That Gaming Podcast.com

Posted by Ian

We’ve all heard about how much fun Rock Band is from our American cousins who’ve been playing the game for months now. We brits have had to wait paitently on the sidelines and make-do with Guitar Hero. Well no more! (well, for 360 owners anyway).

Yes fans, EA have finally announced the official European release date for Rock Band as May 23rd. However, they’ve also announced that this is only for the Xbox 360 version of the game and that PS3 and Wii owners are going to have to wait a couple more months to get their freak on as the title is a timed exclusive on the 360.

The game will launch with 67 songs included on the disc, including 9 exclusive to the European version. The DLC that has filled up the US Marketplace will then be made available for download here and EA have promised that future DLC releases will be simulataneous for both the US and European markets.

The full track listing for the game is listed below for your rocking pleasure:

Exclusive tracks

• Blur “Beattlebum” (English)
• Oasis “Rock ‘n’ roll star” (English)
• Tokyo Hotel “Through the Monsoon” (English)
• Muse “Hysteria” (English)
• Les Wamaps “Manu Chao” (French)
• Indochine “L’Aventurier” (French)
• Playmo “New Wave” (French)
• Die Toten Hosen “Hier Kommt Alex” (German)
• Juli “Perfekte Welle” (German)
• H-Block X “Countdown to Insanity” (German)

Non-exclusive tracks

1960’s:

• Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter”

1970’s:

• Aerosmith “Train Kept a Rollin”*
• The Who “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
• Boston “Foreplay/Long Time”
• Mountain “Mississippi Queen”*
• The Police “Next To You”
• David Bowie “Suffragette City”
• Black Sabbath “Paranoid”*
• Blue Oyster Cult “Don’t Fear The Reaper”
• The Ramones “Blitzkreig Bop”
• Deep Purple “Highway Star”
• KISS “Detroit Rock City”
• Molly Hatchet “Flirtin With Disaster”
• The Outlaws “Green Grass & High Tides”*
• Sweet “Ballroom Blitz”

1980’s:

• Rush “Tom Sawyer”*
• Bon Jovi “Wanted Dead or Alive”
• The Clash “Should I stay or Should I Go”
• Faith No More “Epic”
• Pixies “Wave of Mutilation”
• R.E.M “Orange Crush”
• Iron Maiden “Run To The Hills”

1990’s:

• Foo Fighters “Learn To Fly”
• Metallica “Enter Sandman”
• Nirvana “In Bloom”
• Stone Temple Pilots “Vasoline”
• Weezer “Say It Aint So”
• Smashing Punpkins “Cherub Rock”
• Radiohead “Creep”
• Beastie Boys “Sabotage”
• Hole “Celebrity Skin”
• Garbage “I Think I’m Paranoid”
• Soundgarden “Black Hole Sun”

2000’s:

• The Hives “Main Offender”
• Queens Of The Stone Age “Go With the Flow”
• The Strokes “Reptilia”
• Jet “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”
• OK Go “Here it Goes Again”
• Nine Inch Nails “The hand That Feeds”
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Maps”
• Red Hot Chilli Peppers “Dani California”
• Coheed & Cambria “Welcome Home”
• Fallout Boy “Dead on Arrival”
• The Killers “When You Were Young”
• New Pornographers “Electric Version”
• Unlockable Tracks:
• Anarchy “Blood Doll”
• Bang Camaro “Pleasure (Pleasure)”
• Crooked X “Nightmare”
• Death of the Cool “Can’t Let Go”
• Flyleaf “I’m So Sick”
• Freezepop “brainpower”
• Honest Bob and The Factory-to-Dealer Incentives “I Get By”
• The Acro-bats “Day Late, Dollar Short”
• The Konks “29 Fingers”
• The Mother Hips “Time We Had”
• Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld “Timmy and the lords of the Underworld”
• Tribe “outside”
• Vagiant “seven”

Track listing originally posted on CVG.com

Posted by Ian

Sony US have released the next official firmware update for the PSP. Firmware 3.95 (as it’s known to guys in the know) offers configurable buttons for Playstation One titles and the ability to quit remote play with your PS3, but still leave your PS3 switched on.

To get the update, just connect your PSP to the cyberweb and choose Network Update from the XMB. Easy as pie. Or, if you prefer the more long-winded way just click on the link below.

Firmware Download

Click here to download 3.95 PSP firmware

Word!

Posted by Ian

Ok, so I’ve finally managed to get some proper gaming time in this past weekend (the last few weekends me and the wife have been assembling various pieces of furniture). There’s been one thing I’ve been playing all weekend; Variety Pack Team Deathmatch on COD4.

WOW! I’ve never had so much fun online in a game. Whilst the maps were only playable in 3 online modes over the weekend Infinity Ward were tempting players to log-on and play by offering double XP all weekend. This was great for me, I managed to level up 5 times!

Whilst 4 maps were released in the pack: Chinatown, Creek, Broadcast and Kill House, only the first 3 were in the rotation cycle. Each of the new maps are brilliant and remaking Carentan from COD2 and giving it a modern look and feel (Chinatown) was a stroke of genius.

The Maps

The Creek map can be played in several different ways, snipers can sit on top of the rocks surrounding the gulch and pick off opponents. Players preferring to take their combat up-close and personal can opt for a shotgun and hide out in the cave, whilst troopers can run around freely with either machine gun weapons or rifles and achieve a healthy number of kills. Firefights in the confines of the cave can be very manic and it’s always satisfying to lay the odd claymore mine and then watch some fool rush in only to get blown sky high (and earn you plenty of lovely XP).

This map is the one best suited to a 12 player game.

Chinatown is my favourite new map. As stated, it’s the Carentan map from COD2, but with a new lick of paint. This made it immediately familar to me (and indeed anyone else that’s played COD2). However, Infinity Ward have made some very subtle changes to the map that can affect gameplay. For a start a few of the buildings have an extra floor, so you can get up higher, the angle from the mounted machine gun window has been slightly changed to improve the balance, (you can actually make it across the square in the street in front of the window without it being guaranteed that you would get shot to shreds). The turning axis of the gun has also been increased so you can now shoot people in the opposite window.

These changes result in more finely balanced firefights and this was demonstrated several times with games on this map often being decided by just one extra kill.

Broadcast is set in the TV station level from the single player campaign. Most of the level is indoors and combines both open plan rooms with narrow corridors. The fighting tended to centre around 2 locations on the map, the stairs and lobby in the TV studio and the roof of the building. This map tends to ‘push’ you towards these areas.

People seem to ignore entire areas of this map (the back part of it outside behind the buildings). This isn’t a bad thing though, as the feeling you get from calling in an airstrike when you know all the opposing team are on the roof is unsurpassed and your kill count can increase quickly and dramatically. Graphically this one seems the weakest of the 3 maps, though its still great looking, with plenty of detail.

Overall the Variety Map Pack is a brilliant addition, to what was already my favourite FPS of all-time. Well worth the 800 MS points (about £6.50). I can’t wait for the next batch of DLC for the game. In the meantime I’m back online in COD 4 tonight!

Word!

Posted by Ian

In a totally surprising move, Sony have attacked the 360 and put over their own machine the Playstation 3.

This latest verble bashing given by the Japanese giant sees them proclaiming that MS may have ‘punched themselves out of the fight’ by releasing all the big titles for the 360 in the first 2 years of the console’s life. Meanwhile, Sony themselves say that the recent momentum in sales for them coupled with titles like MGS4, GT5 Prologue and various new IPs they have lined up provide both a good base for existing users of PS3 whilst demonstrating that they still have a lot left to offer that we know about (Home, Little Big Planet, Motorstorm 2) and lots of new things we don’t yet know about.

Whilst I believe that the PS3 still has a lot of untapped power I wouldn’t say the 360 has shown us everything it can do yet either - not by a long shot. The recent demo of the new features in Unreal Engine 3 prove that it’s software that will be making the biggest changes to gaming this gen, not hardware. The majority of multiplatform titles look almost identical on both consoles, including titles like Burnout Paradise that was developed first on the PS3, then ported to the 360.

In the end, the conclusion I reach is that both consoles are great and we should all just enjoy gaming (unless you’re Anne Diamond, or her sons).

Word!

Posted by Ian

Unreal Tournament, Epic’s online (mainly) FPS frag-fest is still coming to 360, despite earlier reports that the title was having problem due to Microsoft not wanting user generated content (new maps and mods) on their system.

Mark Rein, the head honcho at Epic, has posted an entry on the company forums stating the title is ‘coming along nicely’ on the 360 and that members of the press will get the chance to play the game for the first time in a couple of weeks when Midway holds it’s gamers day event. However, there’s still no word on an offficial release date for the title. Maybe they’ll announce it at the Midway event?

I recently (very recently, still waiting for it to be delivered) bought UT 3 on the PS3. As listeners to the podcast will know I was waiting for the game to be available for a lot cheaper than the usual £40 price tag, and I managed to snag a (nearly) new copy of it from Ebay yeseterday for the discounted price of £19.99 - not bad at all.
It will be interesting to see how the game perfoms on the 360, compared to the PS3 version as Microsoft’s console is associated with online play far more than the PS3 (at least for us here it is).

Posted by Ian 
The official time for the launch of the new COD 4 map pack is 2.30pm this afternoon. WOOOO! The Variety Map Pack (as it’s officially known) will contain 4 new maps, Creek, Broadcast, Chinatown and Killhouse and John Shiring (programmer of the game, or one of them anyway) said the maps came about as a result of community feedback.

The maps are only for the 360 version of the game at the moment, with Infinity Ward informing us that the PS3 versions will be made available in about 3 weeks time (so not that long to wait really).

I will be downloading these later tonight to play in my shiny new gaming room. The map pack will set you back 800 MS points (about £6.50 in earth money).

Posted by Ian
 
So you’ve burned around the streets, beeches and mountains of Paradise City and taken all of the advice offered by DJ Atomika but there’s still more to do in Burnout Paradise, well, there will be more to do later this year, that’s according to the developers of the game Criterion.

They say, on their official website, that the updates they’ve got planned are so significant that they’ve had to give them code names, because the usual number updating system just don’t cut it for these guys. The three updates will be rolled out later this year and in the order of ‘Cagney’, then ‘Davis’ and then ‘Eastwood’. But what could all this mean? Will we see new areas added onto the map, new events becoming available, different vehicles being added in? Maybe there’ll be weather additions or a day/night cyle? Who knows?

I would assume, at this stage, that these updates are coming for both the 360 and PS3 versions, though Criterion haven’t actually specified this as yet.

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see, in the meantime - get online and get those multiplayer challenges done!

Posted by Ian 

Kazunori Yamauchi, the creator of legendary racing series Gran Turismo has revealed that patch, to be made available later in the year, will finally add vehicle damage to the cars along with a several new ‘community building’ features for the online portion of the game.

I tried out the online racing for myself for the first time last night and had a great experience in doing so. The matchmaking was quick, the racing was lag free and it was just plain fun.

GT5 Prologue was released in the UK on March 28th and has become the fastest selling PS3 title to date.

If you’re not picked up a copy yet, I highly recommend you do so (Mark).

For more details on this story head on over to CVG.com.

The 4th episode of our increasingly popular podcast is now available to download right from this very post (or the podcast page). Better yet, why not click on the iTunes subscription button below and get each episode every week automatically?

Some of the things we talk about in this week’s show include the PS3 store update, Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 going multi-platinum, Anne Diamond as a game reviewer and eczema! All this plus our usual round-up of our own personal gaming experiences and interesting ’stuff’ we found on the Internet.

Have you heard that gaming podcast?

Podcast Download

Episode 4 - Click here to download (73mb)

Subscribe in iTunes

I’m fully aware that the site hasn’t been updated as much these past few days and for this I must apologise, there have been other things that have taken up my time.

However, I’ve now finished with them and should be able to update the site more regularly again.

To begin with here’s a rundown (in bullet-point form only) of the major news topics so far this week:

• PS3 - GT5 breaks UK PS3 sales records
• Tanya Byron’s report is done and she’s tidy
• GTA4 has been classified as ‘18′ - thanks Tanya
• Sony reckons the episodic content in GTA 4 for the 360 isn’t important (yeah, right!)
• Lots of April Fools stuff going on with various companies including a mock up of Altiar running around in Metal Gear Solid 4
• New PS3 store on the way in April, no content updates till then
• Microsoft should hit 2 million 360’s sold in the UK by next week
• 50 cent 2 actually looks pretty good
• Rainbow Six Vegas 2 sells 2 million worldwide
• PS3 COD4 DLC to arrive 3 weeks after the 360’s
• Mr Driller on XBLA today
• Capcom bags the rights to Moto GP
• Capcom buys Tenchu developer (WHY?)

Phew! Quite a bit of stuff there.

In addition to that news stream we’ll also be producing episode 4 of our podcast tonight - well, it’s almost certain it will be tonight, if it’s not then it will be done tomorrow, and that’s GUARANTEED!

Word!