This one is firmly in rumorville, but since the names are big, I’m going to pass it along.

EGM’s “Quarterman” column this month suggests EA will be announced as the publisher for the videogame companion to the big budget GI Joe movie.

With a writer’s strike on and the exact status of the Joes uncertain, the movie could well come out later than the intended summer 2009 release. This could be good news for a game, as the one thing holding back many license games is a rush to get the job done by the movie release date. Activision’s Transformers was a good game, but was about 2 months worth of adjustments and tuning away from a great game.

GI Joe has certainly been the subject of games before, with 2 pretty good NES titles and a fun coin-op entry as well. A next gen third person shooter with all the goofy joe vehicles, characters, and gadgets is just the thing we need to shake up the overly serious shooters. In fact, its high time I log on to Halo 3 and see if I can’t build some kind of Joes vs Cobras map…

The other day we found out the final track list of Guitar Hero III, and its only fair we post the other major music simulator. I’ve compiled (at great time expense) videos for the track listing. The lead off track is “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, at least chronologically. You might remember this song being in the Martin Scorsese films Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed, and as well as being the title to the historic documentary about the final show on the Stones final 1969 tour.
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Looks like it’s that time of year again.
What’s that you say? Fall?
Wrong.
It’s EA buyout time! Earlier today Electronic Arts Inc. issued a press release stating their plans to purchase VG Holding Corp., owners of both BioWare Corp. & Pandemic Studios. BioWare is, of course, known for both the original Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the upcoming Mass Effect for the Xbox 360. Pandemic Studios are the brains behind the Destroy All Humans! and Mercenaries series. Yahoo! Finance has all the gory, monetary details here.

We’re a bit late this week due to the outage, but we’re back. I’m gonna give you the $20 GOTW and the Lost Classics at the same time this week, as to not to overshadow aDam’s Mexican Independence day. One of this week’s featured games is one of the all time greats of the RTS genre, while the other is one of the few good movie based games of the 16-bit era. So, lets waste no further time in getting started. Click the jump and come ride with me to your local video game dealers bargain bin.
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I wanted to give you some first impressions a while ago when the demo hit Xbox Live, but it was too short to fully try out the game’s features. Also, I wasn’t too sure about the new direction EA decided to take with the series, so I decided to wait until I could find it used. For those of you who don’t already know, for reasons known only to themselves, EA decided to hand the Def Jam brand off to EA Chicago, the creators of the Fight Night series. Many players agree that it was just fine with developer AKI, but Kudo Tsunoda had his own ideas for the series, mainly integrating the music into the game engine, and making use of the analog sticks in a manner similar to Fight Night. It’s clearly not gonna be for everyone, and there are a few areas that could use some work, but for the most part, it’s a bold new direction for the series.
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In 2004, there were 3 big first person shooter games; Doom 3, Halo 2, and Valve’s Half Life 2. Of the three, many gamers consider this to be the best, and for good reason. The game is second to few in terms of graphical quality, story telling, gameplay, and capability for modding. Built on a modified version of the Havok physics system, a large part of the game’s appeal is simply picking up objects laying on the ground and throwing them at people. A weapon known as the gravity gun allows players to use the physics system to make anything into a weapon. Players take control of series protagonist Gordon Freeman, as he is awoken from stasis nearly two decades after the end of the original Half Life. He emerges into a world overrun by the combine. Joining up with a resistance group, Freeman has to fight back against all odds, battling head crabs, police officers, and alien creatures with a large variety of weapons.

As mentioned before, another part of this game’s popularity has to do with the modding community. There are several mods ranging from new deathmatch maps to full game conversions. One of the more popular mods, “Gary’s Mod” allows players to simply spawn objects in a sandbox environment just to play around with the physics system. Another mod is an attempt at recreating the popular N64 game GoldenEye. Of course when you’re through with the main game, there is plenty of more material coming to keep fans occupied. Episode 1 was released this year, continuing Gordon Freeman’s quest. This fall will see the release of Episode 2, along with the source engine based Team Fortress 2 and Portal. Xbox 360 and PS3 gamers can grab a special “orange box” containing the main game, as well as all the extras mentioned above. Whichever way you decide to get it, don’t miss out on the chance to play one of the best FPS games ever.

System Requirements
Processor: 1.2 GHZ or better
OS: Windows 98 and higher (including Vista)
Internal Memory: 256 MB RAM
Storage: 4.5 GB
Graphics: DirectX 7 or greater
Internet connection required for verification
DVD-ROM drive (unless obtained from Steam)

From the LA Times

I never thought I’d see the day. Tony Hawk, Transformers, Spider-Man, and especially Guitar Hero have propelled Activision into the top slot among the highly competitive world of third party game publishers.

It won’t last of course: EA will launch Skate to takes sales from Tony Hawk, a new Medal Of Honor to go against Call of Duty, and Rock Band may be the upstart to finally slow sales on Guitar Hero. Oh yeah, and EA Sports will have Madden on shelves and Peter Moore at the helm this fall.

Well, its good to know that there is another contender for the top slot.

Two guitars, a drummer, and a singer… we were kinda wondering how this would all work on one screen, and now we have a video of some of the Harmonix crew getting into Guns N Roses first hit. Rock Band will have its own guitars, but this video confirms that your 360 X-plorer will still work.