maestro! green groove screenshot

Neko Entertainment have announced the European launch of Maestro! Green Groove, a musical platform adventure game designed for Nintendo DSIWare, available from the Nintendo Shop Channel now.

Blending two exquisite flavours, Maestro! Green Groove is a unique concept combining the standards of platform gaming with the pleasure of musical creation in a unique and astonishing way.

Maestro! Green Groove gives players the power to create a symphony with the touch of the Nintendo DS-stylus. Set in the deep, dark tropical forests of the Green Groove World, players take control of Presto a colourful music loving bird.

Using the DSi stylus players strum, run and tap to the rhythm of a Bollywood musical orchestra whose reinterpretation of classics such as Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Chopin’s Nocturne n°2 and Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” will drive you wild. Just like the world’s best conductors, to move Presto through Maestro! Green Groove players will need to stick as close as possible to the original composition to progress.

Featuring challenges including special strings, goofy enemies and crazy targets that need to be knocked down as fast as lightning, Presto will need to defeat his jealous rival Staccato and his spider gang in epic musical battles.

Utilizing the Nintendo DSi microphone Maestro! Green Groove is one of the first DSiWare games to truly make the most of the Nintendo DSi microphone, allowing players to let their vocal cords loose with the melodies featured in the game.

Laurent Lichnewsky, Managing Director of Neko Entertainment says;

“We are pleased to announce the launch of Maestro! Green Groove for Nintendo DSiWare owners throughout Europe. Its perfect mix of platform adventure gaming and musical creation featuring some of the world’s best known compositions will appeal to players both you and old.”

For further information visit Neko Entertainment.

Singstar Motown

This year Motown celebrate their 50th anniversary and the Sony Corporation have marked the event by releasing a new karaoke game called ‘SingStar Motown’.

The new version of the game follows the theme of the previous Singstar PS3 game and features 30 songs on the disc with the outstanding quality come to be expected of the brand.

The Playstation 3 game offers a big update of the Playstation 2 titles with an online store where you can buy further songs for a small fee.  The price for the latest version is around £20 and includes the following titles;

PS2 and PS3 Songs

David Ruffin – Put A Little Love In Your Heart
Diana Ross & The Supremes – Reflections
Jimmy Ruffin – What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted
Lionel Richie – My Destiny
Martha Reeves & The Vandellas – Jimmy Mack
Martha Reeves & The Vandellas – Nowhere To Run
Marvin Gaye – Let’s Get It On
Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On?
Marvin Gaye & Kim Weston – It Takes Two
Mary Wells – My Guy
Rick James – Super Freak
Smokey Robinson – Being With You
Smokey Robinson And The Miracles – The Tracks Of My Tears
Stevie Wonder – For Once In My Life
The Commodores – Brick House
The Commodores – Easy
The Contours – Do You Love Me
The Four Tops – Reach Out I’ll Be There
The Isley Brothers – This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You)
The Jackson 5 – ABC
The Miracles – Love Machine
The Supremes – You Can’t Hurry Love
The Temptations – Get Ready
The Temptations – Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone
The Velvelettes – Needle In A Haystack

PS3 Exclusive Songs

The Four Tops – I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)
The Jackson 5 – I Want You Back
Martha Reeves & The Vandellas – Dancing In The Street
Marvin Gaye I Heard It Through The Grapevine
The Supremes – Stop In The Name Of Love

The singing game feautures forty number one singles for you and friends and family to perform in the style of your favourite artists and is guaranteed to be a massive hit this Christmas!

Check out the video of  Lips: Number one hits on Xbox360

The Beatles: Rock Band

Former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were once again on stage together at the launch of The Beatles Rock Band game.

Paul and Ringo were joined by John Lennon and George Harrison’s widows, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, at the E3 Electronic Entertainment expo in Los Angeles.

The Beatles: Rock Band is a take on the popluar Guitar Hero computer game.  The game allows gamers to play along to their favourite songs using controllers which mimic the Fab Four’s instruments.  I’m not sure how many gamers have even heard of The Beatles, let alone want to plat along with hits from the sixties!

The Beatles Rock Band game could start family feuds as teenagers all over the world complain about how parents are wasting too much of thier life playing computer games!

Ringo Starr said: “The game is good, the graphics are very good and we were great.”

Paul McCartney added: “We love the game. We think it’s fantastic. Who’d have ever thought we’d end up as androids.”

The game has been developed by Harmonix, the makers of the Rock Band game series.

Watch the trailer for The Beatles Rock Band game.

There was one brilliant third party title that deserved to sell millions and didn’t, despite Steven Spielberg’s involvement: Boom Blox. A superb physics based party games where players would attempt to throw, pull and shoot their way into demolishing towers – a sort of anti-jenga if you will.

But it’s great news to hear that the original’s disappointing commercial performance hasn’t stopped EA coming up with a sequel, and here’s the trailer. Makes you want to risk tennis elbow and an arm that feels it will break any second all over again, doesn’t it?

The most exciting thing about this, aside from the prospect of more arm-achingly good gameplay? Well, the original allowed you to create your own levels using a wonderfully simple tool, but the game is following in the footsteps of Little Big Planet and Guitar Hero World Tour in allowing users to share these creations over the Wii’s internet connection meaning it’ll be a lot harder to memorise those tower-toppling strategies in multiplayer.

Boom Blox Bash Party is due out this Spring only on Wii.

Anyway, in some news which really shows up yesterday’s stale sounding Guitar Hero Greatest Hits cash in, gamers will be able to enjoy the music of the fab four in game for the first time, after Harmonix paid an obscene-yet-unknown amount of cash for the rights.

Y’know what else is likely to be obscene? The cost of the full instrument bundle, that’s what. Many of us (myself included) were left a little outraged by the price of Rock Band in Europe last time around (£180 for instruments plus game, significantly more than our US cousins), and if the early US RRPs are anything to go by, we UK gamers can look forward to being offended all over again.

With unique controllers based on the actual instruments played by John, Paul, George and Ringo, you can look forward to some stinging pricing: The game alone will be $60 (£43), the standalone guitars will be $100 (£70) and the full bundle (presumably with guitars, drums and game) will set you back an eye watering $250 (£175). You can expect a full UK mark-up on top of these straight currency conversions too with the usual excuses.

The Beatles aren’t the first band to get a rhythm action game devoted only to themselves: Guitar Hero has previously had an Aerosmith song disk, Rock Band have released the music of AC/DC and Guitar Hero: Metallica is on the way.

Aging PC gamers may also remember a first person shooter based on the band KISS – the only thing more unusual than the franchise being the fact that KISS Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child was actually pretty good.

Will you be getting this? Fed up of rhythm-action games? Drop us a comment.

Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits is coming to Xbox 360, Wii, Playstation 3 and the must-be-on-its-last-legs-now-surely Playstation 2 platforms this summer, and it will include 48 master recordings from the previous games in the series.

The good news is that this will take many of Guitar Hero World Tour’s improvements on board, so gamers can look forward to added drums and vocals in the songs for the first time, as well as online play and GHWT’s Music Studio feature that allowed you to make your own songs or blatantly copy more famous ones.

There will be no new venues, but gamers who have spent far too long on the series and can play “Through the Fire and Flames” on expert blindfolded will be rewarded with a new “Expert +” setting. Think I’ll just stick to hard.

Of the 48 tracks (which seems a little short to me, given even Guitar Hero: Aerosmith managed 41), only a partial track listing has emerged just yet, but here it is anyway:

Alice in Chains – Them Bones
Dragonforce – Through the Fire and Flames
Heart – Barracuda
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts – I Love Rock N Roll
Poison – Nothin’ But a Good Time
Queen – Killer Queen
Rage Against The Machine – Killing in the Name
Twisted Sister – I Wanna Rock

Disappointingly, according to an interview with IGN, Activision haven’t followed in the sensible shoes of Harmonix’s Rock Band series and will not be allowing the tracks to be exported to the hard disk for use in future titles. Neither will DLC purchased for Guitar Hero World Tour work in this new release, which sounds like Activision shooting itself in the foot to me.

What do you think readers? Is Activision going to cause the franchise’s downfall by milking it too hard?

Never seen the appeal of waving around noisy plastic instruments?

And what have been the best songs to virtually strum along to, anyway?

Let us know in the comments.

The two teenagers are Renos Goergiou who was 16 and Lyndon Jones who was 15 were watched by over 9500 people at the ‘Give it a Name’ festival in Earls Court, London.

This exiting new game offers DS gamers the chance to play Guitar Hero on their DS.

I know what your thinking, how do you attach the Guitar to the Nintendo DS console? Well, this game comes with a Grip not a Guitar, that nicely fits on to your DS console, enabling you to take and play the game wherever you go. You also use a Guitar Pick-stylus to strum out your favourite tunes on the touch screen.

Although this game does not allow you to compete with friends via Wi-Fi you can battle it out using a local network.

Now you can shout ‘Rock Out’ into the DS microphone to unlock star power, whilst you play along to songs.

The game comes with 5 new venues and 2 new characters especially for the DS.

Overall I would give this game a 4 out of 5.

The game should cost around £50 and is only available on the Nintendo DS. It is planned to be released on the 17/7/2008.

Check out the Website for Guitar Hero: On Tour.