The founding of a nation is pretty significantand well worth getting excited about. The best way to display said excitement is, of course, with massive, colorful airborne explosions, a.k.a. fireworks. Tomorrow night, towns across the USA will be putting on fireworks displays, big and small — but why should you have to wait for it to get dark? The games you’ll find after the break will let you get all explode-y from the comfort of your living room, without the charred mess and frantic 911 call. So, put on your favorite patriotic tune (it’s “The Stars & Stripes Forever” for us) and make with the clicking!
Don’t worry, Hogwarts devotees, you won’t need a Marauder’s Map to find these new Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince videos. First, direct your gaze to the launch trailer above. Once finished, point your wand to the break and two more videos will magically appear. Said videos are “making of” featurettes that discuss, unsurprisingly, the making of the game, including the new dueling, Quidditch and potion-making features. You’ll also get to see Tom “Draco Malfoy” Felton working his best PR / Marketing schtick.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ships for every platform under the sun this week.
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon host, uh, Jimmy Fallon, laid down the gauntlet for one golf legend Tiger Woods recently, challenging him in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 on Wii. Kotaku reports that Tiger has accepted and will play Fallon on his late-night show this Thursday.
We take special interest in this because we’ve always had a dream of challenging Bill Laimbeer in his stellar SNES basketball romp, Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball, so you can bet we’ll be cheering Fallon on all the way.
It reads like so many rhythm/music game releases in the past — the ubiquitous track listleak. The Beatles: Rock Band is still a few months off from its September 9 release date but Ripten has gotten its hands on a leaked list of the possible tracks from the game (found after the break).
The list does include the three tracks we checked out in our hands-on with the game at E3, though it also looks an awful lot like a list of Beatles singles across their career. Ripten notes that the ten tracks found in the glorious opening to the game are all included in its leaked list — and it is approximately the same amount of tracks we know the game will be shipping with — though we’ve yet to receive any official confirmation or denial from MTV Games, Harmonix, or EA.
Update: A Harmonix spokesperson has confirmed to us that this leaked list of songs is definitely not the track list for The Beatles: Rock Band, saying, “The rumored ‘leaked’ list is not the disc track listing for The Beatles: Rock Band. We’ll be announcing more tracks throughout the summer. Stay tuned to thebeatlesrockband.com for the most up to date information about disc songs and downloadable content!”
In the latest trailer for Boom Blox: Bash Party, the man with a plan, Steven Spielberg, gets intimate and offers details on EA’s sequel to its beloved Wii puzzler. Marketing jargon is thrown around quite freely, with Spielberg admitting that Bash Party “takes Boom Blox to a new level” and that “all of the good ideas” were saved for the sequel. Yeah, right.
Thankfully, the video doesn’t stray into that territory for long, as we eventually get a close look at what we all want to see: multiplayer! If that doesn’t look like fun, then we must be dead.
According to EA’s Joe Booth, plans for the Nintendo Wii are “long-term” at EA, as the company tries to strike a good balance of titles for the popular platform in 2009. In an interview with the Official Nintendo Magazine, the senior producer for Electronic Arts’ Nintendo group said the company wants to “take some risks” with Nintendo’s home console.
“The industry has woken up to the Wii,” Booth told the mag. In his own estimation, Booth — who is overseeing Need for Speed Nitro for Wii — feels the Wii has a lot of “new energy,” which drives his group’s passion. Perhaps Nintendo’s energy stems from sailing high above the competition in hardware sales.
Electronic Arts has a slew of Wii exclusive software planned for 2009, including EA Sports Active and Dead Space: Extraction, along with special Wii versions of its annual sports franchises.
The background image on the Beatles: Rock Band site has changed from a studio full of instruments to a reproduction of the set of the Ed Sullivan show from the Beatles’ American debut on February 9, 1964. Without the band present, it just looks like the show is really proud of that drum riser.
We’re currently checking with Harmonix to verify whether you can play on this set in the actual game. With all the work that went into modeling it, it would be pretty silly if it didn’t show up in the game. We would, then, also expect at least one of the songs performed at that “really big shew” to be playable: “All My Loving,” “‘Til There Was You,” “She Loves You,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Are you getting tired of playing MySims and MySims Kingdom over and over again? Maybe you need something to help bridge the gap between MySims Party and MySims Agents. Good news: EA has dated MySims Racing, the MySims game that is about racing. The kart racer starring the almost intolerably cute MySims will be out in North America on June 12.
EA sent out new screenshots for the Wii version of the game, demonstrating some of the wacky powerups you can use against your opponents. A few standouts from EA’s list of in-game items: the Melon Accelerator (which shoots a watermelon at the closest car ahead of you), the Seed Thrower (shoots a seed at the ground that instantly grows into a tree), and, uh, Bunny Luv (invokes a Cupid-esque bunny to block opponents vision with cartoon hearts).
Anecdotally speaking, the guitar teaching business has never been better for Bo Moore, a West Pennsylvania guitar teacher. Speaking with The Tribune-Democrat, he says, “We’re so busy right now, and I think these games have been a big factor behind it,” referring to the likes of Guitar Hero and Rock Bandinspiring young musicians to pick up the real thing after playing the plastic equivalent. Quick, somebody tell Prince to chill out!
Moore says he’s seen a 35 percent uptick in guitar lessons over the past two years, an increase he attributes to the mainstream ubiquity of Activision and EA’s rhythm-based music games. In fact, around 80 percent of the over 100 students currently enrolled with him have taken to the guitar.Unfortunately for those teaching other instruments, business hasn’t been so hot. Moore claims, from conversations he’s had with other teachers, that business is down if you’re not teaching the guitar. “We need more kids learning to play woodwind instruments … we need more piano players,” he says.The piece’s author opines that titles like “Xylophone Xanadu” might help to push kids into other instruments, though we all know Sitar Hero is going to be the one to do it.
Three games to light up your 4th originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
