Gaming Links and Notes
First off, a few Guitar Hero/Rock Band notes.Michael Lyons e-mailed with four new songs announced for Guitar Hero III:
Suck My Kiss - Red Hot Chili Peppers-
La Grange - ZZ Top-
Number Of The Beast - Iron Maiden-
Through The Fire And Flames - Dragonforce
The Hanger 18 of GH III is going to be Dragonforce. Here's the song. How would you play that? I have no idea.
Francis Cermak sent in a link to an article in the Chicago Tribute about Guitar Hero and its growing popularity during Happy Hour. "Guitar Hero Night' is turning into a bit of a phenomenon, and you can read about it here.
Jeremy sent in a link to a thread over at the ScoreHero forums where a group of users were flown out to California by Neversoft to playtest GHII. The thread is here, and here's one excerpt that I thought was very interesting:
One of the biggest gameplay changes was with the system for hammer-ons and pull-offs. Rather than being based solely on the timing of the notes, Neversoft is able to program certain notes to be strummed or hammer-ons. The general guideline is, if a note is strummed on a real guitar, it will probably have to be strummed in-game. When a note is a hammer on for a real guitar, you'll probably be able to do a hammer-on for it in-game. This provides a much more realistic feeling to the charts.
I believe that's similar to what Rock Band is doing, based on the neck buttons on the Rock Band controller.
In Rock Band news, Nirvana's Nevermind has been confirmed as the second album. Another excellent choice. November is NEVER going to get here.
Issue 107 of The Escapist is online, and every article is interesting and worth reading, so instead of linking to individual articles, I'm just going to link to the issue's main page here. The theme is noir games, and yes, that's extremely cool.
If you're familiar with the Combat Mission series, you know how brilliant the games have been. Now there's a new installment--Combat Mission: Shock Force--and early word is extremely positive. There's a preview over at The Wargamer here, and over at the Battlefront website, you can find a link to the demo on the news page here. Thanks to Rob Varak for the links.
Joe Jaquette sent a link about how Nielsen Media Research is now tracking gaming data. I have no idea how they can really do this accurately, but it's interesting, and you can read the article here.
Greg Bagley sent in a link to Frets on Fire, an open-sourced "Guitar Hero type" game that includes keyboard support as well as a song editor. When I looked at this game a while back, guitar controllers weren't supported, but the latest notes on the game's website indicate that they can be used now. Take a look here.
Scott sent in a link to a very interesting video game review site called "The Video Game Critic." What distinguishes this site, apart from the absolutely huge number of reviews, is that games are reviewed for all platforms--for all time. You'll see a 360 review next to an NES review next to an Atari 7800 review, and like I said, there are a ton of reviews. Take a look here.
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