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.

Here is 26 minutes of Hideo Kojima, Shinji Mikami, and Suda 51 talking. Why is that important? Because they’re the creators of Metal Gear, Resident Evil, and Killer 7; respectively. Arguably the most influential minds of the playstation generation. Next year’s biggest games will no doubt be Metal Gear Solid 4, Resident Evil 5, and No More Heroes, so these guys will only get more influential.

Xbox360Fanboy cornered Harmonix at E3 and found out some of the best news I’ve ever heard for any music game in the history of forever.

Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos announced that Rock Band has some serious plans for delivering content to players. First off, Harmonix plans to release new music tracks every week. They can be released in singles, multi track bundles, or more deliciously, full albums. As an example Alex announced that The Who’s Who’s Next would be available for download following the game’s release.

I was already thinking I’d want to get Rock Band for the drums. Knowing I can play as Keith Moon on my favorite album by own of my favorite bands is personally very exciting. I cannot expect you, dear reader, to understand. Maybe you can get excited at the idea of your favorite album to get added to the list. But right now the only one they’ve announced is my favorite album.

I call that a bargain… the best I ever had.

thanks to RJK for the news!

1up seems to have locked up all the Soul Calibur news. see also these images and The 1UP Show Soul Calibur IV Special, a 16 minute look at the game.

Yes, we all saw it coming a mile away. Kotaku reports that Sony’s David Karraker announced the Sony PlayStation 3 will immediately begin selling for $499 in North America.

In addition, in August Sony will sell a model with a larger 80 GB hard drive installed and a copy of Motorstorm for the old price of $599.

OK, how about now? Is everyone done bitching about the price now? Oh you want more cuts? Sheesh.

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.

Earlier this week, Ubisoft dropped some new maps on to Xbox Live community for Rainbox Six: Vegas in the form of the Player’s Pack: Black Edition , costing 800 points, not unlike the Red Edition they released back in April. Only one problem: This was supposed to be free.

Rainbow Six Vegas just came out on PS3 with all of the Red & Black content included, so fans obviously cried foul, and rightly so. Ubisoft pulled the download shortly after went up and apologized for the mistake. Its now available for all Xbox Live users completely for free, and the Red Pack will be converted to a free download on July 6. Those who made the ten dollar plunge into Black Edition will be refunded their points… in 8-10 weeks. Oh well, I guess it can’t all be perfect.

I personally just picked up this game a few weeks ago, and if you’re itching for more Gears Of War, R6V is a worthy successor. Intense difficulty, great use of cover for fire fights, and enough sneaky stuff to have fun with, but not so much as to ruin the experience for a run & gun player like myself. I guess I’ll have a lot to dig into with the game this week when I go online.

From SD Tekken, we’ve got some details on the arcade version of Tekken 6. While a few configurations will be available, the one pictured above is the most awesome. It includes 4 monitors so that 2 matches can happen at once with each player getting their own screen. Cost? $36,000. Yeah, suddenly the $700 you’d have to blow to get PS3, the game, and an extra controller is pretty low.

There will be a new “rage” system where as a fighter’s health goes down, his/her ability to do damage goes up. They’re also bringing back the customization from Tekken 5 and adding items that affect your actual in game performance. Crazy!

There is a mountain of info on this page, including character lists, all the released flyers and more stuff than a casual player could possibly find interesting.