Sunday Gaming News – 27/1/2012

January 27, 2013

Happy Day After Australia Day! Let’s News!

  • Rock Band is still around, and still getting new songs, and I get to mention it for the first time in a long time because, this week, Aerosmith come to the franchise for the first time (not counting that execrable cover of Train Kept Rollin’ from RB1). While I’m not that excited about the new stuff, the old stuff includes two classics from the band’s 1975 album, Toys In The Attic, “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion”, as well as a live performance of their early classic, “Dream On”. If, like me, you still break out the plastic guitars/drums/keyboards for an occasional Rock Band session, then this should give you some good new stuff to play.
  • Being a modern, advanced console with digital output, the Wii U doesn’t really care about analogue formats such as PAL and NTSC. The days of poor PAL conversions are long over, right? Well… not quite. The newly-announced Wii U Virtual Console will see PAL versions of titles go up on its European version. While this is in-line with the policy for the Wii, it contradicts Nintendo’s approach on the 3DS, where NTSC games are available in all regions.
  • In a massive update on the DayZ blog, Dean “Rocket” Hall has detailed the current state of the upcoming standalone version of his open-world zombie-survival game. The big news is a redesigned server architecture which will help to significantly curtail the amount of cheating going on in the current version. The post also discusses the new visuals, and offers some impressive screenshots of the progress on this. All in all, the game is shaping up really well.
  • If you’ve been waiting for Path of Exile to enter open beta, then wait no more. The game hit open beta last week, and it’s looking pretty good. Feeling very much like Diablo II (even moreso than the Torchlight games), and with an incredibly detailed passive skill tree system (that looks a lot like the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X for some reason), this New Zealand-developed game is headed for big things. Check out the open beta trailer below:

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