Electronic Arts has announced the soundtracks for its fall lineup of EA Sports titles, which includes Madden NFL 10, FIFA 10, NHL 10, and NBA Live 10.

As expected, it’s a lot of damned music, representing what you’ll be listening to when you tackle, dribble, and check things this fall. The soundtracks are pretty diverse, from artists like Slipknot to Pete Rock, Rancid to Murs. The FIFA 10 soundtrack is particularly interesting, made up of artists that represent the global music scene.

While Will “Fresh Prince” Smith has went off to become one of Hollywood’s biggest superstars, DJ Jazzy Jeff of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince fame has continued to… be a DJ.

So it makes sense that Activision would tap DJ Jazzy Jeff to not only appear in the upcoming DJ Hero, but to create exclusive mixes for the game. “Tears for Fears ‘Shout’ vs. Eric B & Rakim ‘Eric B. Is President’” and “LL Cool J ‘Rock the Bells’ vs. The Aranbee Pop Symphony Orchestra ‘Bittersweet Symphony’” will appear in the game alongside the DJ’s in-game character.

So Lionsgate Films, the guys behind the Saw series and a ton of other movies, want and believe that the Wii will have a movie channel world wide and soon. Speaking to Casualgaming.biz Lionsgate’s president of digital media Curt Mavis let it be known that Lionsgate is looking at digital distrubtuion over gaming consoles in a large way and that the Wii is a huge part of that plan.

“As for Wii, I envision the Wii’s motion picture store will launch worldwide soon,” he stated. “The essential point is that the game machine is already connected into the Television, and we see it as a major conduit inside the home to bring movies via the web into the TV. Our horror and action movies are best for the Xbox and PlayStation’s hardcore audience, while the broader audience of the Wii are likely to enjoy our more mass-market properties.

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This pretty much backs up what Iwata said at the launch of the Wii video service in Japan, and makes a bit more sense than the weak rumor about Netflix showing up on the system. If it does happen soon the lack of HD will probably drive most readers here to the 360 and PS3, but then again HD isn’t that massive a deal to the majority of the population since the majority of the population doesn’t have an HD TV. I would wager that Mavis is right and the Wii will bring them a good amount of cash once if the channel comes to the rest of the world.

If you like pretty things, the good folks over at G4 have posted a video showcasing a fairly hefty chunk of gameplay footage from Vanillaware’s upcoming Wii title, Muramasa: The Demon Blade. It’s a direct feed, so you’ll get a look at what you’d actually be seeing on screen if you were the one playing it. I am not the one playing it, and that makes me sad.

Still, I’ll take what I have the ability to get at the moment regarding this beautiful game. The video gives us a closer look at some of the gameplay details and finer points of Muramasa, with commentary from Ignition Entertainment’s Development Director, Shane Bettenhausen.

I’m not sure how I feel about that whole breakable sword mechanic, but I’m willing to put up with a certain amount of abuse from something so gawww-juss. Vanillaware games are kind of like a girlfriend that way. See the lovely in action after the jump.

Yesterday, Nintendo held a launch event for Wii Sports Resort in New York City’s Times Square, allowing the public to try out the game three full days before its launch on Sunday, July 26th. They went all-out for this one, trucking in fifty tons of sand from across the Hudson River in New Jersey and turning Military Island into the game’s fictional tropical paradise, Wuhu Island. (Get it? “Woo-hoo”?)

I checked out the oasis of sand at the intersection of 7th Avenue and Broadway, and I’m here to tell you all about it. You can also take a gander at all the pretty pictures I snapped in the gallery below! I should mention that the first two were taken by Dtoider CactarCrush, who joined me in playing Wii Sports Resort. (She’s in two of the photos herself.)

Be sure to check back in twenty minutes, when I’ll be putting up an interview with Bill Trinen, Nintendo of America’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, on Wii Sports Resort, the launch event, and MotionPlus.

When I first read about the event, I didn’t really know what to anticipate. The invite promised “a sandy beach, swimming pool and tropical lounge,” all in the middle of Times Square, but how was Nintendo going to pull that off? By dumping a layer of sand on Military Island, of course. I was initially apprehensive about trudging on the “beach,” since I was wearing sneakers — after all, no one likes to get sand in their shoes — but the sand wasn’t particularly deep.

Again, Nintendo spared no expense in transforming Military Island into a resort. Spaced out among the sandy beach were six palm trees, complete with unripe coconuts hanging underneath the leaves sprouting out from their tops. The beach included a Wii Sports Resort-branded, kid-safe wading pool, perhaps deep enough to submerge a child’s foot up to the ankle. Floating atop the water was a beach ball, covered in a few spots with a thin veneer of sand where a kid had dropped it on the beach while playing around. Nintendo must’ve spread the word about the launch, since I noticed a few groups of kids — apparently from local summer camps — in attendance.

Staff members wearing flower-themed shirts handed out leis while a band serenaded the crowd with reggae and salsa music (the dude on the steel drums was fantastic, especially during a brilliant rendition of Gloria Estefan’s “Conga” that even got some people dancing). Throughout the day, professional athletes stopped by to play crowd members — that’s, athletes who play sports that the Wii Sports Resort games are based on. I saw Frisbee master Bradford Keller take on a young girl; earlier in the day, ten-year-old table tennis whiz kid Alston Wang and archery pro Martin Vezzuto came out.

Amid the spectacle, of course, was the game itself. Nintendo had set up twelve Wii Sports Resort kiosks under six white tents — through most of the day, clouds threatened to open up, but by the time the rain actually began to fall, the event had ended. With so many available demo stations, none of the lines were too long, even with a relatively massive crowd.

CactarCrush and I tried out the Archery and Swordplay games. This was my first time playing Wii Sports Resort, and I was highly impressed by the degree of fidelity in the controls. In Archery, you press A and hold the Wii Remote in your left hand while holding Z and pulling back on the Nunchuk with your right — as you would the string on a bow — and then release Z to let loose your arrow. It feels great, and the game ramps up the challenge by forcing you to compensate for wind and distance. By the way, I proved my sports prowess, scoring two 9s and a 10 in three shots (out of a possible 10 points per shot). Oh yeah.

Swordplay only requires the Wiimote, which functions as your sword in the game. While there’s 1:1 control, which is fine-tuned so well that you can actually tilt your wrists to get around an attempted parry, the game starts an animation when you thrust forward. So once the game interprets that you have swung, your character will do that, and you won’t have any control for a split second while the animation finishes. And in practice, Swordplay seemed to devolve into two players wildly swinging their Wii Remotes, so while it’s still fun, I definitely like Archery. (Oh, and I beat CactarCrush in two three-round fights.)

Everyone who played a game got a drink ticket; Nintendo was serving virgin strawberry daiquiris and pi

Osamu Tezuka’s classic title Astro Boy is an important piece of animation history — many cite it as the birth of the modern anime, with its debut on Television in 1963 (the manga started in 1952). And now, the character is getting a 3-D film from Imagi Studios, which you can check out the trailer for it here. Coupled with the release of the film is a game from High Voltage Software (The Conduit), and put out by D3Publisher.

What intrigued me about this title is that preceding this title (not directly) is the 2004 title Astro Boy: Omega Factor, an extraordinary shooter/beat-em-up developed by Treasure that really set the bar high for the people at High Voltage. And things aren’t any easier when they said they’re looking at Omega Factor as a source of inspiration.

So, how do they hold up? Find out after the jump, of course!

Astro Boy: The Video Game (Wii, PS2, PSP)
Developer: High Voltage Software
Publisher: D3Publisher
To be released: October 23, 2009

Much like Omega Factor, this Astro Boy title is a mix of shoot-em-ups and a brawler settings — focusing mainly on the brawler. Taking place in a 2.5-D environment, the game has you firing lasers, punching, kicking, and waggling about in order to defeat your enemies. I sat down to play this title on the Wii, the main development platform, and got a chance to hop right into the game.

They’d a couple of segments set up, and the first one was a factory setting. Taken straight from the movie, this had me platforming, avoiding lava, enemies’ bullets, and timed jumps. If you’ve played any sort of Castlevania or Metroid title in the last decade, you’ve got an idea of how this is supposed to work. The controls are customizable to any fashion of play, but I stuck with using the nunchuck to move around and the Wiimote to jump, punch, and activate my super powers.

Super powers are something to be used liberally in the game: useful for absorbing enemy bullets to replenish your life, firing lasers, or butt-machine guns. They’re pretty much your first line of defense when dealing with the enemies and bullets in most platforming stages. And combat in these beat-em-up stages are where I ran into my first set of problems.

Normally, when enemies shoot missles and laser bullets, you would assume that you can shoot down the missles, right? That’s what I’ve learned from Metal Slug, Bionic Commando, and a host of other games like this. Missles are something you just need to dodge, in addition to the bullets that fly at you. One of the superpowers will let you absorb the ammo, saving you from certain death, but it’s a bit much to rely on superpowers simply to not get hit.

My other problem was with how slow the movement felt. This didn’t give off the atmosphere of a fast-paced action game, but something more akin to the pace of a platformer — this is something I’m fine with normally, it’s just that when dodging bullets, it just felt too slow. I would frequently get caught simply because the bullets flew too fast, and I moved too slow.

To move onto the shoot-em-up stages, which comprise some 30% of the game, it follows as you would think: a side-scrolling shooter where you attempt to take care of wave after wave of enemies and their bullets. Enemies will come out in familiar chains, and your job is to blast them out of the sky before they do it to you. Apart from the weakest of enemies, I had problems destroying even one chain of most of the characters that flew by. Sure, they took multiple passes, but even with that, it was almost impossible to destroy them, and with the superpowers, I didn’t even have a 50% success rate. Needless to state, I had a bit of trouble completing these stages.

I hate to damn this game to the category of the typical movie tie-in, but with the release date looming in the not-too distant future, there’s a lot of progress that needs to be made in order to try and work its way out of the shadow of Treasure’s title. Right now, the game needs a lot of visual polish, lest it remain looking like a several-year-old PS2 title, not to mention a lot of the technical problems that make the shooting simply frustrating to deal with.

source Destructoid

Hey! Some of those Weezer songs you were whining about not being in Rock Band are coming to Rock Band next week! Along with a Kiss track pack, a Blink-182 track pack, and a single track by Damone that if you’re Samit, you might have heard on the Madden NFL 07 soundtrack.

Weezer 3-Track Pack ($5.49/440 MS Points for pack; $1.99/160 MS Points per song)
“My Name is Jonas”
“Pork and Beans”
“Undone – The Sweater Song”

Kiss 3-Track Pack ($5.49/440 MS Points for pack; $1.99/160 MS Points per song)
“100,000 Years (Live)”
“Deuce (Live)”
“Parasite (Live)”

Blink-182 3-Track Pack ($5.49/440 MS Points for pack; $1.99/160 MS Points per song)
“Down”
“Feeling This”
“The Rock Show”

Damone – “Out Here All Night” ($1.99/160 MS Points)

On a side note, has anyone heard the interview that Gene Simmons from Kiss did with NPR’s Terry Gross? What a dick!

By the way, all of those songs up there will be coming to the “Rock Band Music Store” for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. If you’re a Wii owner, your haul is after the jump, along with the Rock Band Unplugged update. Click through to enjoy that.

Additional tracks available for Wii on July 28, 200 Wii Points a piece

Kings of Leon “Crawl”
Kings of Leon “Molly’s Chambers”
Kings of Leon “Sex on Fire”
Rancid “Last One to Die”
Rancid “Ruby Soho”
Rancid “Time Bomb”
Rise Against “Prayer of the Refugee”
Rise Against “Re-Education (Through Labor)”
Rise Against “Savior”
Lush “Sweetness & Light”
Children of Bodom “Are You Dead Yet”
Finley “Tutto

I guess 2K Sports just remembered that their NBA 2K franchise isn’t the only one that’s celebrating its tenth anniversary, because they sent us some updated box art for NHL 2K10. As you can see in the gallery, the cover now features a gold “1999-2009 Tenth Anniversary” banner, just like the Anniversary Edition of NBA 2K10. The shot of a toothless Alexander Ovechkin remains intact, though.

We’ve also got the first screenshots of NHL 2K10 — there are eleven of the PS3/360 version and six of the Wii version. They’re looking pretty good! And remember, if you’re looking for a hockey game on the Wii, NHL 2K10 is your only option; EA Sports is only making NHL 10 for the PS3 and 360.

This year’s version of NHL 2K seems to be adding a lot of the same things that EA Canada is adding to NHL 10, like fake shots and being able to shoot from your knees. For all the details on the HD and Wii versions of the game, hit up IGN’s feature blowout.

source Destructoid

It’s been roughly three seconds since there was an “M-rated Wii game” debate on the Internet, so we better get this written quick and plug the gap! Epic’s Mark Rein has been chatting to IndustryGamers, where he reaffirmed Epic’s policy on ignoring the Wii, going so far as to accuse adult-oriented games of being “huge financial flops” on Nintendo’s white box o’ waggle.

“We don’t make games for that platform because we don’t see a market for the kinds of games we make — let’s be honest,” claims Rein. “[M-rated games have] been big financial flops … It’s just not where the market is. Look at EA. Do you see the same Madden game on Wii? Of course not — it’s a dumbed down game.”

Rein believes that “it’s not worthwhile” to use Unreal technology on the Wii, but did concede that if Nintendo released a Wii 2 or Wii HD with “a couple more processors and a little more memory and superior graphics,” that Epic would be on the case. Those cheeky graphics whores.

Tiny King’s Story is a new game from the creative minds behind Super Mario RPG, Final Fantasy VII, and Harvest Moon. A superstar collaboration of this nature would be the stuff of non-stop discussion if we were talking about a new motion picture or CD, but with videogames, creative teams don’t seem to matter as much famous mascots and recognizable namesakes. If only Little King’s Story were called Gears of Warcraft: Wii Edition, maybe it would be getting more attention.

OK, enough bellyaching. Hit the jump if you want to know how much I love Little King’s Story. I’ll tell you right now, it’s not just a “little” bit.

HA! I kill me.

Little King’s Story (Wii)
Developer: Cing/Town Factory
Publisher: Marvelous Entertainment/XSEED Games
Released: July 21, 2009
MSRP: $49.99

It was love at first sight for me and Little King’s Story. From the moment that the game started, with its brilliant, hand painted-looking opening cinema, to the last second of its bizarre twist ending, I was absolutely smitten. The game constantly sparks with creativity. There are a few technical failings that keep the game from being perfect, but they’re easy to overlook when everything else is so outstanding.