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

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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

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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

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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

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At a recent EA press event, we took the opportunity to squeeze a few new details out of developer Mythic Entertainment on its upcoming massively multiplayer game, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The game is currently in a beta-test state with thousands of loyal testers from the fan community pounding away at it nightly and with more beta testers to come thanks to the preorder offer that EA Games has attached to the collectors' edition, which will let early adopters into the beta in advance of the launch (and will also nab them exclusive character customization options, quests, and items).

Warhammer Online is in a beta-test state and will be launching in about a month.

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Last week, several high-profile members of Midway Games' management staff departed, including Chicago studio chief Mike Bilder and media relations director Reilly Brennan. Today, the publisher announced further staff reductions at its Austin studio, which developed Area 51 (2005) and BlackSite: Area 51. Prior to its 2004 purchase by Midway, the shop developed 2002's Tribes Aerial Assault for Sierra Entertainment.

In a statement, Midway announced that "it has canceled an as-yet-unannounced project in production in its Austin, Texas, facility, and as a result Midway will have a reduction in force of a portion of the affected development team." According to the company, some 90 to 130 positions will be eliminated, although two teams will continue work on "unnamed prototype projects intended to expand Midway's portfolio of new intellectual property."

"While this was a very difficult decision, we feel it was the right thing to do for the future of Midway," said Matt Booty, Midway's interim CEO and president. "We view every game as an investment that must meet certain standards for quality, scheduling, and profitability."

The Midway Austin cl

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TOKYO--Today at its DK Sigma3173 Event, Square Enix made a series of announcements, including revealing the March release of a Final Fantasy XIII demo. However, those on hand were also impressed by a video shot by series designer Tetsuya Nomura which offered some raw behind-the-scenes insights into the game's development.

The video started off with an inside look at Square Enix's internal studio and its overall development environment. However, the scene quickly switched to a meeting where developers spoke bluntly about Final Fantasy XIII in general--and the Xbox 360 version in particular. The game's announcement was a major surprise at the E3 Media & Business Summit last month, where producer Yoshinori Kitase held a roundtable--but left many questions unanswered.

In the video, director Motomu Toriyama didn't beat around the bush when Nomura asked him questions about the 360 FFXIII. Starting off, he reconfirmed that, "We haven't changed the direction of the development. We're making the PS3 version first, and then porting to the 360 later." That means that since the game will be released simultaneously on both platforms in North America and Europe, the PS3 re

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Edge offered me a soap box this week and I figured I’d grab it and address one of my biggest pet peeves about the industry today…

I’ve always hated those “the industry is screwed” editorials – mainly because they’re objectively wrong. They may sell magazines, or click-throughs, but year on year by any metric you choose (sales, users, number of titles) the industry isn’t just growing, it’s exploding faster and faster every year. There are simply more good games out there than you can play. So, the industry isn’t screwed. But it is making a mistake right now, and this mistake is getting more and more irritating.

It doesn’t have anything to do with sequelitis (players want sequels), lack of innovation (there’s tons of innovation every day), excessive violence (please!) or any of the tired usual suspects the pundits trot out with disturbing regularity. The mistake I’m talking about is one of semantics but it’s a serious one.

It revolves around a single word – Casual.

We developers need to ban this word. Or at least, banish it to a special, small, isolated place, where it can’t hurt the rest o...

More news concerning the tiff between Hellgate: London's Flagship Studios and the MMO's Korean publisher, HanbitSoft. HanbitSoft recently gave the developer a scathing tongue-lashing, calling its founding members "selfish and irresponsible."

The Korean publisher also claimed to have offered Flagship Studios several investments, but claimed that the developing studio severely lacked in effort, leading to the talks between the two companies going haywire. HanbitSoft's CEO, Kim Ki-Young, said:

Flagship not only lacked effort, but were only looking for personal gain. Firing all of the Flagship employees in order to protect the personal interests of its founding members only shows how selfish and irresponsible they are.

Now, that was certainly direct to the point. But harsh criticism isn't the only thing that HanbitSoft will dish out to Flagship, but also serious legal proceedings as they believe that the Hellgate: London developer committed a breach of duty towards the stockholders.

Updates as they come along....

Does Funcom's Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures need a better travel system? That's a question that has been discussed ever since the game came out. On one hand, it would be a convenient addition to the game itself. However, depending on the implementation, it may not fit in with the theme of the game.

On that note, I would really want to see this feature implemented for players in the middle to higher end of the leveling scale. If you allow the lower leveled characters to have access to this, it might make some of the quests too easy.

As to how the developers would implement this, I propose a series of quests similar to the destiny quests which will allow users who complete it to add another save point to their Path of Asura ability.

The quest itself can be given out by the NPC named Amunarton in Conall's valley who was studying wayfarer stones and was accidentally teleported there from Stygia. He could probably ask your character to help him out in his research when you hit 30, 50, 70, and 80, with the reward being some experience and the ability to add another saved teleport point to the Path of Asura.

What do you guys think of putting in a travel system in Age of Conan: Hyboria...