Monthly Archives: November 2009

Harmonix and MTV announced this morning that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band will be released as DLC for The Beatles: Rock Band next week on November 17 and 19 for Xbox 360/Wii and PS3, respectively.

This is the second full album to be released, with Abbey Road being the first, and Rubber Soul coming in December as the third album.

The complete album pack includes: Fixing A Hole, She’s Leaving Home, Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!, Within You Without You, When I’m Sixty-Four, Lovely Rita, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) and A Day In The Life.

Tacks Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, With A Little Help From My Friends, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Getting Better, and Good Morning Good Morning are already on the game disc, so the new tracks will complete the album.

Individually, each will run you $1.99/£.99/€1.49 EU, 160 MS Points, or 200 Wii Points ($2).

The pack will cost $13.49/£7.49/€8.99 or 1080 MS Points.

This week on the US PS video store, you can get four free episodes of KatalystHQ, which is Facebook’s first original web series, and a reality show revealing the inner workings of Ashton Kutcher’s production company.

As far as HD movies are concerned, highlights include Drag Me to Hell, Up!, and Land of the Lost starring Will Ferrell.

Also this week, we have decided to list the top HD movie downloads from last week, and it looks like the Travolta/Washington thriller, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, was top dog and Sandra Bullock’s The Proposal was number two.

Disney’s Earth is also on the list, which is gorgeous, but since we saw it at an IMAX Theater we don’t know how well it looks on a smaller screen. Might just be on par with your typical NatGeo program. Hit the link for the full thing.

HD Movies

• Up!
• Drag Me to Hell
• Drag Me to Hell (Unrated)
• Land of the Lost
• Enlighten Up!
• Familiar Strangers
• Spread
• The Merry Gentlemen
• Eden Log
• Fay Grim
• The War Within
• Woman Thou Art Loosed

Top Downloaded HD movies last week:

1. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
2. The Proposal (2009)
3. I Love You, Beth Cooper
4. Orphan (2009)
5. Aliens in the Attic
6. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
7. Mutant Chronicles
8. Disney’s Earth
9. Stan Helsing
10. Observe and Report

Acti Blizz CFO Tom Tippl has shown a slide in New York that appears to push Diablo III passed a 2010 release, Kotaku reports.

While StarCraft II, the Battle.Net revamp and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm were all shown to be hitting next year, Diablo III, StarCraft II expansion packs and Blizzard’s next MMO will release in the “next few years”.

Tippl was speaking at the BMO Capital Markets Conference last night.

Nintendo said today that Wii’s iPlayer now has its own channel.

“The new Wii Channel is expected to be available from 00:01 on Wednesday 18th November,” said the firm in a statement.

“We’re pleased that we’ve been able to work with Nintendo to evolve BBC iPlayer on the Wii, providing a faster, high quality and improved viewing experience,” said BBC chap Erik Huggers.

PR after the break.

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Bet you never saw this coming. ActiBlizz CFO Tom Tippl’s told this week’s BMO Capital Markets Conference that Call of Duty, as well as more of the firm’s “biggest franchises,” are to benefit from Blizzard’s World of Warcraft online money-making skills.

“It’s definitely an aspiration that we see potential in, particularly as we look at different business models to monetize the online gameplay,” said Tippl. “There’s good knowledge exchange happening between the Blizzard folks and our online guys.

“We have great experience also on Call of Duty with the success we had on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. A lot of that knowledge is getting actually built into the Battle.Net platform and the design of that,” he added. “I think it’s been mutually beneficial, and you should expect us to test and ultimately launch additional online monetization models of some of some of our biggest franchises like Call of Duty.”

Call of Warcraft 3. We kill ourselves. More on IGN.

Codemasters has put out system specs for the PC version of DiRT2. And here they are:

Recommended Specifications: Enhanced for DirectX 11

OS: Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
Processor: Intel Core i7 or AMD Phenom II
Memory: 3GB
HD Space: 10GB
Video Card: ATi Radeon HD 5700 Series

Minimum Specifications:

OS:Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3400+
Memory: 1GB (2Gb for Windows Vista)
HD Space: 10GB
Video Card: ATI Radeon X1500, NVIDIA GeForce 6800

The Games for Windows Live version ships on December 1 in North America, December 3 through EPAC territories and December 4 in the UK.

GT’s posted up a couple of HD movies of The Saboteur’s lead designer, Tom French, showing off sandbox gameplay in the Pandemix adventure, and very good it looks too. Here’s the first, here’s the second.

The game’s set in WWII Paris, casting the player as a race driver turned Resistance ally with access to perks, a gazillion weapons, tons of cars, an insane amount of sandbox objectives and an awful lot more.

The main story’s been beefed up to between 20-25 hours, and this is looking very Christmas gamey to us.

See for yourself. Thanks, Blerk.

Looks as though Pandemic’s been drafting some extra content into The Saboteur’s fight this Christmas: if comments by lead designer Tom French at EA’s winter showcase in London last week are to be believed, the WWII adventure has grown by up to eight hours since the summer.

“The main story of the game we’re seeing as 20-25 hours,” said the developer, speaking to the EU PS Blog.

“Then there are side missions as well, which are probably about another five hours of content.”

French said in June that, “We’re shooting for the player that just plays straight through the main story to be between 12-18 hours depending on how much the player is sprinting.”

So there you have it. Your buck now has more bang. On top of the mission-based stuff – there are collectable elements – like blowing up AA guns, to complete.

Watch the video after the break for full details. The game’s out on December 8 for PC, PS3 and 360.

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Do you have $9,000? Do you like PS3? Are you slightly retarded? Say aloha, then, to the gold-dipped PlayStation 3 Slim. Amazing scenes.

The console is not only coated in precious metal, but also comes with a choice of an 18kt gold logo with white diamonds or – and get this – a platinum, diamond-encrusted motif.

Buy two. Get one for the dog, or something. Marry Bobby Kotick and get 2,222 of them with his stock winnings this week. Go nuts.

Via Computer Choppers.

Ubi’s confirmed that Splinter Cell Conviction is to have in-game ads, and has provided advertisers with “heat maps” to show where best to place their creatives.

The hot spots show where players are most likely to go, natch.

The news came from a Microsoft Advertising’s Gaming Upfront presentation in New York last night.

More on Joystiq.

After the break. The Redeployment Germany DLC pack sounds amazing.

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Nintendo’s response to last night’s NPD release was to thank America’s consumers for keeping its machines and note that DS is about to break a one-year hardware sales record.

“We are very appreciative of the continued, strong consumer response to both of our systems as we head into the holidays, and are excited to bring to them our key games, like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which launches this Sunday, and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, which launches December 7,” said the company in a statement.

DS is “poised to surpass the all-time single-year US hardware sales record,” which was set in 2008 by the Wii with 10 million units.

Wii and DS sold 506,900 and 457,600 units respectively in America last month.

Thanks, GI.

Quick. Before it gets yanked. The first fill episode of Halo animation Halo Legends – titled The Babysitter – is after the break.

It was posted on Halo Waypoint earlier this week, apparently, before being removed.

Go go go. Thanks, Destructoid.

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Crysis and Crysis Warhead are now on sales at a 50 percent discount on Steam.

Both were £19.99 each. They’re now £9.99 each.

It’s cheap. You get to shoot stuff. Buy them before they go back up in price at the end of this weekend.

The US PS Blog just stuck up the weekly American PSN update. The most notable thing on it’s Braid for $15.

There’s a bunch of DLC and a Dita Von Teese PSP theme, in addition. It’s bonus city: we’re all the mayor.

Take a look.

Another month, another set of US sales figures. To summarise, America’s October was a bit rubbish. Unless you released Borderlands.

Should you be anal enough to need more information, you’ll find it below:

• October NPD – Wii holds first as PS3 moves down to 320k
• October NPD – Uncharted 2 tops on software front
• October NPD – US sales down 19% year-on-year
• October NPD – MS focuses on 360 hardware growth, software domination
• October NPD – DJ Hero sells 122,000, Brutal Legend 216,000

DJ Hero fell short of analyst predictions in the US last month, selling only 122,000 units.

Bear in mind the music game was only on sale for four days in the reporting period.

Here’s the platform breakdown, courtesy of Gamespot:

• DJ Hero (360) – 62,000 units
• DJ Hero (PS3) – 39,000 units
• DJ Hero (Wii) – 19,000 units
• DJ Hero (PS2) – 3,300 units

In addition, Brutal Legend sold 216,000 across 360 and PS3. Like this:

• Brutal Legend (360) – 150,000 units
• Brutal Legend (PS3) – 66,000 units

For the rest of the news from last night’s figures, hit this.

Acti boss Bobby Kotick sold nearly 2 million share in the firm this week, totalling profit of just over $20 million.

The options were worth $1.03 in 2000; they were worth between $11.43 and $11.51 per share from November 9 to November 11. Modern Warfare 2 launched on November 10.

Kotick took home $20.2 million in three days.

Enjoying your pew pews? Bobby is too.

More on Gamespot. Via Kotaku.

EA recently let a bunch of people go. You may have heard about it. Hell, in all likelihood, you may even be one of those people, considering how many heads rolled off the chopping block. However, according to EA SVP and CFO Eric Brown, your sacrifice was not in vain. You fueled the future. Or something.

“It’s no coincidence that we simultaneously announced a cost reduction in connection with the acquisition of PlayFish, because that represents, in our mind, a very important shift to digital direct,” Brown said during the BMO Capital Markets 2009 Annual Digital Entertainment Conference in New York.

Brown also shed some light on the motivations behind EA’s hook-up with PlayFish.

“One of the things they do exceedingly well is make a game for viral distribution … [another is] the quality of the revenue model,” he explained, talking about PlayFish’s microtransaction-centric business model. “We bought them for their IP and their game design expertise.”

More at Gamasutra.

If you don’t build it into the main game, they will come, apparently. Dragon Age’s DLC, which released alongside the full game last week, has already plucked $1 million from players’ all-too-willing wallets.

“Dragon Age just launched about a week ago, it’s doing very well,” said EA executive VP and CFO Eric Brown. “The game was designed at the outset to have extensive PDLC [paid downloadable content] at launch, as well through the next 12-plus months of its lifespan. We’re well past one million in PDLC, so the attach rate appears pretty good.”

Whoa, whoa, Dragon Age. Can’t we slow down a bit? We’ve hardly even spent 15 hours together, and you’re already talking white picket fences and DLC. Granted, we’re absolutely head over heels for you so far, but we’ve been burned before.

Thanks, G4.