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After months of financial statement teases and the initial reveal in an issue of Game Informer, Activision has officially released the first details of Guitar Hero 4, now known as Guitar Hero: World Tour. The game will be available this Fall on the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360. The same development teams that created Guitar Hero III are back on board with the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions being developed by Neversoft, while Vicarious Visions is creating the Wii version and Budcat is bringing it to the PS2.

Guitar Hero: World Tour looks to be the beginning of a completely era for the Guitar Hero series. As was revealed by Game Informer, World Tour will feature a drumkit and microphone along with the Music Studio track editor and an eight-player Battle of the Bands mode. Any song created in the Music Studio can be shared with other gamers through the game’s online database GHTunes.

Other gameplay options will include a four-player “full band” mode (that can be played both online and locally) and singleplayer Career mode that can be played with any instrument. ..

Activision is saying that World Tour will feature the largest number of tracks in a music game ever. As of now, four bands have been confirmed to have a place in World Tour: Van Halen, Linkin Park, The Eagles and Sublime. And all of the songs will be master tracks; there will be no covers on Guitar Hero: World Tour. The game will also offer “significantly more localized downloadable music than ever before on all of the next-generation consoles.” So while it’s vaguely worded, it sounds like downloadable tracks are coming to the Wii as well as the PS3 and Xbox 360.

The Wii Fit, which comes complete with its own special balance board, is one of the new fitness computer games from the Nintendo stable, which already includes virtual games such as tennis, boxing and bowling…

Sophie, a publicist, shows me the new hardware for Wii Fit at her office in Soho. On the floor in front of a giant TV is a pressure-sensitive balance board about the size of weighing scales. In fact, what the new Wii does is to weigh you straight away. Along with your height and age, the computer then works out your body mass index. Mine is 29.36, somewhere between Medically Obese and About To Drop Dead. “It’s not 100 per cent accurate,” Sophie says, tactfully. “Muscle weighs more than fat.” “Thanks,” I say. “I can see why you’re in PR.”

[Youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=t3pfQdADxEs[/youtube]

Next, after some rudimentary balance exercises in which I am revealed to be fundamentally lopsided, the machine computes my “Wii age”. It is 65 (my actual age is 43). “Oh dear,” says Sophie. I have to choose a “Mii”, an icon to represent myself on screen. I go for a perky little chap with a side part and pot belly. He introduces himself. In Japanese. The English language version is not available yet, but if its success over there is anything to go by – more than a million copies of the game sold in just over a month – this game won’t be sitting on shop shelves for long.

I select an on-screen tutor, wondering if it’s morally or legally OK to lust after a computer-generated fitness instructor. She greets me with what I take to be a provocative pose. “She’s saying, ‘Hello, you fat bastard’,” the photographer says.

A lot of gamers would know Uwe Boll. He’s the guy who directed several movie adaptations for video games such as House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark. He’s also the brains behind the new Far Cry movie.

Despite his long history in making movie adaptations of video games though, Boll doesn’t seem to be Blizzard’s prime choice for making the World of Warcraft movie. In fact, as MTV reports, they practically laughed at him when he offered to do so.

Boll recently got into contact with Paul Sams of Blizzard to make the movie. Boll relates the reply he got was a flat-out denial:

We will not sell the movie rights, not to you…especially not to you. Because it’s such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.

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Thank goodness Uwe Boll won’t get his hands on this popular game to make a movie. It’s been a good six or seven months, I’d say, since I pulled myself from the clutches of WoW (although I still have my level 70 toon just in case…), but still, if it was made into a movie, I’d prefer it be made into a good one. Blood Rayne was a serious letdown.

For all the Uwe Boll haters, the comment “not to you… especially not to you” has to be extremely humorous and rewarding.

the wife has already let me know that we’re getting one.

Wii Fit has already made waves in Japan, selling more than 1.4 million copies since December, and Nintendo of America has finally announced how much it will cost us to get in shape when the game finally hits North America on May 19. The Wii Fit package, which includes both the game and the wireless balance board, will sell for $89.99.

The title features more than 40 different games and activities, in areas such as yoga, strength training, and aerobics. Nintendo also announced that the first thousand people who pre-order the game from the Nintendo World Store in New York City will receive limited-edition t-shirts featuring everyone’s favorite tea-table up-ender, Shigeru Miyamoto.

While the game will be priced slightly higher than the $75 it was originally sold for in Japan, it is probably due to the sturdier version Nintendo had to make for bigger folks on this side of the Pacific.

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Officials at one eastern Kentucky hospital say their patients soon won’t have to travel to see a specialist.

That’s because they’re bringing the specialists to them with a robot.

Officials at Saint Joseph Hospital in Martin say the robot is controlled wirelessly from a computer with a joystick.

They say their robot will allow doctors from anywhere in the Saint Joseph System to see patients at the Floyd County hospital.

Hospital officials say doctors have to first get credentials before they can see patients wirelessly from the robot.

All seven Saint Joseph facilities in the state now have a robot doctor.

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After what many have seen as an eternity, Flagship Studios has finally released another patch for the single-player version of the Hellgate: London. Caution that the patch is a beta and not a final release. If you wish to install the beta patch there are a large number of fixes discovered and tested in the multiplayer version. Just be certain to back up your save games before installing beta patch.

Download Hellgate: London SP patch 1.2 beta (US)
Download Hellgate: London SP patch 1.2 beta (UE)

Also of note is that the Test Center server was updated with an early build of Hellgate: London Patch 1.3.

Hellgate: London SP patch 1.2 beta Patch Notes:

Hello Hellgaters!

We’re very pleased to bring our single-player gamers up to date with this patch. We’ve been putting a lot of focus on the online space where we get a great deal of testing done on our Test Center servers. The consistent feedback and requests to have these same improvement made available for those of you that enjoy offline, single-player gaming has not gone unheard! We’re still a small studio, so getting everything done as fast as you and we want to can be a challenge. So we greatly appreciate your patience while we got this patch into the development / test / release cycle.

You’ll find tons of bug fixes, skill changes, class balances, UI updates, graphic enhancements, and much more in this patch.

FOX6 shows us how patients recovering from spinal injuries are getting help from the Nintendo Wii. Doctors have found that using the video game system helps patients recover more quickly.

This Bonus Pack includes 3 new maps (well, 2 revived back to life for UT3 and 1 completely new map).

• Morbias is the deathmatch arena that started it all, perfectly suited for anything from small intense duels to chaotic free-for-all matches.
• The Unreal Tournament classic, Facing Worlds was one of the most played maps in gaming history, beloved sniper map.
• Searchlight is an intricate new capture the flag map designed for both z-axis rooftop runs and strategic indoor gameplay. Returning classics and fresh new designs let you experience Unreal gaming like never before.

DM-Morbias: The Morbias Station is a transport hub that focuses all traffic passing through Taryd’s jumpgates. The Station offers a terrestrial shuttle, storage facilities (with quarantine services for live cargo), and a social center where guests can meet incoming visitors or hold private meetings in a neutral setting.

DM-FacingWorlds: The Necris have forced their way into even the most revered of Izanagi landmarks. Their corruption has spread to the Temple of Facing Worlds, and one of its towers is already showing the effects of infection and decay.

CTF-Searchlight: The lighthouse serves as a beacon to this remote island, thought to be the ancient home of the Necris Prophet. The spiritual components of the Necris conversion are greatly misunderstood, and their power is vastly underestimated. Those who are willing to face the impact of their conversion often come to religious centers like this one to meditate.

This patch was created to address a few minor issues prior to the next release of America’s Army.

FORCE CLASS
We have enabled Global Forceclassing (FC) on honor bearing servers. Individual FC can still be used but not on honor servers. Using a Global FC on everyone levels the playing field for all. When using Global FC, honor is accrued at less than normal rates due to the fact that old maps were created with specific weapon loadouts in mind. Forceclassed Servers will show up in MBS with an (FC) preceding their name for easy identification.

USERNAMES
Spaces in user account names are no longer permitted. If you have an old account with a space it has been replaced with an underscore character (_) or in the case of conflicts a number. You should have received an email to your address of record indicating the change. All of your other account information was retained.

BAN SYSTEM
Ban system again supports banning by IP, MAC, or Name/PBGUID (for PB servers banning by NAME will result in a PBGUID ban instead of a name ban). Ban system now supports console commands to list ban lists in sets of 20 (or so) to allow “scrolling” through the list to locate banned players. The Admin Command Post only supports showing the first 100 ban entries but now has a wider list to show all the ban details. The Banning system was rewritten and includes the preliminary ability to download a ban list from a web server on game server startup.