Apple Corps announced that they will release a new music video game, The Beatles: Rock Band, in September 09.  Apple Corps, the venerable band’s marketing and licensing arm, has long envisioned  making money on the popularity of the Beatles. After a number of so-so attempts including  Apple Electronics, Apple Films, Apple Publishing, and Apple Boutique, little was heard from the core for over 25 years.

Late last year, we talked here about a possible release of the  Beatles Collection on ITunes, and we really hoped it would happen. Since the Gordon’s don’t torrent, Lisa and I were faced with using the Evil Apple to pay those poor artists their 3 cents for our listening pleasure, and any artist who resisted the ‘personne corrompue’ for all those years deserved our support. Anyhow, now that DRM is a thing of the past so goes those thieving rotten bastards and viola, Beatles Rock Band!

As avid gamers, there is always a certain pride when we see an obvious winner like Rock Band getting set up in peoples living rooms. It’s just too bad EA didn’t  steal Take Two last year, we could have seen a “Revolver”  theme in the next Grand Theft Auto!  Either way, you have to hand it to Jeff Jones . What a great job so far in bringing what is now a 40 year old brand into the new century, and almost getting all of these young kids rocking to the Beatles. Not just that, it will be a lot of fun to karaoke I Want To Hold Your Hand with a bunch of  50 something Paw-Paws. What a laugh it will be.

I just wonder how much money this is going to cost the insurance companies and if these games and stories will eventually be monetized. Either way, here a little flying game for you to enjoy before the money grubbing lawyers get a hold on it!

Play the game HERE

Take-Two Interactive Software, who had been asked by a Federal Court to show why it is not in compliance with a subpoena demand by regulators involved in the EA deal, have told the Feds to ‘forgetaboutit’. Saying rather loudly that that the court’s request is unnecessarily broad and would entail unacceptable additional expense, the company has decided to ignore this latest request.

Take Two, who apparently is being run by a group of meth addicted Bioshock  groupies, have hired the conservative law firm of Goldberg, Ligner & Shyster as council. Senior Partner Tom Goldberg, who until today was thought to be assassinated by Niko, was refreshed and is in court. Take Two, who have never heard of the Southern District of New York or White Plains, figures if they ignores the Feds long enough, McCain will call off the witch hunt when he gets elected, thanks to Tom.

Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto remains the No. 1 video game on earth, selling 871,300 units in May, over $500 Million in less than 2 months.

It reminded me of the Bad Old Days of AOL dialup. AOL Dialup isn’t hard to remember, if anyone cares to. Do you remember the busy signals for hours on end, the non-existant customer support, and the 2 years before they finally got it straight? One may see a parallel here with the bad old days of AOL. They put on more subscribers than they could handle for years. Oh by the way, the message XBox released looks alot like those of the AOL of old. A press release, propaganda letter, and an i’ll gladly give you on tuesday a hamburger you bought today mentality that sent AOL subscribers running away in droves 10 years ago. Either way, this offer is sure to keep the Better Business Bureau at bay, and lets Major Nelson off the hook.

From the XBox Live Team Dear Xbox LIVE Members:

During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service. As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance. I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state. At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service. And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge. In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you. Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!

 Sincerely, Marc Whitten General Manager

When Shipping Departments Screw Up

nashhousewares found a thread on an Italian forum with some pictures that, if they’re what they look like, do NOT bode well for keeping Halo 3 secrets until launch day. We’re looking into this – but if it turns out to be what it looks like, I’m thinking we’ll probably close the forum down for 3 weeks. Starting… really soon. Stay tuned.

“We’re looking into this”.  Which means he went running to his buddies at Bungie, who then went running to Microsoft Game Studios, who then probably got these poor fucks in a lot of trouble for posing in some innocent picture.  Because as it turns out, those are simply the empty boxes they are going to use for display purposes around the store. 

I went back to the Italian site where this pic was originally posted, and the pic was removed with this message:

means that these guys not only got falsely accused of being, as one   HBO regular called them, “Italian Pirates”, had their faces and gamertags plastered all over the internet, and got investigated by Microsoft, they also had their fucking server crash from all the HBO dorks hitting them up.

Mama Mia!