If you haven’t seen it yet, here is some of the first footage of Harmonix’s Rock Band in action, with four employees playing "Welcome to the Jungle." Two things came to mind while I was watching it: 1) That it sounded as if the vocal track was layered over a pre-recorded take (either the original or a cover.) That’s how it worked in Harmonix’s Karaoke Revolution, but in the video, with its poor audio quality, I don’t think I could pick up the vocal player at all. 2) I don’t have a cool leather jacket and will never appear as effortlessly awesome as the hairy fellow, even if he is only playing with a white Fisher Price guitar.
Tetsuo Mizuguchi, creator of delicious music games Lumines and Rez, is apparently going to help create a virtual Tokyo inside Second Life. Not only is Mizuguchi a talented designer, but I like his approach to this project, if not his grammar. "I hope to make Virtual Tokyo like a museum of Japanese pop culture. My friends abroad have told me often that there’s so much materials and it’s never preserved. This might be the perfect place for it." I’ll be very interested to see how a game developer translates his skills into the creation of a setting without obvious goals, providing no sense of completion.
Hey PS3 owners: developer Ninja Theory has announced, through informal channels, that a demo for their action game Heavenly Sword will be arriving on the PlayStation Network in the near future. This is one of the games that helped push the hype for the PS3, initially; it’ll be good to give it a spin, if it maintains anything of the Prince of Persia/God of War combination touted. Even if it doesn’t, it has a redheaded protagonist.
Speaking of E3, Eurogamer has a mostly-complete list of publishers appearing at the show along with the games they’ll be showing off. I’m really looking forward to more on Clive Barker’s Jericho, Age of Conan, and all the GameCock shit. Thank goodness for the Xbox Live "Bringing It Home" stuff, because I want moving pictures and I don’t think I can handle the G4 coverage. It’s not you, Kevin, Adam, Morgan– it’s the cocktease format of television.