Like many of my geek brethren I have a serious love for board games. Back in the day when I lived in a dumpy house with my university cronies and eventual bandmates we played board games almost every night. At its core board gaming is cheap and fun, and if you pick the right games it also leads to lots of shouting at each other – something that has a lot of entertainment value on its own.

Two of our favourite games were Acquire and Cosmic Encounter. These two games are considered to be forerunners of the “German Board Game” genre, with lots of player interaction, minimum amounts of luck, and boards and pieces that are fun to play with and manipulate. These basic concepts are the ideas that allowed the Germans to revolutionize board gaming and go beyond the typical North American “roll the dice and go around the track” gestalt and get into some seriously fun shit.

Which, in a very roundabout and overly biographical way brings us to Catan (otherwise known as The Settlers Of Catan) for the iPhone. It is an insanely good realization of the game, with an excellent tutorial, easy-to-parse attractive graphics, and a really really good interface. This game is an absolute must have if you are a fan of Catan, a fan of German-style games, a fan of board games in general, or just want to have fun. The only limitation on the thing is that it is strictly one player against either 2 or 3 computer opponents – but since the whole point here is that it gives you a chance to play when you can’t round up some meatspace opponents for actual tactile play, that is probably a restriction that most people can deal with.

The game is on the high side of the iTunes Store price range at $4.99 – but at less than the price of a big-ass latte, that is pretty damn good value. And you will be playing with this for a lot longer that it would take to slurp back some venti choco lactose-free mocha caramel double no-whip thingie down at Staryucks.

If you have never seen the way the typical game of this genre plays and want to know what you are in for before spending your five measly bucks, the publishers of the Catan games have a semi-hokey but fun web site that gives tutorials in all of their games (the same tutorial that comes in the Catan iPhone game, actually, so if you go through it on the web you can skip right into the play when you do buy the game).

So yeah, buy this. You won’t be sorry.

I am a complete sucker for innovation – especially in gaming. If it is new and cool and different and fun, I will be the first in line to pluck my simoleans down for a title. Everything from Animal Crossing to Guitar Hero to Boom Blox – I’ll search it out and be more than happy to pay. So when something that reaches up into that part of the stratosphere and it is free … well, you can connect those dots for yourself.

And when you do connect those dots, you end up with Word Ace – a combination of a word game and poker that is 100% winner-winner-chicken-dinner. The guys at Self Aware Games took scrabble, mixed it half-and-half with hold ‘em poker, added a dash of really slick on-line play, in-game chat, and an achievement system, and they brought it in at the low low price of free. So yeah, that works for me. Big time. The game is available for the Palm Pre and the iPhone and if you have either of those devices you need to take a look.

You can find all the details here (note: that is an iTunes store link) and see what else the gang at Self Aware is up to over here.

Guitar Hero 5 has PETER FUCKING FRAMPTON on board.

Really, I don’t need to say anything more.

There is a new Wario title out for the Wii, and it is loaded with seriously cool old-school 2D platforming goodness. For the most part it is 2 buttons and a D-pad, the way things were meant to be … but with a bit of a twist involved. Or in this case, a shake.

Nintendo has posted a promotional and game-play video to YouTube and in keeping with the general gestalt here, the video has a bit of a twist too. You will have to watch to see what I mean. Very clever indeed.

There is an update available now for Wurdle, and it has a feature that is either really cool or really annoying, depending on how competitive and/or irritable you are. When you are done a game, you now have the option to see all the words you missed and should have found if you weren’t such a fenderhead. The feature is fun, but also rather humiliating. If you have Wurdle already, you need to grab this update – there are other goodies in it, including a more responsive “shake” – and if you don’t have Wurdle then you really need to spend the three dollars and get it now.

Wurdle rocks.

One of the coolest things about the Application Store for the iPhone is that the distribution mechanism (ie; insanely easy, with no overhead at all for the developers or publishers) and the profit margin (way more money into the developers’ pockets than any traditional model) means that we are now seeing the advent of “impulse” software purchases. Since the developers can sell their product for 2 or 3 bucks and still make some serious coin, software is for the first time ever priced at a point where you can just buy something on a whim, and if you dont like it or you only use it once … big deal. It costs about as much as a cup of coffee.

Which is a very roundabout way of getting to the actual point: I bought Wurdle on a complete whim because it was a puzzle game (which I like), a word game (which I love), and only cost $2.99 (which meant that I said “what the hell” and gave it a click). The result? Wurdle is an insanely great game, totally addictive, perfect for any sort of “got a few minutes and need a break” play, and is way more interesting and well-thought-out than most of the game software you buy for 49.99 down at Ye Olde Best Buye.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, get Wurdle. Period. Or else.

Grr.

I won’t bore you with prattling on about how awesome Mario Kart Wii is … suffice to say that is is awesome, and repeatedly so. It is pretty much the perfect pick-up-and-play game, the perfect party game, and the perfect game for hardcore game geeks. Again, awesome.

Just buy the damn thing.

However, what I will prattle on about is my Mario Kart license number. You wanna add me to your roster? Go for it – the digits are 4124-5420-0252.

Game on!

It’s been a long time since I pimped a workday-wasting browser game, so let’s rectify that little omission right now. Bubble Tanks 2 puts you in charge of a mass of bubble that drives around shooting other bubbles. The key here is that after you blow up your bubbly opponents, you can gather up the bubble wreckage to make your own tank bigger. Get it big enough and you can upgrade to a tougher or faster tank – you decide which upgrade path you want to take – and eventually you get to the King Bubble Tank Of Doom.

Keyboard to move, mouse to aim and fire, and stay away from anything red on the screen. Everything else, you can discover on your own.

Click here to play.

A friend of mine recently regaled me with a tale of watching a guy play Guitar Hero 3 at a competition. The contestant played Metallica’s One and ripped off 93 percent on the “Expert” setting. That is good – very good. In fact, we can engage in some hyperbole here and throw in the extra “very”, in bold.

Very, very good.

We are not here, however, to talk about “very good”. We are here to talk about “completely and unbelievably fucking awesome” which is what the performance in the following video most definitely is. Through The Fire And Flames is generally considered to be the hardest song in GH3, period, bar none, end of discussion, thank you. One is difficult to be sure, but Flames is rather more difficult in the same way that Crime And Punishment is somewhat longer than Green Eggs And Ham. And on “Expert”, it becomes something exponentially more intricate, the notes akin to an arcane language that you can hear, but simply have no hope of ever comprehending.

And while there are some things of note in this performance – the excellent two-handed technique in the long hammer-on section at the start, the switch from the strum bar to two-handed tapping and back in the really hard part at 2:24, and the crucial drying of the hand on the jeans at 4:00 – there is no real point in trying to quantify or even understand the way this plays out. Just watch the video.

You’ll know.

If you have a Nintendo Wii (funny how, after all of the joking about the name, everyone has settled in and now just goes with the flow on that one) you have probably updated your console to include the “Nintendo Channel”. For the uninitiated – those of you without a Wii or without the technical skills to perform the 1-click upgrade now and again – this is a section of your Wii interface that feeds videos and news about current and upcoming games. It is essentially advertising, but couched in enough “content” – interviews with developers, “making of” videos, gameplay tips – that it is at least semi-palatable. So you have probably looked at it, seen a couple of game examples, maybe even rated a game or two.

That said, with nothing at the top levels of the channel to really draw you in, you have probably missed the best part of the whole thing … to wit, the DS Demo Download Service. From there you can download demo versions of new games for your DS, and try them out to your hearts content. It is fast and easy and free and it not only rocks from a consumer standpoint, but could probably sell a shitload of games if Nintendo had the brains to make it a little more obvious.

If you haven’t found it yet, here is the drill:

Spark up the “Nintendo Channel” on your Wii

Ignore whatever is blaring at you from the splash screen and select “To The Video List”

Once there, hit the “Find Titles For You” button.

And way down at the bottom of that screen, pick “DS Demo Download”

Once you are there, browse the games, pick one that you want to try, and then follow the instructions. Like most of the Wi-Fi and user interface components on the Wii and the DS, the download is startlingly easy to do, seamless, and pretty much foolproof. If the local sample is any indication, it is i a powerful sales tool, since after trying CrossworDS for the DS, I immediately went out and bought the thing. Which, by the way, I recommend as an absolute must have title for your DS.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can try the damn thing out for yourself.

CODA: I am amazed by the number of people who do not realize that their DS has a full Wi-Fi suite on-board, and will talk both 802.11 and Nintendo’s own wireless protocol right out of the box. I really think the big N needs to pimp that more – there are boundless applications to be had here, if only the user base – and, more to the point, the potential buying public – was better filled in. Get with the program, guys.

I won’t bore you with prattling on about how awesome Mario Kart Wii is … suffice to say that is is awesome, and repeatedly so. It is pretty much the perfect pick-up-and-play game, the perfect party game, and the perfect game for hardcore game geeks. Again, awesome.

Just buy the damn thing.

However, what I will prattle on about is my Mario Kart license number. You wanna add me to your roster? Go for it – the digits are 4124-5420-0252.

Game on!

Yes, really. Activision just released this little widget that lets you embed Guitar Hero on any web page. There are only three songs (I will let you discover them) and each one is pre-set at a difficulty level (one is easy, one is medium, and one is … surprise … hard). Yes, it is a cheap marketing trick and shows that Activision is just a teeny bit desperate in the face of the Rock Band juggernaut. But that doesn’t mean you cant have fun with it. Rock on!

Note: Instead of picking through the source of this page, you can get your mitts on the embed/object code from the widget itself … just click on “Grab Code” instead of “Start Rocking” when you click on the widget. Then paste it in whatever web page you happen to have at hand. Viral marketing gone mad!

Jonesing for a Friday morning time-waster that might actually have a redeeming value or two? Why not give TypeRacer a shot? It is a twist on the old “water race” games you see at the carnival … instead of shooting a stream of water into a clown’s mouth to propel your little car/horse/snail/Spongebob/whatever, you type. The faster and the more accurately you, the faster your car goes. Just the thing for all you blogger types who now have mad keyboard skillz after years of bashing out your deathless prose.

Hot tip: You have to go back and fix a typo immediately – the instructions aren’t overly clear on it, but if the typing box turns red you must go back and the misspelled word now, you cant let even the smallest typo slip. Any typing you do while the box is red is just a waste of finger energy.

And no, for you smartasses, the game would not be better called TypoRacer when I am playing. Hmph.

The idea of entire albums being added to the Rock Band catalogue gets closer and closer – today owners of Harmonix’ sublime music game will have noticed that about half of Boston’s debut album hit the download list, for 2 bucks a track or a sawbuck for the whole package:

Hitch a Ride
More Than a Feeling
Peace of Mind
Rock & Roll Band
Smokin’
Something About You

If you played the original versions of Guitar Hero, you know that “More Than A Feeling” was a wickedly good time, so this would seem to be a no brainer download. Anything that smacks of cock-rock is usually worth the time and effort in this particular gaming genre.

Also, the Wii version of Rock Band is now 100% official. It releases on June 22 in both Canada and the United States, and the main product will be the standard “game, drums, microphone, and guitar” bundle. Guitar Hero controllers for the Wii will also work with the game, and (praise be!) all of the instruments will be available separately on launch day. No word yet on whether or not downloadable songs will be available*, but there will be 5 bonus songs included in the original package.

This has got license to print money written all over it. It may surprise you to know that the Wii version of Guitar Hero 3 outsells all other platforms, including the ubiquitous Playstation 2, but the people at Harmonix are well aware of this and ordering larger wallets even as we speak.

*Given the fact that there are extra songs already included, I would say that the immediate answer would be “No” to the question of downloadable content – the Wii’s built-in storage just isn’t large enough. However, the downloads are a huge money factory for Harmonix, so that will probably not be the situation for all time. As soon as the Nintendo adds the ability to address an external hard drive, you can bet that the download store will be open for business.

Back in the day – and I am probably dating myself here – there was a genre of adventure game known as “point and click”. The folks at Sierra were the undisputed kings of this particular market, with titles ranging in content from the traditional to gritty, passing through wacky and the generally tasteless on the way. The games were a lot of fun, but were eventually superseded by richer and deeper products – games with character growth, better narrative, open-ended gameplay and (eventually) on-line play and evolving content.

The somewhat simple narrative and linear storylines – not to mention the distressingly lame graphics – did not age well, and the genre as for the most part faded away, although there are certain people who work tirelessly to keep the flame flickering.

Anyway – while the entire adventure game industry has moved on to bigger and better things, some brave souls over at Capcom thought that the Wii and it’s tactile control system would be a natural fit for this sort of thing. And after some messing about they came up with Zack & Wiki, which is an utterly delightful little exercise in welding traditional adventure gameplay with the waving and thrusting of the Wiimote. The game is a ton of fun, but has sadly remained pretty much entirely under the radar. The game is in the stores, but the chances are very high that you have never ever heard of it.

So, in the spirit of public service and of wasting a good 30 minutes of your work day, I feel obligated to point out this on-line demo level of Zack & Wiki. It uses the mouse instead of the Wiimote, but the general concept is the same: click on the various items that highlight when you mouse over them and figure out the order you need to use/trigger/manipulate them to get to the treasure. When you get to the page, click on the “Gameplay” tab to get to the demo level.

Go try it. Consider it your Wednesday diversion. And if you have a Wii, you really need to think about picking this one up.

Back in the day – and I am probably dating myself here – there was a genre of adventure game known as “point and click”. The folks at Sierra were the undisputed kings of this particular market, with titles ranging in content from the traditional to gritty, passing through wacky and the generally tasteless on the way. The games were a lot of fun, but were eventually superseded by richer and deeper products – games with character growth, better narrative, open-ended gameplay and (eventually) on-line play and evolving content.

The somewhat simple narrative and linear storylines – not to mention the distressingly lame graphics – did not age well, and the genre as for the most part faded away, although there are certain people who work tirelessly to keep the flame flickering.

Anyway – while the entire adventure game industry has moved on to bigger and better things, some brave souls over at Capcom thought that the Wii and it’s tactile control system would be a natural fit for this sort of thing. And after some messing about they came up with Zack & Wiki, which is an utterly delightful little exercise in welding traditional adventure gameplay with the waving and thrusting of the Wiimote. The game is a ton of fun, but has sadly remained pretty much entirely under the radar. The game is in the stores, but the chances are very high that you have never ever heard of it.

So, in the spirit of public service and of wasting a good 30 minutes of your work day, I feel obligated to point out this on-line demo level of Zack & Wiki. It uses the mouse instead of the Wiimote, but the general concept is the same: click on the various items that highlight when you mouse over them and figure out the order you need to use/trigger/manipulate them to get to the treasure. When you get to the page, click on the “Gameplay” tab to get to the demo level.

Go try it. Consider it your Wednesday diversion. And if you have a Wii, you really need to think about picking this one up.

When I was a wee child, I absolutely adored puzzles. Puzzles of any kind – jigsaws, magic squares, cryptograms, acrostics, crosswords, you name it. Even something as inane and simple as the “Jumble” feature on the comics page was latched onto and savoured. Puzzles were my pals – much more enjoyable to spend any sort of time with than the cretinous little jerks that I was forced to endure as my classmates or (dripping sarcasm coming) “peers” (dripping sarcasm ends).

Let me tell you, finding out that school was more “being cooped up in a room full of semi-literate morons” and less “reading cool books” was a huge and life-changing shock for an impressionable 5-year old.

Ahem. Anyway, I loved all puzzles, but the absolute best puzzles were the logic and perception kind. I would search for these everywhere – books, magazines, even the occasional Reader’s Digest – and delight over every manipulation and solution. If there were 12 visually identical weights and a scale that you could only use 3 times, I was there, baby. All of which – and in a rather roundabout way – brings us to the most insanely awesome videogame release of the last 2 years, Professor Layton and the Curious Village.

This is a game that you must buy if you have a Nintendo DS, and if you don’t have a Nintendo DS you should go out right now and buy one. Period. And if you know someone who doesn’t own a Nintendo DS you should go out and buy one for them and then give them a copy of this game to prove what an awesome friend you are. Really.

The game is a joy on virtually every level. The art direction and animation is impeccable, with a classic European feel (think Belle and Sebastian or Tintin) that is wonderfully refreshing in a world saturated by cheap anime. The sound and voice acting is impeccable, the writing is delightful, and the presentation classic and clean.

All of which, of course, pales in comparison to the puzzles. Everywhere you go, everywhere you turn, some door or entrance or clue is blocked by a puzzle, which you must solve to unlock the next step in the adventure. Hundreds of puzzles, lurking around every corner and waiting to delight and reward you. I have taken the liberty of reproducing one of the first puzzles in the game here – just a warm-up, found in the early minutes of the game to get your brain lubricated and working. It is a variation on a classic, and still a fun little diversion:

As shown in the diagram below, you have exactly one quarter of a circle. Within this circle is the rectangle ABCD, which touches the edge of the circle at D. Point B is located at the exact centre of the circle, and all of the angles of the rectangle are 90 degrees. How long is the diagonal line AC?

See? Awesome. Imagine an adventure game that lets you poke around and explore a world that is packed with these little gems – every one demanding that you produce the solution before you can move on to the next. And, via the built-in WiFi functions of the DS, new puzzles to download from the Nintendo mothership each and every week.

I’m not religious, but if I was – and by extension believed in some sort of “heaven” concept – it would be like living in this game forever.

Absolutely perfect.

So, yeah, the worst-kept “secret” in the videogame world is now official: today Activision officially announced the impending release of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. All Aerosmith, all the time. The game will ship in June and be available for the Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, and (maybe) the PlayStation 3. Activision is definitely hedging their bets on the PS3 thing in the press release, which much be causing yet another round of eye-gouging and self-flagellation over at Sony.

To promote the news (and to get to the whole point of this post) Activision is offering a free (that’s free, as in gratis) download of Dream On for owners of Guitar Hero III on the Xbox 360. It will only be available from February 16th to the 18th, so don’t miss out.

Meanwhile, the first screen shot of the game makes Joe and Steve look far less hideous than they do in real life. Whew.

The song Friends in Low Places is really fucking hard.

Just saying.

Best Buy had this listed very briefly on their Canadian web site:

“Interactive and synchronized light and smoke stage show for Rock Band on the Xbox 360″

The listing has now been taken down, and the only other reference I can find to it is on a GameStop page (sans picture) here, but if this is the real deal then life just got a whole lot cooler. The release date on the GameStop page – June 28, 2008 – matches the date that was on the Best Buy page, so hope certainly springs eternal.

Please please please let this be true …

The long-awaited and much-lusted-after english-language release of Professor Layton & The Curious Village is finally almost here, and you can almost taste the puzzle goodness. Not to mention to insanely awesome art direction.

I have personally been waiting for this thing for two fucking years now, and the last few days are going to be hell. Just to make us squirm a little more, Nintendo has put up a “teaser’ web site which is more akin to “torture”. Come on, February 10th! Jeezus!

The long-awaited and much-lusted-after english-language release of Professor Layton & The Curious Village is finally almost here, and you can almost taste the puzzle goodness. Not to mention to insanely awesome art direction.

I have personally been waiting for this thing for two fucking years now, and the last few days are going to be hell. Just to make us squirm a little more, Nintendo has put up a “teaser’ web site which is more akin to “torture”. Come on, February 10th! Jeezus!

I first saw Free Rice a couple of weeks ago, and kicked around the idea of adding a link to it. It’s a straightforward vocabulary game – just match words to their definitions (think “It Pays To Enrich Your Word Power” from Readers’ Digest) – and for every one you get correct the sponsors will donate 10 grains of rice to hunger relief through the United Nations’ World Food Programme. Ultimately, I decided against it for two reasons: One, the words seemed a little to simple to offer any real challenge, and two, it just seemed too good to be true. Play a game, and corporate sponsors pony up for some carbs? There’s gotta be a catch, right?

That would have been the end of the matter, but the Metal Queen herself dropped me a line to recommend the game. Chastised, I did some poking around that the whole thing is on the up and up: You play, and the rice goes to them that needs it. Period. The words are still pretty simple, but I guess I can overlook that in the face of some overriding charity here. So go and play Free Rice – your vocabulary will get a little kick in the pants, and the world will be just a teeny tiny bit better for it. 10 grains of rice might not seem like a lot, but if you get 10 words right that is 100 grains for someone who would otherwise have just about zero. Zip zilch nada.

Bupkus.

And when bubkus is the alternative, 100 grains of rice is a lot.

UPDATE: An increase in sponsorship means that every word you hit the definition on will now buy 20 grains of rice instead of just 10. Which is twice as much, where as twice bupkus is still bupkus. So there is no excuse – take a few minutes out of your day and go play a few rounds. Everyone wins.

Most of the fun in Factory Balls is actually figuring out how to play it, so I won’t say too much here. Suffice you say you have to get the balls into their boxes, and when you run out of balls in the ballblender your game is over. It’s fun, you need to use your brain and experiment, and it is prefect for a boring Friday afternoon at the office. The only caveat is that you cant turn the music off, so you will have to turn down the sound on your workstation. Enjoy.

Back in the day, when I was just a little geekboy, the premium after-school snack was something we called a “peanut butter flipover”. The concept was simple – a single piece of bread, spread with peanut butter, and then folded in half (the “flipover”) to make what was essentially a half of a sandwich, but with what was effectively double peanut butter. There was a temptation, I believe, to extend this to a “peanut butter and jelly flipover”, but that did not have the same sublime perfection – doubling up on the “J” as well as the “PB” with the fold just made for a soggy sandwich. With a peanut butter flipover part of the appeal was definitely the comforting simplicity of the thing.

Anyway, that’s not the point here. The point here is that “Peanutbutter Flipover” would be a totally awesome name in Rock Band, and I offer it up free gratis. You want it, it’s all yours. Just make sure you do the name proud, okay?

Many of you are less than a week away from the release of Rock Band – specifically, those of you in the United States who are getting the game on November 20th. On behalf of the rest of us, who have to wait until December, allow me to point out that we hate your fucking guts. With a passion.

Ahem. Now then. There is a temptation by a lot of people to assume that this is just Guitar Hero with drums. This is a bit (okay, a lot) of an over-simplification: While Harmonix did build the basic mechanics of both games, Rock Band is a much deeper experience. The way that you manage your band’s career is just as important as hitting the notes – if you take a gig at a venue that is over your head and stink the place out, you will have to work for months to get back on track. A the stench of a bad show follows you around like dog shit on your shoe, destroying your reputation. Even small items like creating the setlist for your gig become – as in the real world – crucial decisions that can make or break a particular show and by extension, a career.

One of those small items – or, depending on your state of mind, not so small items – is the name of your band. The name you pick is not just for your own amusement – it will be publicly displayed on the networked progress boards, on the covers of magazines that document your progress, and in any on-line performance (being the opening act for a more experienced band is a great way to get exposure) you might get into. And while most of you probably have a Secret Awesome Band Name that you have been carrying around in the back of your head for ages, Harmonix has you covered if you can’t think of anything cool. There is a “name generator” in Rock Band and if you draw on it, the game will randomly take one word or phrase from list “A” and match it with one random word or phrase from list “B” to come up with your nom du guerre:

Some of the possible combinations are positively sublime – you would certainly be hard pressed to do better than “Weekend of the Loaf Dogs”, which has awesome Swedish heavy metal written all over it. Once again, Rock Band appears to rule large.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …

Hang on, wrong post.

Er, a long time ago (and I am showing my age here) the “bleeding edge” in videogame technology was “3D vector” graphics. This was nothing more than a fancy way of saying “straight lines” but it was a huge step forward because the graphics were scalable – as they moved towards you, they could get bigger, providing a very shaky illusion of depth. The best know of these titles was Atari’s Battle Zone but there were other lesser known entries as well.

Vector Runner is a tip of the retro hat to those games, mixed with a bit of Pole Position and without the stupid pointy tank that you could never ever kill. Use your arrow keys to steer your ever-accelerating cube – er, vehicle and try not to hit the cones while grabbing the coloured power-ups.

It’s pretty much a twitch-fest, bit it is also a fun little time-waster for 5 or 10 minutes on a Thursday afternoon – made more interesting by the rather unique feature wherein it costs points to pause, and the basic sort of inertia that the playfield seems to be subject to. Have fun.

So no, for those that asked, I do not have the game yet – I am still agonizing about what platform to go with. Really, it rates up there with the great questions of our time. In the meantime, however, I hear nasty rumours that the new game is too easy, and that the avatars are really lame in both design and in the way they move. I really do not want this to be true …

There has been much in the way of speculation and wishful thinking over the “final encore” in Guitar Hero 3. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, the final encore was debuted in Guitar Hero 2 – the last song that would push you and your audience to the limit. That cut was “Freebird” … pretty cool because (a) the song is fucking hard, and (b) in the original Guitar Hero they kept referring to “Freebird” as an example of rock excess that you would be best to avoid. The whole thing was exciting, fun, and self-mocking at the same time – a fitting finish to the game.

In Guitar Hero 80s Edition some people felt that “Play With Me” was a bit of a letdown, and – while I personally liked the choice because I am a huge Bill & Ted geek – they may have been right. Despite having some serious musical and gameplay grapefruits, the song just doesn’t have the same sort of iconic presence in our musical psyche.

Which brings us back to GH3. Some people, buoyed by the presence of Led Zepplin in Rock Band, have nattered on about “Stairway To Heaven” as the super-secret final track. This shows a serious lack of imagination and fortunately – no matter what else their faults – the mopes at Activision have a little more vision and style than that. Some people might complain about the final decision, but I think that this is a really cool choice and I can’t wait to see how it plays out. No matter what, it definitely qualifies as “fucking hard”.

Give it a listen here. Iconic? Oh my yes ….

So here we are – into the fateful final week as we wait for Guitar Hero 3. If this sort of thing is not your cup of tea (or Jack Daniels, as the case may be) then come back next week. There will be a lot of rambling about the game on These Very Pages as we count off the last 4 days of delightful anticipation …

Four days, twelve hours, and counting …