Last month, Harmonix announced that Rush's 1981 smash Moving Pictures would be the next full downloadable album added to the Rock Band catalog. But when it came time to flip the switch and take the content live, the studio encountered a technical difficulty and told fans it could be a matter of weeks before the album hit the game's music store.

On Harmonix's official forums today, a representative provided an update on the album's status. Moving Pictures is now set for release next Tuesday on the Xbox 360 and next Thursday on the PlayStation 3. The seven-song album will be available for $10.99 (880 Microsoft points), or on a per-track basis at $1.99 (160 Microsoft points).

Gamers who don't care for the Candian prog rock act might still find something new to download, as Harmonix will also release six individual tracks from Bad Religion, The Cult, Hot Hot Heat, Kasabian, Sleater-Kinney, and The Stone Roses. These songs will sell for $1.99 (160 Microsoft points) each. All of next week's downloadable songs will be master tracks. Like all Rock Band downloadable content, the songs are compatible with the original game as well as the recently released sequel...

The full list of next w

Spore is an enjoyable game that pulls off an interesting balancing act. On one hand, it lets you create a creature and guide its maturation from a single cell to a galactic civilization through an unusual process of evolutionary development. Because the tools used to create and revise this creature are so robust and amusing, and each creation's charms are so irresistible, it's hard not to get attached to your digital alter ego. On the other hand, this intimacy is abandoned in the long, later portions of the game, when you lead your full-grown civilization in its quest for universal domination. The idea sounds ambitious, though Spore isn't as much a deep game as it is a broad one, culling elements from multiple genres and stripping them down to their simplest forms. By themselves, these elements aren't very remarkable; but within the context of a single, sprawling journey, they complement each other nicely and deliver a myriad of delights.

Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming...

Spore's greatest asset, by far, is its intuitive set of creation tools. If you've played the separate Creature Creator, released earlier this year, you're only seeing a small piece of the puzzle

Less than 24 hours after it made headlines for selling over 1 million copies of Ninja Gaiden II, Tecmo is making news again. This morning, role-playing game giant Square Enix (Final Fantasy XIII) announced it was making an unsolicited but nonhostile bid for the Dead or Alive 4 publisher.

In a statement, Square Enix president Yoichi Wada presented the offer as an attempt to rescue Tecmo. In the span of two months, the publisher has been rocked by a declining stock price, class-action lawsuits, and the departure of and legal action by star designer Tomonobu Itagaki. Just last week, Tecmo president Yoshimi Yasuda abruptly stepped down, citing personal reasons.

"Tecmo is a group of excellent creators with a proven track record in the global market, which is a precious human resource of Japan," explained Wada. "We, however, cannot be optimistic about the future of this significant resource, given the current circumstances surrounding Tecmo. We believe that Tecmo will be able to make a great leap forward by joining Square Enix Group, which will provide the group with further growth opportunities as well."

Though Tecmo has not yet publicly commented on Square Enix's

After making us salivate over the arcade version for some time and finally confirming its perennial fighter would be coming to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Capcom took the wraps off the console version of Street Fighter IV. We had some hands-on time with the game at the Games Convention in Leipzig earlier today.

Hadoken your heart out when Street Fighter IV comes to consoles.

Anyone who's followed the franchise's rebirth will know that SFIV includes many of the characters and stages from Street Fighter II, while adding a few brand-new characters into the mix including femme fatale Crimson Viper, Mexican luchador El Fuerte, French fighter Abel, and the generously proportioned Rufus. While Dan, Fei-Long, and Cammy are expected to make an appearance on home consoles, they were missing from the character menu, so we'll have to wait and see if this will be the case in the final version.

We managed to snag a Xbox 360 controller, and we found the controls to be as responsive and natural as you'd expect without an arcade stick. We didn't get to try it with Microsoft's just-announced, revised Xbox 360 controller (complete with a more responsive directional pad), but as it's apparently