Three shots of Nirvana and a four-pack of Foo Fighters grace the Rock Band Music Store next week, with Joan Jett and the Blackheart’s “Fake Friends” this week’s sole non Nirvana-related track.

For those of you who prefer Dave Grohl stick to drumming, Nirvana’s “About a Girl”, “School” and “Blew” will keep him quietly hitting the skins. Those of you wishing for a more pronounced Grohl presence should be pleased with “Best of You”, “The Pretender”, “Wheels” and “Word Forward” from the Foo Fighters.

If you prefer a more portable Rock Band experience, there’s always Bullet For My Valentine’s “Waking the Demon” and System of a Down’s “Toxicity” for Rock Band Unplugged on the PSP, both of which contain zero Grohl-levels.

Available on Xbox 360 and Wii (Nov. 3) and PlayStation 3 system (Nov. 5):

• Foo Fighters – “Best of You”
• Foo Fighters – “The Pretender”
• Foo Fighters – “Wheels”
• Foo Fighters – “Word Forward”
• Nirvana – “About a Girl”
• Nirvana – “Blew”
• Nirvana – “School”
• Joan Jett & The Blackhearts – “Fake Friends”

Tracks available for Rock Band Unplugged (November 5):

• Bullet For My Valentine – “Waking the Demon”
• System of a Down – “Toxicity”

The Tears of the Hextadon map pack consists of two new maps for Brutal Legend’s completely non-real-time strategy online multiplayer mode. The Circle of Tears map is completely surrounded by water, while the Death’s Fjord map takes place in an icy mountain path, where players must brave wide open spaces in order to reach the fan geysers needed to generate units.

Double fine’s Tim Schafer explains the map names.

“I play Brütal Legend online every night,” said Tim Schafer, President of Double Fine Productions. “And I need more maps! Circle of Tears is named after the crying of my vanquished foes on the battlefield, and Death’s Fjord is obviously a tribute to my Nordic ancestors, and their love of fan geysers and… Well, actually I just thought the name was cool. See you online!”

He doesn’t explain, however, why the PlayStation 3 version of the downloadable content is free from the November 5 release until November 19, while the Xbox 360 pack costs 400 Microsoft points as soon as it hits Xbox Live on November 3. Perhaps EA is trying to drum up more PS3 business? We’ve contacted EA about the reasoning and will update as soon as we hear back.

While eight of the twenty-one songs in the Rock Band Country Track Pack have already been released, thirteen of the tracks are brand-spanking new to the game. For the first time, fans will be able to rock country out to old favourites like Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” and Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler”, along with eleven more songs I don’t recognise at all. The names of the artists are familiar at least, with Shania Twain, Sara Evans, Rascal Flatts, and Trace Adkins all making their Rock Band debut.

As with previous retail track pack releases, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners will be able to transfer their songs to the hard drive, while Wii and PS2 owners are limited to playing the standalone game on the disc. Regardless of console, everybody pays $US29.99 on July 21st.

Now if you’ve already downloaded all the country that Rock Band has to offer and just want the thirteen new tracks, you’re either gonna have to buck up and buy the whole thing or wait until the disc exclusivity drops and the songs are released on the Rock Band Music Store. It’s a tough choice, but no one ever said the life of an outlaw was gonna be easy.

Here’s the full track listing:

1. Alan Jackson “Good Time”

2. Brad Paisley “Mud on the Tires”

3. Brooks & Dunn “Hillbilly Deluxe”

4. Cross Canadian Ragweed “Cry Lonely”

5. Dierks Bentley “Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go)”

6. Dixie Chicks “Sin Wagon”

7. Drive-By Truckers “3 Dimes Down”

8. Jason Aldean “She’s Country”

9. Keith Urban “I Told You So”

10. Kenny Chesney “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”

11. Kenny Rogers “The Gambler”

12. Lucinda Williams “Can’t Let Go”

13. Martina McBride “This One’s For The Girls”

14. Miranda Lambert “Gunpowder & Lead”

15. Montgomery Gentry “Gone”

16. Rascal Flatts “Me and My Gang”

17. Sara Evans “Suds In The Bucket”

18. Shania Twain “Any Man of Mine”

19. Steve Earle “Satellite Radio”

20. Trace Adkins “Swing”

21. Willie Nelson “On the Road Again”

Ego Draconis takes place a couple of years after the last game, and a war between dragons and humans is in full swing. While the two races once lived in harmony, mistrust and fear have blossomed, and an order of Dragon Slayers is now tasked with hunting down and slaying the massive beasts. Your player starts as one of these dragon slayers, but an ironic twist in the story soon has you joining the ranks of the legendary Dragon Knights, humans with the power to transform themselves into dragons at will.

I sat in on a demonstration of the game at E3 2009, and everything started well enough. The PC in publisher DTP’s tiny booth launched the game smoothly, and the graphics were crisp, smooth, and vibrant. Intrigued, I leaned in closer, only to have the PC sputter, stutter, and die.

Then my demo pilot switched to the Xbox 360 version, where the graphics were noticeable darker and the frame rate nowhere near as smooth. Now I know which version I’ll be picking up.

Ego Draconis is a 3D action roleplaying game, much like Fable or Gothic, only with a twist. After a certain part in the story, the player gains the ability to transform into a dragon, covering long stretches of terrain in minutes, while having to face off against much larger foes.

The character-driven section of the game is rather nice. All NPCs in the game are fully voiced and animated using motion capture, giving the world a very lifelike feel.

While on foot, the player engages in combat, leveling skills from several different classes – mage, warrior, and ranger, to name a few. While there is a main story to follow, players can also embark on quests, with every quest having some sort of impact on the story down the line, even if you don’t accept it. For instance, refuse to help a soldier kill a few goblins, and later you’ll find that soldier dead in the goblin camp, having gone it alone. And boy if his lootable armour isn’t nice…

The high level of polish didn’t quite carry over into the dragon section of the game, unfortunately, with much of the character of the title falling away once the player transforms, losing some detail in order to affect a sense of scale, no pun intended. In order to keep the player from moving too far in dragon form, certain areas are warded by dragon-proof walls, which are as transparent a means to keep the player’s power in check as they are actually see-through. If humans have so much power over dragons, why bother with the war in the first place?

The game also features a Dragon Tower, where players can store their items, send NPCs out into the world in search of crafting materials, and even seek the aid of a necromancer to help build a summonable monster out of parts you gather during your travels.

Divinity 2: Ego Draconis is a truly ambitious sequel to the 2002 action roleplaying game. Developer Larian Studios is looking to far outdo themselves in terms of storytelling, scope, and quality…let’s hope that they are up to the task. I’d love to see what the dragon portion of the title looks like on the PC instead of the 360. Perhaps the polish the game lacks on the console is made up for on PC.

I’d also like to see Venetica, but I’m not bitter. No, no.

Divinity II: Ego Draconis is due out later this year for the Xbox 360 and PC.

It may look a bit like a Wii sensor bar, but it’s something altogether different. Project Natal, as Microsoft is calling it at their 2009 E3 press conference, is a camera and sensor assembly that recognises faces, body movements, objects, and even voices in order to integrate the player into the gaming environment. Examples shown at the conference include a boy holding up a skateboard, which then appeared on the screen, with the boy then riding said board by just swaying back and forth on his own two feet; two women trying on virtual clothes using a camera image of themselves; facial recognition; voice control; buzzing in to 1 VS 100 by raising a hand;and even browsing the NXE using hand controls as in the movie Minority Report.

Project Natal creative director Kudo Tsunoda took the stage, showing his Xbox Live avatar moving with his movements and playing various tech demos, including a handball game and one that allowed you to paint with stencils.

Development kits are arriving at Microsoft partners today, so while there’s no word on when this amazing technology will actually make it into player’s hands, with developers like Fable’s Peter Molyneux behind it, we can expect great things.

Activision’s double preview feature of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen showcased two approaches to movie-game making that we ought to see more of.

The last thing Prototype is trying to be is a modern day version of Assassin’s Creed set in Liberty City, so stop making those comparisons right now.

Oh fine, there’s parkour and it’s set in New York City. But the game has more in common with its cousin The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction than it does with anything Ubisoft or Rockstar created; and it doesn’t have some pretentious sci-fi or overwrought gangster premise. Seriously – when you’re elbow-dropping tanks and flinging pedestrians into airborne helicopters, do you really need some character-driven excuse to have fun?

What Is It?
Prototype is a singleplayer action game set in a sandbox world that happens to be New York City. Gameplay focuses on the sinister superpowers of amnesiac Alex Mercer that allow him to, among other things, rip people apart and absorb their appearance and memories. It’s coming out on PC, 360 and PS3.

What We Saw
I spent an hour with the 360 version of the game in a private hands-on appointment, going through the first tutorial mission and a second steal-the-helicopter mission set about a third of the way through the game.

How Far Along Is it?
This build is shy of release code by a bit – Trophy/Achievements haven’t even been worked out yet – but it looked pretty smooth for a game two months away from shipping.

What Needs Improvement?
Why Do I Care About Alex?: No matter how vast, pretty or interactive a sandbox game is, it gets boring if you have no connection to the main character. Radical has kept details of the plot pretty close to the vest so far, so maybe there is some compelling reason why I should care about this hoodie-wearing mutant. But unless and until I found out what that is, Alex could get old fast after the first hundred elbow-dropped tanks or so.

What Do You Mean No Multiplayer?: Sounds like Radical bit off more than they could chew when they first announced Prototype – this game was supposed to have a badass multiplayer to go with the badass gameplay. But it doesn’t, and I’m docking points for promises broken.

Simultaneous Releases Make Me Nervous: I only saw the 360 version of the game, so I don’t know how it plays on PS3 or PC. But I have noticed a sad trend where games that go for simultaneous releases on all three platforms usually break one and leave the other out in the cold for DLC – that’s PS3 and PC respectively.

What Should Stay The Same?
The powers: Remember those old Nintendo ads that said “Now you’re playing with power”? I think this is what they had in mind. Alex Mercer has all kinds of weird mutant tricks that allow him to run up the side of buildings, tear through the streets of NYC at a blurring rate, glide like a bat, and – of course – kill people in weird ways. One of the weirdest I saw in the tutorial level was where his hand turns into a black and red writing mass that he slams into the ground, which causes a huge set of spikes to jut out from the ground in front of Alex, flipping cars and impaling people.

The control scheme: Alex has a lot of superpowers and a lot of people shooting at him because of said superpowers; players need to be able to handle his big bag of people-killing tricks and get him the hell out of trouble at the drop of a hat. Thankfully, the controls lend themselves to both, with most of the mutant moves mapped to the face buttons, plus a “flee” option mapped to the right trigger that performs most of Alex’s parkour moves without the player having to find surfaces that are viable parkour platforms – so for example if you’re running through a crowd, Alex doesn’t shove people aside and stumble, he just vaults over them and then runs up the side of the building because the flee button allows you to parkour off of pretty much any surface (unlike a certain game that I said we shouldn’t compare Prototype to).

So Many NPCs, So Little Time: The Titanium engine developed for Prototype can support a lot of NPCs on screen at one time. Dave Fracchia, VP of Technology at Radical (and former software dev on Reboot), told me that the engine can handle between 80 and 100 pedestrian NPCs plus another 100 or so vehicles. That’s 200 things for me to wreck, maim or otherwise inconvenience via Alex’s superpowers at any given time. Awesome!

Gotta Absorb ‘Em All: A major storytelling method for the game is the Web of Intrigue – a network of memories that Alex collects by absorbing people. Some of the Web you’ll unlock by progressing through the main plot; but there are lots of non-essential memories that fill in Alex’s back story that you can gobble up by seeking out and absorbing random NPCs all over town. Having this storytelling method might not make the plot any better (or worse, as the case may be), but it definitely gives you something extra to do in the game. And the really fun part? They might “misremember” stuff, so you’ll have absorb even more people to get a clear picture of what really happened to Alex to make him the freak he is.

Final Thoughts
Prototype was a cathartic game to play, but not at all mind-numbingly repetitive. The varied superpowers, dense city and numerous ways to break a helicopter (you can jump off a building and sort of glide into its propeller – so hilarious) kept things interesting, even though I couldn’t get into the plot. I’m almost willing to say that even if the plot is horrible, that won’t make the game less fun; repetition is the enemy of sandbox games, not pretentious plots. But I’ll have to wait and see. Maybe Radical can cook up something so pretentious, it sucks all the fun out of sucking up people’s memories.

The new motors are the McLaren F1 GTR, Nissan GT-R, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X, Honda S2000, VW Nardo, Pontiac Firebird Trans AM, TVR Cerbera Speed 12 and Volvo C30. Both versions will come with two new multiplayer modes, while the Xbox pack adds 4 new 25-point Achievements.

The PC version of GRID is meant to have its own dollop of DLC, but Codemasters would only say that details and a release date will be available “shortly”.

GRID DLC Hits Consoles Today, PC Later [Shacknews]

Turns out that in between two meaty chunks of Unreal 3 engine powered football there will be a sliver of tasty Drumline relish. Frankly, I have no idea where I am going with this food based metaphor. Maybe there will be a side of gameplay and plenty of graphical.. cutlery? I’ll stop now.

Anyway, the big news is that you will be able to join your team’s drumline using the Rock Band drum controller. We have no idea if the controller will stand up to the pounding it will surely be taking, but it is a cool idea and a nice way to add value and – dare we say it – synergy between two quite different titles.

Drumline meets Rock Band, 360 in Black College Football game [Ars Technica]

Speaking to Eurogamer, a THQ spokesperson said that the latest DAH game would only be an Xbox exclusive in North America – due to the company being unable to finish the PS3 version by the games early release date in that territory.

“Destroy all Humans: Path of the Furon will be released on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 formats on February 13th 2009 across Europe,” said the THQ person.

Odd.

Destroy All Humans PS3 coming to Europe