The White Stripes must be huge PS3 fans. Rock Band dropped last week and people have been rocking hard ever since. But in a game that features “BAND” in its title, PS3 owners are having a hard time with the “BAND” part. The game allows for 2 guitars to be played, one regular guitar and one bass. The game only comes with one guitar so its supposed to work with other guitar controllers. The Fender guitar controller that comes with the game works fine, but when trying to use another guitar like the Les Paul or SG from GH3, they cannot. Xbox 360 owners aren’t claiming any problems with the controllers though. But hey who needs a bass guitar anyways? Am I right Jack White?
More…

Well, GameTrailers.com has you covered. They recently launched a special area on their site dedicated to the new Assassin’s Creed game. It’s their Assassin’s Creed Launch Center.

Not only do they have a ton of video on the game, they also have a video review of the game as well. Most of the videos are available in HD which makes everything better.Game Trailers has already done this “launch center” thing with other games you may have heard of like Halo 3. So, if you’re interested in this game and love to watch game videos this is the place to be.

Boom!

It was bound to happen and now it has. Guitar Hero 3 is now helping bands increase their record sales. Unfortunately its helping some of the worst bands ever namely Slipknot and DragonForce. DragonForce reports that their album has seen an 126% increase in week to week sales since their song “Through the Fire and Flames” was featured in GH3. Slipknot hasn’t released any hard numbers but they report an increase also.

The news follows comments made by EA’s Steve Schnur at Games Convention Asia in September. Schnur asserted that games were now more relevant than radio when it comes to promoting new music.

Ea should know they have been helping bands by putting them in their sports titles for years. Hopefully GH3 will help some better bands in the future. I hear Kansas’s “Carry On My Wayward Son” is moving back up the charts…. THANKS GUITAR HERO!!!!

Looks like the deal we mentioned on our podcast earlier this week may or may not be honored at your local Circuit City. Circuit City’s weekly flyer stated that you would receive a copy of Call of Duty 3 for free with the purchase of the new Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (both for Xbox 360). So many a gamer went into their local Circuit City with high hopes and money in hand only to be pwned at the register. The employees claim the ad in the flyer was a “misprint”. How does a company not only print an ad with the promotion mentioned twice, but also on their website online multiple times, and call it a “misprint”! I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m a little peeved about this bait-and-switch crap.

Anyway, you might still want to try it for yourself. And if you are able to get the deal let us know. Hopefully they’ll at least give you the poster.

Link: Full story at the Consumerist online

Boom!

Medal of Honor Heroes 2 hasn’t really gotten much press. While it’s a sequal to a game most people never played, let alone never heard of, this game looks to help move the Wii a step closer to the “hardcore” gamers. The game may not look nearly as good as most similar games on the other two consoles, it does boast some of the best control options on the Wii.With the release of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption many Wii gamers have fallen in love with FPS controls on the Wii. MoHH2 looks to improve on the controls provided in Corruption by giving the player extensive customization for pretty much any control scheme you can dream up.

Okay, so the game is still set in WWII, not the “modern combat” setting many gamers are moving into now. I hate to have to preface things like this, but, for a Wii game it looks to really impress. The fact that they are one of the first developers to try real online multiplayer with the Wii. Let alone 32 players at a time.

And if that wasn’t enough, the game also supports the Wii Zapper, woopidy doo. But here’s a cool spot of fun, an Arcade mode, designed for the so-called casual gaming Wii crowd, you know the toddlers and grandparents that can’t handle the difficult controls of a First Person Shooter, but still want to shoot the crap out of Nazis. The Arcade mode is basically an on rails shooter version of the full game, which I’m actually really looking forward to.

Oh yeah, and it’s coming to PSP also, minus the Arcade mode, I think. Don’t quote me on that.

Boom!

Another delay for another big title.  Looks like Army of 2 will not be coming out until early next year. This marks yet another push back for a industry that makes it seem like your doing something wrong if you don’t delay your release at least once. With pretty much all of Sony’s big exclusives being pushed back as well as Nintendo’s we have to wonder why this keeps happening. Is it that the developers are just not given enough time to finish? Do they simply just jump the gun in stating their release dates? Maybe it a good thing maybe it means that they are going the extra mile to make sure these games don’t suck. Of course what do they say if and when it does come out and it still sucks? Army of 2 has created quite a bit of buzz around here at Counter Agent with its made for co-op game-play and we were eager to get our hands on it. If the delay just makes it better then delay away EA. Maybe EA just wanted to push it back because there is going to be a gluttony of games coming out around the same time as their first release date. We’ll just have to wait and see, fortunately we have and will be getting plenty of games in the coming weeks to keep us busy.

Conan and The Simpsons Game Demos available Xbox Live Marketplace Today.

Conan Summary from Microsoft’s Major Nelson: Play the Conan demo and experience the strength and savagery of Conan as you wage an epic battle across the world of Hyboria! Approximately 15 minutes of gameplay plus some short video segments.

First Impression: The first 30 seconds of the demo sum up what this game is about. It starts with Conan slicing the head off a guy and then offering some servicing to the leading lady. The game looks pretty good. The gameplay starts basic enough and moves on to combos and advanced moves fairly quickly. It’s a decent action/adventure game and we haven’t really seen many of them on the Xbox 360.

The Simpsons Game summary from Major Nelson: After Kang and Kodos use their Halloween ray on Springfield’s famous Lard Lad statue, it’s up to Homer and Bart to stop the rampaging mascot from destroying the town. To do this the two must fend off waves of miniature Krusty dolls while avoiding Lard Lad’s destructive laser and stomp attacks in an attempt to pull out his wiring. Will our heroes prevail? The fate of Springfield is in your hands!

First Impression: If you’re a fan of the Simpsons this is finally a game that does the long-running series justice. You may or may not know about previous Simpsons games and their less than perfect track record. The game looks pretty good for a cel shaded cartoon game. The control’s not bad, but it could be a lot better. Overall the single level they give you in the demo is really fun and worth checking out. Hopefully when the final product ships it will be as fun as the demo was.

The latest hockey release from EA sports stands up well to its older brothers. There really aren’t any new ground breaking features to speak of but it is still a solid game. First thing you’ll noice is how good this game looks the players are recognizeable if you recognize any NHLers anyway. The controls seem to be revamped a bit most noticeable is the shoot feature. You still use the right thumb stick to shoot but they made the wrist shot easier to release. It runs smooth and looks good. The shoot outs are also done well. Use the right thumbstick to deke and then shoot you gotta watch the goalie and shoot it where they leave an opening.

“What do you mean they took the fighting out of it. Fighting was the best part of the old version!”

“I think kids were beating each other up or something. But you can make someones head bleed Mikey.”

“Make someones head bleed!!!”

With the seasons for the NBA and the NHL about to kick off again, the game wars will also be off and running. EA is the big fish in the pond of sports games and they are the best in my opinion. Yes they are able to throw more money at their games, and is that a bad thing? EA always makes a faster better looking game with better game-play also. I know most people hate the EA machine but the truth is they do things better. 2K’s big advantage was their price point for the early releases. For 19.99 the 2K games where worth it but they have lost their luster. The game-play is never up to par with EA. It is always slower with not as tight control. And to be honest it never looks as good. I for one will continue to buy EA games until someone delivers a better sports game.

Just when it seemed that fighting Nazi hordes to save Europe was over. Just when you thought “I will never play another WW2 shooter”. Another one comes along and we couldn’t resist it. I am a big fan of WW2 shooters but have grown tired of the genre, then along comes Medal of Honor Airborne and I believe once again. The MOH series of games has been pushed aside by Call of Duty in recent as the premier WW2 shooter. With COD moving to a modern combat genre MOH has picked a perfect time to change up the system and give us a pretty darn good game.

The first thing that you’ll notice is that the levels are free roaming, no more point A to point B only. Its a welcome change and can make the game playable multiple times. You’ll also be able to parachute into any part of the battlefield. While landing in an intense fire fight can make your survival tough it can also give you the needed advantage. The ability to land anywhere, such as roofs, into blown open buildings and enemy bunkers makes for different gameplay each time as well as perfect sniping posts (if your into sniping as I am). When landing behind enemy lines make sure you nail your landing or it will be a short life for you.

Also the game allows you to pick what weapons load-out you want before you deploy. It has a small arsenal at first including some German weapons and as you pick up weapons they will be added to your load-out screen so you can start with them. This leads me to personally one of my favorite things and that is the weapons upgrades. This caused me to play the game through multiple times as getting these upgrades is quite addicting. You can get the upgrades by using each weapon to remove a Nazi from the game. Granted while some of the upgrades don’t seem to do much, some of them are great such as the addition of scopes, larger mags, and bayonets.

The levels are done well and really make you feel like you’re in old world Europe. They aren’t extremely large so navigating them is easy. Although the last level is a bit of a maze and I admit to getting lost a couple of times.

As with most WW2 games the AI leaves a bit to be desired. While the Nazi’s are fierce and will not run away they also will not move to and from cover very often so getting a sight on them isn’t all that difficult. The Nazi’s are also split up into classes and the lower the class the less battle hardened they are and thus easy to dispose of. The top of the Nazi food chain are the Nazi Elite, they are well armored soldiers with MG 42 machine guns that they carry around and are quite hard to take down (aim for the head). This was a nice addition. The AI of your teammates is awful as usual. It is nice to have multiple guys around so the bad guys aren’t just wasting you, and the AI is good for a few kills but more than a couple of times the AI decides to run in front of you just as your tossing a grenade and the grenade comes bouncing off their helmet right back to your feet.

Mutliplayer just seems a bit tacked on and really isn’t all that great. This game would have been a great co-op game and I’d like to see a WW2 game with co-op in the future.

All in all this game did not disappoint in a world where there may already be to many WW2 games. MOH Airborne gives a bit of a twist that makes it better then most recent WW2 games. With Call of Duty leaving the WW2 game behind and if your just itching to waste some of those easy to hate Nazi’s this game is worth picking up.