As David Bowie once sang, "We could be heroes, just for one day"… on Sunday, to be specific.
Guitar Hero World Tour, the latest in the megahit franchise, will be released on Xbox 360, PlayStations 2 and 3, and the Wii. The game will be coming out Sunday rather than Tuesday, the traditional release day. There are no plans yet for PC or Mac versions of the game, a spokesman for Activision said.
The set list for the game has 86 songs, ranging from Airbourne and the Allman Brothers Band to Willie Nelson and Wings.
Taking a page from rival game Rock Band, it expands game play into a cooperative band experience, with a redesigned guitar controller, a drum-kit controller and microphone, plus a Music Studio option that lets players compose, edit and share their own songs. The base game costs about $60, with pricier versions available packed with the instruments, which are also available separately.
This week's biggest new title is likely to be Midnight Club: Los Angeles, the latest racing game from Rockstar Games. Players race in muscle cars, motorcycles, luxury cars and more on the streets of Los Angeles, which have been re-created in painstaking detail.
It is available for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. And for PSP, there's the new Midnight Club: LA Remix.
Four years after its start, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft continues to dominate the field of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (known by the acronym MMORPG). It's not for lack of competition; dozens of companies have tried to peel off some of the 10 million WoW subscribers, only to be stymied by technical problems. Funcom's Age of Conan, for example, got off to a fast start earlier this year, only to be hampered by those problems.
The latest challenger is determined to avoid such issues. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, the sword-and-sorcery fantasy developed by Mythic Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts, has already attracted 750,000 subscribers since its September debut. But Mythic co-founder Mark Jacobs said: "The launch is just the beginning. Even the first year is only a step."
"No MMORPG is ever ready to go out," Jacobs said. "These games are so complicated, you can never get it 100 percent right." For a new online game to succeed, he said, players have to be "able to do everything it says on the box."
One of the most intriguing PlayStation 3 games of the year is Sony's LittleBigPlanet. Unfortunately, it got a little too intriguing when an early reviewer discovered a few quotes from the Quran embedded in a musical track.
Sony recalled all copies, which was to go on sale this week. "We have taken immediate action to rectify this and we sincerely apologize for any offense that this may have caused," said Patrick Seybold, the corporate communications director. Revised LittleBigPlanet discs should go out next week.
NEW IN STORES: Microsoft's Fable II, the long-awaited epic from Black & White mastermind Peter Molyneux, arrives on the Xbox 360.... Ubisoft's exotic first-person shooter series goes to Africa in Far Cry 2 (for the 360, PlayStation 3).... Nintendo invites you to create your own orchestra with Wii Music.... Marvel's friendly neighborhood Web slinger embarks on a new adventure in Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (Activision, most systems).... Dracula's back in Konami's Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS).... Majesco takes a fresh approach to the classic dungeon crawl in Away: Shuffle Dungeon (DS).... Disney delivers a batch of new delights for the kids, including Think Fast (Wii), Sing It (360, PS3, PS2), High School Musical 3: Senior Year Dance! (360, Wii, PS3, PS2) and -- for those of you who are bored with Madden NFL 09 -- Disney Fairies: Tinker Bell (DS).
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