Tremble with fear, wallet! Rock Band releasing full albums monthly

The prospect has been looming above us since Rock Band was released and the time is finally upon us - Full Albums will be available for download monthly starting April 22. Judas Priest will be kicking things off this Tuesday when their entire Screaming for Vengeance album will be made available for $15. Separate tracks will still be available for the standard $2 a pop. Full albums are planned to be released monthly heretoforth with The Cars' self titled debut album to appear next month and The Pixies' Doolittle popping up in June. Your wallet hates you in advance.

Telltale Games Reveal New WiiWare Game

Telltale has finally revealed what their not-Sam-and-Max WiiWare game will be -- An adventure game starring Strongbad from HomestarRunner.com called Strongbad's Cool Game for Attractive People. Unfortunately it seems that the game developers forgot one key thing - everything on homestarrunner.com that isn't strongbad is less funny than crib death.

I guess the game could be good. Admittedly, I haven't really gone to Homestar Runner in years and never really got into it as much as everybody else did. I just never found a retarded marshmallow and a stubby luchadore that says "crap" to be all that funny, although strongbad was good for the occasional chuckle.

So, no, it isn't the new Monkey Island or Indiana Jones Point and Click adventure that I was hoping for but, still, Telltale has proven with Sam and Max (and maybe not so much with CSI) that they know how to make a quality adventure game and, hopefully, the dismal unfunniness of 90% of homestarrunner.com won't ruin it.

[Telltale]

Thriftbot: No Cake Jokes

Today Harmonix is proving to the world that there's more to April Fools than tricking people into clicking links to an 80's music video of a man that looks like Parker Lewis dancing around in a prison issue denim outfit. Any Rock Band owner playing on a sufficiently modern console (sorry PS2) has a free song waiting for them to download. Not just any song, mind you, but a song that launched a million cake jokes and made Portal the over-referenced Napoleon Dynamite of the videogame world - "Still Alive".

Maybe the song isn't quite as suited for Rock Band as some but do you really care?

If you're looking to download some other songs this week, you're out of luck because that's all she wrote. Why no other songs? Maybe Harmonix is running out of steam. Hahahahah, see what I did there? Because Steam is the name of Valve's game downloading servi- Nevermind, just go download the song.

Nintendo Embraces Online Gaming

[Obviously an April Fools Joke. Nintendo still hates the internet.]
In a Nintendo Press Conference held today with Nintendo of America COO, Reggie Fils-Aime, it was revealed that Nintendo is regretting their limited integration of online features into their games. Fils-Aime says:

"We've seen the market for online gaming growing exponentially and, in the interest of maintaining our position of being an innovative, cutting edge industry leader, we will be reinventing the Nintendo brand to embrace the online market rather than avoid it."

Some changes Reggie goes on to mention include:
•The abolition of "Friend Codes" for a more user-friendly Xbox Live interface.
•Online multiplayer for all First-Party and Virtual Console games, including ones that have already been released via updates.
•Voice chat compatible with all previously released and future games via a microphone attachment to the Wiimote.
•DLC including new minigames for Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, new levels for Super Mario Galaxy and new playable characters for SSBB - including one that Reggie would only say is a "diminutive blue-clad android who fights simplistically named robots, doctors and, occasionally, people named after greek letters with an arm cannon."

Video of Reggie's full appearance can be found here.