The Beatles: Rock Band.

Alert readers of this space will have noted that we're both fans of Rock Band and The Beatles. So, Harmonix's new game is less a potential purchase as much as it is a lifestyle fine.

In case you missed it, check out the promo movies over at the official site. The opening cinematic is definitely the one to watch. To quote my Mother, "It's like they were actually THERE."

As long as we're talking about Adventure Games...

LucasArts has a new Indiana Jones action game coming out for the Wii: Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. That's not real big news, in-and-of itself. What is interesting is that apparently the classic SCUMM game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis will be included as an unlockable bonus feature.

Hmmmmm.

So, LucasArts now has a SCUMM interpreter that natively runs on Wii hardware. (There's no word, as yet, as to whether ScummVM's code got used for any of this.) That seems like an awful lot of work for a single bonus feature.

On the other hand, as proof of concept piece as a prelude to releasing their old SCUMM games on the Wii's Virtual Console, that DOES seem worth the effort...

Look behind you! A Three-Headed Monkey!

Well, the unthinkable has happened: they're actually making a new Monkey Island game.

It's okay, I'll wait for you to glue your brain back together again just in time for me to BLOW IT APART: Tales of Monkey Island is being made by Telltale games, the dudes that made, among other things, the new Sam n' Max and the Strongbad Games. ALSO: they were the group of people who used to be the Adventure Game unit back at LucasArts in the old days when LucasArts made really good games, not highly questionable Star Wars shooters.

For example: the lead guy on the new Monkey Island is Dave Grossman, who was one-third of the team on the original Secret of Monkey Island along with Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer, not to mention the co-designer of Day of the Tentacle. And, they've brought a whole stack of the old team along as well, including Michael Land (the guy who wrote the music for the Monkey Island games and just about every other LucasArts game) and Dominic Armato (who played Guybrush in Monkey Island 3 & 4).

But wait, why stop there? At the same time, LucasArts is also releasing a remake of the original Secrect of Monkey Island, all tricked out for modern systems - but with the ability to switch back and forth to the old version.

Before you ask, Ron Gilbert has some awesome things to say about the situation.

Towards the end, he makes an excellent point. By the end of the year, he, Dave Grossman, and Tim Schafer will all have new games out. IS THIS THE END OF THE WORLD?


Its the end of the world for SUCKY GAMES, I can tell you that.

Lego. Rock. Band.

So, Harmonix pretty much had me at "Lego Rock Band is coming for the Wii." But then, they had to go and level that one up - one of the songs in the setlist is going to be "The Final Countdown?"

DONE.

New Play Control!

Gamecube games rewired to use the Wii Controls. I finally get to play Metroid Prime 1 & 2.

(I'm loving the way that the Wii really is in many ways a GameCube do-over. And I mean that in the best way possible. Great hardware with great games that no-one played - because everyone bought a PS2 with GTA3 instead.)

A nice writeup of the latest EVE Online shenanigans

EVE Online (wiki link) is a game that manages to utterly fascinate me, despite my having no desire to play it whatsoever.

The short version, for those who don't know: it's a space opera massively multiplayer game. It's like Everquest or World of Warcraft, but if everyone was Han Solo (or Mal Reynolds, if you prefer), all with a thick layer of cyberpunk sauce.

(Side note: "Cyberpunk Sauce" would be an excellent band name.)

The thing I find so fascinating is the amount of insane social stuff that happens around the game. The game assumes - or at least *allows* - for the players to play criminals, and as a result, the sort of behavior that would get you kicked out of any other MMO gets you more or less a high-five in EVE.

For example, one of the major game-play components is that players can start and run corporations. Like banks.

So, Ponzi Schemes are all over the place. Also, banks that turn out to be Ponzi schemes, whereupon the investors find this out, form a space-posse, and murder the heads of the organizations and steal all their stuff, also commonplace. Meanwhile, the game developers are all grins, because that's the game they wanted to run.

(There's a story from a few years back, which I assume is true, where one of the larger banks in the game, with jillions of player's in game money in it, was revealed to be a Ponzi scheme. But, the story goes that this was revealed by the guy who was running the con, who proceeded to fold the operation, take all the money he's acquired, buy the best ship in the game, and then take out a huge bounty on himself. I mean, that's awesome.)

Anyway, some crazy stuff happened last week - crazy even by EVE standards. I'm not going to try to recap, but this Ragdoll Metaphyics column over on Offworld does a great job summing it up.