI rounds off what sounds like a very very nice FPS. Online multiplayer supports up to 32 players too. This is almost enough to make me think about getting my PC back up to scratch.

PS2 barely warrants a mention with Jackass The Game, International Cricket Captain III and Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey.

Just two releases on the PS3 this time round: Medal of Honor: Airborne and Assassin's Creed (more of which below.) MoH:A follows the fortunes of the 82nd Airborne division as they parachute into a massive area with each new mission. Maybe this will be different enough from other WWII shooters to feel fresh and interesting. The 360 version was met with middling approval, reviews picking up on stale mission objectives and difficult and unforgiving gameplay.

Sony's sexy shiny lozenge (which is getting sexier and shinier by the month), the PSP, is graced with two new releases next week. Firstly is the instantly dismissable International Cricket Captain III, and secondly is the could-be-interesting Warriors of the Lost Empire. An action/RPG slasher featuring two player co-op and short load times.

The 360 bag contains the F.E.A.R Files, a bundle of the Perseus Mandate and Extraction Point add-ons for F.E.A.R. I suppose if you've played F.E.A.R then you've already heard about these expansions, and considered purchasing them. I'm not really able to get worked up about them. Additionally we have a poorly reviewed World Championship Poker, and a (presumably) slipped Beowulf makes another appearance. Cream of the crop for Microsoft's chunky white hoover impressionist is Assassin's Creed. AC goes straight onto my must-play list (hovering corpses or not) with it's open-ended gameplay, impressive graphics and large city-based play areas.

And so on to the awards... I think I made a compositional error by putting the Turd of the Week at the end of last week's synposis, so this time I'm doing that first. Sorry DS, I'm picking on you again this week for the woefully daft and bizarre My Pet Dolphin. Pet sims have proven to be big money for Nintendo, with Nintendogs helping to launch the portable to its dizzying instant success. Other publishers quickly jumped on board with Dogz and Catz and the like. The Sims franchise followed with Sims 2: Pets. But have we really run out of standard domestic animals so quickly? What more unlikely pet could you wish for than a dolphin? Large, heavy, smelly, wet, dangerous and distinctly uncuddly, I can't think of an animal I'd like to share my home with less. Perhaps that's the point - you'll never have a pet dolphin, so it makes it worth simulating. What's the point of simulating a rodent you could pick up from Pets At Home for less than the price of the game cart? Hmm.... no, I won't change my mind. My Pet Dolphin you are Turd of the Week.

Poor old Assassin's Creed. Any other week it would've earned my highly prized Thumbs Up Game of the Week award. Unfortunately for Ubisoft there's a little unassuming console called the Wii. And on that console this week is a game I've been waiting nearly a decade to play - the spiritual successor to Super Mario 64... Ladies and Gentlemen I give you s u d 0's Game of the Week: Super Mario Galaxy. Already at the top of the metacritic Wii charts, two points above Zelda at 97/100, it has garnered four 100-point score reviews proving that Mario is as relevant today as ever. The disk is ready and waiting next to my Wii, but I've promised myself that I will finish Metroid Prime 3 before starting on this. Temptation is growing though, and my will is weak. It's only a matter of time...

Sorry guys - you knew I was going to do that didn't you?

Gamercards With Status

You may have noticed the slightly updated Gamercards down the right hand margin, courtesy of MyGamerCard.net. I think the information that MGC provide is slightly improved over the xbox.com link and the cards look a bit nicer too.

You'll see that mine contains my XBL status as well. You can get this on yours by following a sign-up procedure that approaches that of joining the Masons.

First off, go to MyGamerCard.net and sign up. They'll do the obligatory send-you-an-email-with-a-validation-link thing in it, so use a real email address. Also - use your proper XBL ID.

Then they send you a Private Message at the Xbox.com Forums (NOT an Xbox Live Message!) to which you reply, or you can log-in to MGC.net to initiate the message yourself. Once your XBL validity has been confirmed in this way you should check your profile at MGC and tick the four boxes at the bottom to enable this data in your gamercard.

This isn't really as arduous as it sounds and easier than I made it, as I didn't realise the PM came on the xbox forum rather than XBL.

MGC.net also have an ace gamerpic scout to help you find out where the cool gamerpics come from, how common they are and also to get a preview of a pack before you buy it on Marketplace.

GTA IV in April.

Wii60.com report that GTA IV is appearing on shop release sheets and promo boxes are arriving in store.

The date on the sheet is April 15 '08. It's a long time to wait, but then there's a lot of other stuff about at the moment.

Ready for the big one.

Having done Levels II and III of Halo 3 twice on Heroic and not gotten the achievements for either, nor the 250GP completion award, I'm about done with single player - I've seen the end, Finished The Fight - where're my fecking gamerpoints? Anyone want to join up for Legendary Co-op? Let's fix a couple of evenings and times. We're going to need three or four of us, and I don't mind not being Mister Chief.

If not, I'll be playing Metroid Prime 3 again, readying my Wii for Mario Galaxy.

"I Changed it's Path of Destruction...."

Another great Halo splatter, again beautifully edited. I'm seeing more and more of these and they just don't get old.