Written By: Alex Shaw

This is an update of the 2006 Xbox release of Outrun 2, (which was itself based on two Outrun Arcade cabinets by Sega). The graphics have been polished up and all the cars are available immediately making it game very accessible.

Taking control of one of a selection of Ferrari's the player races through various branching zones trying to make checkpoints within the time limit and ending up in one of five finish lines. All the while, the hot babe on your arm rewards you with adoration when you perform well and derision when you fail. You can also do time trials and heart attack mode, in which you"re asked to drive in specific ways (hitting no traffic or staying within colored lines for example). There’s also a basic online mode in which up to six people can head for the finish, either with collision on or off.

The best part of this shallow but shiny  racer is the drifting mechanics. Take a corner at speed and it’s fairly easy to swing your car into a long and gratifying drift which not only looks and feels the business, but shaves valuable seconds off your time and saves you having to slow down. With collision off in multplayer and six gorgeous looking Ferrari’s all arcing in unison round a hairpin bend it’s hard to remember a time when racing felt as fun or stylish. The graphics are crisp and colorful taking you through a variety of different backdrops, from Niagra Falls to a Shuttle launch-pad, all beautiful and exhilarating to cruise past.

The original Xbox version, rated as one of Edge’s top 100 games of all time, was released with additional modes, some of which have been trimmed for this XBLA (and PSN in Europe only) version. The most obvious omission is the original’s extensive series of challenges. This increased the longevity allowing you to daisy-chain unlocks (Cars, tunes and more challenges) in a series of achievements. There’s also, like the original, no local multiplayer mode, which is a shame. However it’s worth remembering that for 800 points rather than the 1200 most classic Xbox games command you’re still getting most of the game for two thirds the cost. I personally enjoyed Outrun Online Arcade so much I picked up Outrun 2 on Xbox for £1.99 ($2.91) in a bargain bin, so if this loss of extra modes has you fuming, you can find it on eBay or elsewhere for a very reasonable price. The XBLA version wins over the old, for me at least, due to the polished graphics, immediate accessibility of all cars and most importantly the chance to play with friends or strangers in a 360 online race. There are general leader-boards available, but Sumo have not yet gathered that most of us only care about our friends fastest times.

In summation for 800 points you get a flashy, slick, hellishly addictive arcade racer. It’s not going to win any awards for depth, complexity or originality, but as someone who rarely gets much out of racers other than the Burnout series it’s got me back into feeling the need for speed, and the drifting is absolutely second to none. It’s closer to Ridge Racer and Daytona than Gran Turismo and GRiD, but if that’s what you like then at this price you’d be crazy not to bag this classic.

Rating: 8/10

Games based on movies and why most of them suck.

Following our first video podcast, which focused on the superb GoldenEye we took a look at why most other movie licensed games are shallow, creaky and unsatisfying.

Also up for discussion are Lego Rock Band, Wanted: Weapons of Fate and what's apparently next for many Wii owners. Listen out for a movie review Easter egg

And greetings to all new listeners who've come to us from Gamehounds, YouTube, Platform Nation and Daniel Floyd's lectures. We've got some great shows coming up and we want to hear from you. Write to digitalcowboys@googlemail.com

Written By: Alex Shaw

After playing and reviewing GoldenEye again recently for the first time in years (Check out the video podcast here) and with Riddick about to be re-released I started wondering about the distinction between the good and bad (and terrible) games based on movies.

For the longest time, they were just sideways-scrolling platform shooters or brawlers, with tenuous links to the narrative of their movie counterparts, often featuring hero models who bore no resemblance to the actors. For every step forward (True Lies) there were five drunken staggers backward (Robocop 3, Lethal Weapon, Jurassic Park on the Genesis). This was back when a simplistic adventure could be swiftly knocked together and released around the same time as the movie with relatively little prep time. Even considering this fact, the trend led to some of gamings most wretched abortions as thousands of buried E.T. tapes will attest. Later on as technology improved, shallow 2D adventures gave way to shallow 3D ones and despite the lack of quality increase, development times extended due to volume of programming for this new dimension and burgeoning opportunities for FMV and realism. The choice was either bring it out way after the theatrical release (GoldenEye) or rush it out for with the movie for marketing reasons (Batman Begins). In pure financial terms, obviously the latter seems most likely to elicit profit; people buy in droves because of multimedia hype, this will dry out in the months and years it takes to craft a substantial game so why bother? But that only makes sense if you know nothing about games. GoldenEye sold gangbusters and was one of the best reasons to buy an N64. It had a tight, innovative single-player mode, groundbreaking four-player death-matches and stands as the first brilliant console FPS. The fact that it was a movie tie-in and you were playing James Bond was just the icing on the cake but almost seemed incidental to it's success. It was a fantastic game, decorated to feel like Bond"s world. Look to the thoroughly shitty Tomorrow Never Dies and The World is Not Enough to see what happens when you don’t pay attention to that crucial first part. 

The central problem lies at the top. Film producers list the video game along with the MacDonald’s promotion and the action figures in terms of a small part of the mass-media event that a big cinema release tends to be. So time and budget are rarely a luxury and quality is often not an issue. Look at Pixar’s releases. Nearly every one of their films is a masterpiece, but their best game tie-in, Cars, is only pretty good. The fact that an alarmingly high percentage of movie tie-ins are aimed at children, frequently seen as having no taste or understanding of quality by producers also means that most of the games are going to be bad. You can picture some cigar chomping Hollywood savage tanned nutmeg-brown with a $300 haircut and a phone taped to their ear, sat by his triangular pool, jerking off idly into a pile of money, saying "What else can we do? We got the Mountain Dew promotion, the cartoon’s coming out this summer, the Pussycat Dolls are doing a music video and oh yeah, let’s do a video game. I know a guy.” Twisted exaggeration, yes, but the truth nonetheless.

It’s a costly process to channel developers into making a movie tie-in. They fight against an unmoving deadline, glaring dissimilarities from the source material, unwilling actors, (Sierra found that out the hard way with their Damon-less Bourne game) and more often than not, a narrative that does not lend itself to an eight hour, action-packed video game adventure. Nobody sets out to make a bad game, but it’s very easy to make a bad one anyway if you aren’t given time, research or resources and the money-men are breathing down your neck with release dates. The results range from Jack Sparrow dying when he touches water to the epic grandeur of the Lord of the Rings trilogy reduced to hack, hack, hack, uh-oh Gimli died!

Think of the best movie tie-ins. GoldenEye, Riddick, The Warriors, Die Hard Trilogy. All aimed at adults, all released significantly after the films in question. (Butcher Bay had much more to do with Pitch Black than the horrendous Riddick follow-up). They were all made by experienced developers with their hearts set on carving out excellent games and the producers were wise enough to step back and trust in the strength of the source material to fuel sales, long after the DVD had come out.  But think of the worst, and you’re probably envisioning games released a week before the movie, terrible review scores, jerky, unpolished gameplay and very little added to the central story. At best you sit and watch a crude interpretation of the action from the film on a loop, hammering the A or X button or flailing your Wii mote. It’s not a trend likely to end any time soon either, with these games being massive hits, because in terms of sales, the money-men are absolutely right. Most kids don’t have any taste. God bless the ones that do, because they’re the ones begging their mommy’s to let them play Psychonauts or Super Mario Galaxy, but too many are swayed by advertising and the dreamy pursuit of more Ratatouille fun (as if a crummy 3D platformer could distil the subtle, gourmet genius of that film). If they enjoyed the film, surely they’ll enjoy the game, and it’s that promise of potential that keeps this cycle of derivative crap circulating forever.

But take heart, because the opposite end is even worse. Movies based on games are so bad, that they hardly even count as films. Michael DeLuca allegedly wanted Kurt Wimmer, writer and director of Ultraviolet and Equilibrium, to write the movie version of Metal Gear Solid. This was after David Hayter’s script was passed on. For producers to disregard the individual who’s been inside Snake’s head and embodying his voice for a decade yet seek instead, the man who adapted Sphere for the screen suggests to me a level of blind ignorance of the medium of games that borders on comical. If you want someone to blame, look at the richest bastards in Hollywood. I used to love movies, but it’s stories like this treatment of arguably the greatest game ever made that make me look at what EA did to Godfather II and think to myself: it could be worse.

To celebrate 100 episodes and two years of The Digital Cowboys, we're kicking off our first of a series of video podcasts. These are all going to be on YouTube. The first is a look at GoldenEye on the N64, one of our favourite games of all time. Make sure you watch it in high quality (HQ).

Sex in Video Games.

Guest starring Daniel Floyd, creator of several animated lectures that can be currently found on YouTube. Here's a link to the one on sex in video games that caught our attention.

Daniel very kindly agreed to come on and discuss this touchy subject with maturity and focus. In amongst the weighty issues are cultural differences across several territories, a look at the titillation games that have prevented sex from reaching the mainstream, progressive use of sex in games as a narrative tool and of course that most rotten of old chestnuts; the rape-simulator.

In addition, Daniel answers our customary eight questions and we discuss what we've been playing. Plus the second ever 'Random game of the week', which is shaping up to be a popular segment.

(Update: The songs in bold are now confirmed as being in the game. The whole setlist has not been fully announced yet, so I'll continue to update this post as we get more information. Paul.)

With Activision releasing a new Guitar Hero game compiling songs from their previous titles with the drums and vocals interface of World Tour added, here's a list by game of the songs we want to see on it.

Guitar Hero
Audioslave - Cochise
Bad Religion - Infected
Black Sabbath - Iron Man
The Donnas - Take It Off
Joan Jett and The Blackhearts - I Love Rock and Roll
Sum 41 - Fat Lip

Guitar Hero II
Guns N' Roses - Sweet Child O' Mine
Iron Maiden - The Trooper
Lynard Skynard - Freebird
My Chemical Romance - Dead!
Spinal Tap - Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight
Toadies - Possum Kingdom

Guitar Hero Rocks The 80s
Asia - Heat of the Moment
Dio - Holy Diver
Extreme - Play with Me
Oingo Boingo - Only a Lad
Scandal - The Warrior
The Vapours - Turning Japanese

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
Bloc Party - Helicopter
Disturbed - Stricken
Heart - Barracuda
Kiss - Rock and Roll All Nite
Muse - Knights of Cydonia
Rage Against The Machine - Bulls on Parade
Priestess - Lay Down
The Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK
Slayer - Raining Blood
Social Distortion - Story of My Life
The Who - The Seeker

Guitar Hero Aerosmith
Aerosmith - Dream On
Aerosmith - Livin' On The Edge
Aerosmith - Love In An Elevator
Aerosmith - Rag Doll
Aerosmith - Sweet Emotion
Cheap Trick - Dream Police

Guitar Hero On Tour N/A
Smash Mouth - All Star
Twisted Sister - We're Not Gonna Take It

Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades N/A
Alien Ant Farm - Smooth Criminal
Edgar Winter Group - Free Ride
Foo Fighters - The Pretender
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Can't Stop

Fingers crossed!

Here

...Is where you will find a series of fascinating, hilarious and occasionally horrifying short presentations on the way Gamestop, the USA's premiere game store runs it's business. It was produced by a disgruntled Gamestop ex-employee and mentioned by Edie Sellers in Digital Cowboys: Episode 97. For some reason it starts on episode 3, so kick off there. These were removed from YouTube and the producer Whistleblowerzero had his account suspended. It's pretty obvious why.

Written By: Alex Shaw

Some games you’ll never beat. Statistically only a small percentage of players see a game through to the end, but there’s a difference between getting pushed to the edge of your abilities and laying (or throwing) the pad down and just never getting into the game in the first place. I went back to Mass Effect last week. It was one of the hardest moments in gaming for me. Not because of the difficulty of the game, but because eight months had elapsed since I’d last sat in the Mako and wondered where to go.

Going back to games is something we’ve all faced. Maybe the first time round you weren’t in the mood, or you had too much on your plate or the game simply repelled you by being tricky and convoluted, but then you started seeing it everywhere, your friends kept staring at you aghast when you said you hadn’t even really played it and finally podcasters started talking about the thing like it was a world changing event in gaming, one which you’d missed out on. Those thoughts trickle to the back of your mind and prick at you when you’re in bed, or walking down the street or cruising Amazon. “You never finished Mass Effect dickhead.” They say. “What’s the matter? Is Little big planet too hard for you?” until eventually. “You’re not afraid of The Darkness are you?” Until you snap and go on a budget spending spree.

This is the best thing about the ordeal. You spend only a fraction of what these games originally cost. I picked up Mass Effect for the British equivalent of $12, The Darkness for $9 and LBP for $18. All of which add up to less than one new game. The slow decline in price of any game on the market is a godsend for folks who pick it up late, something that may go away when it’s digital downloads only. Pleased with your bargains you take them home, slap them in and fire them up again.

…and you’re back where you got stuck before. This is the hardest part and the biggest hurdle you will ever jump in that game. RPG’s are the worst offenders. With a platformer or a shooter, you’re going to get fairly universal controls and hopefully an easy to grasp interface. An RPG takes the five hours you’ve already played it just to get to grips with the complex combat, leveling and item system, so when you come back, you have to re-learn that in minutes or you’ll die quickly and repeatedly. Final Fantasy XII still has me stymied. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to go back to that one because it’s a generation behind. The lumbering behemoth of non-widescreen, standard definition, coupled with a wired pad of all things, is a mighty enemy indeed.

But in the case of Mass Effect I had two avenging angels on my side. Xbox Live and a good friend. Quantum sat patiently and talked me through a difficult vehicle section and the mine that followed simply by listening to my descriptions and going from the memory of his past six runs through. Yes that’s not a typo, this man has spent hundreds of hours in that game, and who better to have at my back? Now I’m halfway through and really beginning to enjoy the story and the world it’s set in. So next time you venture back into an uncharted game that you just can’t seem to break into, I can thoroughly recommend getting a coach. Someone who’s been there and can dissolve your frustrations with knowledge and guidance. Quantum, to me is better than a strategy guide. Thanks mate.

These are some of the best previous episodes of Digital Cowboys. Look for them on iTunes or indeed, here on the blog. The best ten are highlighted in bold.

• Episode 5 (May 22/07) Features a screwball radio play 45 minutes in.
• Episode 9 (June 20/07) Was sequels and why they suck, where we worked out the mathematical likelihood of any trilogy being even good, let alone great. This data was extrapolated from 57 existing trilogies.
  
• Episode 10 (June 26/07) Featured among other things video game controversy where we talked about Carmageddon, Beat em and Eat Em and Custers revenge. This was after Manhunt 2 was refused classification in the UK.
  
• Episode 11 (July 4/07) The first room 101 where we threw things we hated about films and video games into a room representing hell.
  
• Episode 13 (July 18/07) Was the 2007 E3 special, featuring Chewbacca and his PSP.
• Episode 18 (August 22/07) Where we looked at films that need remaking. It finishes on an awesome Clive Owen song.
  
• Episode 14 (July 25/07) One for Firefly fans.
• Episode 19 (August 30/07) Movies based on video games and why they all suck.
• Episode 24 (October 3/07) With the release of Halo 3 we did an epic episode looking at the whole trilogy. 
• Episode 36 (December 29/07) The games of 2007 roundup.
• Episode 37 (January 10/08) 2007 news roundup (Including Jeff Gerstman's sudden exodus from Gamespot)
• Greatest Hits (April 22/08) Episodes 1-51's best bits (Also look on the blog at April 6/08 for the trailers of the Bollywood movie of Digital Cowboys)
  
• Episode 53 (April 28/08) Retro games console test and Wii Fit
• Episode 55 (May 15/08) GTAIV Epic Review
• Episode 56 (May 22/08) After Empire magazine published the 500 best movies and Godfather was number one as usual, we decided to do our own, alternative ten greatest movies ever.
• Episode 58 (June 5/08) The NES special
• Episode 59 (June 12/08) The Sega special (featuring Tony Edwards)
  
• Episode 61 (June 26/Part 2 27/08) Metal Gear Solid special
• Episode 63 (July 11/08) Gameboy Special
• Episode 64 (July 18/08) E3 2008 Special
• Episode 67 (August 8/08) The second Room 101
• Episode 69 (August 21/08) Amiga 500 Special
• Episode 70 (September 11/08) SNES Special
• Episode 74 (October 12/08) The dead console special. Turbo Grafx-16, Atari Lynx, Jaguar, 3DO, Sega Saturn, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Nokia N-Gage.
• Episode 75 (October 16/08) Our online friend Davus died. Tony hosted this one and we talked about the gaming community we build up around us. Probably one of the best episodes.
• Episode 83 (December 12/08) The death of the PS2
• Episode 86 (December 30/08) The games of 2008 awards ceremony double episode. After this, we had to decide what to do with the show.
  
• Episode 88 (January 16/08) Following the death of EGM; The decline of print in gaming journalism
• Episode 92 (February 14/08) We got mentioned on 'Gamers with jobs'. Kropotkin guested and we talked about mobile gaming. We also started our Twitter account.
  
• Episode 97 (March 20/08) Paul took a break, we got a new logo and ethos. Alex started writing for PN. Edie guested. Alex's favourite episode.
  

In preparation for this week's episode 101, which is focused on sex in video games, our listeners should check out Daniel Floyd on YouTube.

He has posted various mini-lectures on gaming elements. They are hugely entertaining and very well researched. Made in conjunction with James Portnow.

There is one on Sex.
One on Storytelling.
One on the uncanny valley.
One on learning in games.
And finally one on choice in video games.

Check them all out but especially the one on sex. My wife discovered it after I wrote my article on Sex in video games: how far we've not come.

Ep. 100 Part 3.

Brand New Segment/Shout Outs.

In the final part of our epic 100th trio, Chris O'Regan pops by to say hi and inadvertently stumbles upon the unveiling of a brand new segment on the show. Find out what it is exactly right here.

And finally we give props to the guys who've inspired and helped us through the years.

Chris can be found on his own podcast, The Superhappyfuntimeshow

The composer of our theme music, Mark Tschanz, can be found here and his 1995 album Blue Dog, featuring our theme Love Song, is available on Amazon.co.uk here and in the USA here.

Thanks once again to all of our listeners. Happy trails and see you next week, when we will definitely be back to the one-show format.

Ep. 100 Part 2.

Eight Questions.

The questions we always ask our guests, turned back on the hosts, in this, the second part of our gigantic 100th episode. Some surprising answers.

Edie Sellers drops by near the end to say hi, the episode of Gamehounds that she mentions where Hawks goes batshit crazy about Wii Music can be found here: http://www.gamehounds.net/2008/07/

It's the 23rd of July 2008 episode, and it's a spectacular rant. Hawks, get your ass on our show!

Part three will be up tomorrow night.

Ep. 100 Part 1.

Wii News/Guitar Hero Metallica/Wheelman

To celebrate 100 episodes we recorded an epic-length podcast for you. It's so big in fact that we had to chop it into three portions.

Part one is the weekly news section, this week focusing on the Nintendo Wii, then we talk about what we've been playing; mainly an in-depth look at Guitar Hero: Metallica.

We're also very proud to have Paul Shotton back on in guest form.

Part two will be up tonight, and focuses on us turning the eight James Lipton-style questions we ask all our guests back on ourselves. There were some very interesting responses.

We'd like to thank all of our listeners, new and old alike for tuning in every week. You're what keeps the show going. Honestly. If we had no idea who was listening we'd have given up long ago. Here's to 100 more.

GDC 2009.

This week, Alex and Tony cover some of the stories that caught their interest around the annual Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco last week.

Among them are a long awaited PS2 price drop, the European release of the DSi, Batman: Arkham Asylum footage, the Modern Warfare 2 trailer, XNA and Left 4 Dead sales figures and Duke Nukem urinal cakes. There's the likelihood of Wii Motion Plus being released this spring (Do you Americans have something called "Chinny reckon"?) and then of course there's the inevitable backlash of OnLive

We follow up with final analysis of Resident Evil 5, Silent Hill: Homecoming and Dead Space and a look at Mad World.

Next week; a very special episode 100.

Written By: Alex Shaw

Valve’s recent knee-jerk escapade at GDC had Gamehounds’ Edie Sellers in a lather this week. On her podcast she expressed surprise and annoyance at their decision; namely the withdrawal of Kim Swift, project lead on Portal, from the yearly game design challenge, this year provocatively titled ‘My First Time’. It’s a dully predictable move in an industry still remarkably coy about sex. “My first time”, was an open challenge, marrying sex and autobiography, and the final submissions from Swift’s two substitutes and the remaining contestants showed invention and a mischievous streak, but certainly not the headline-baiting boldness that Valve would need to justify such cautious behavior.

You don’t have to look far though, to see why they might not want their name attached to anything that could be misinterpreted as sordid or corrupting. The media-fueled hubbub over Mass Effect in early 2007 speaks volumes for how different the general public perceptions are between film and video games. The sex scene in Mass Effect is by all accounts no different to the kind of soft-focus, fare you would find in movies like Daredevil or Ghost, with lingering shots of perky backsides and a fleeting nipple or two. This was fed through the Fox-news exaggeration machine, given a quick bake in their conjecture oven and passed around between a group of people who haven’t played ANY video games, let alone Mass Effect, and the resultant debate, now well-worn on YouTube borders on farcical. While Spike TV’s Jeff Keighley defended the game’s content with maturity and crucially having actually played it, he was up against the wall of loudmouthed, opinionated busybodies spouting non-sequiturs like “Who can argue that Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas is a good thing?” and my personal favourite, and the basis for this article; “What happened to Atari and Pinball and Pac-Man?”. This sentence crystallises the problem game developers face when trying to advance the industry in any challenging way. Too many people still envision single-screen 8-Bit arcade machines from the early 80’s when the words “video game” are mentioned, and they can only see children playing them, because why would an adult do so? Time has moved on, those children have now grown up and have children of their own. Now the games they play can be vast, complex odysseys with lifelike HD graphics, and the singular inability on so many people’s parts to marry this evolutionary step with the notion of a growing and maturing audience is what holds back sex in games.

Violence? No problem. We jumped that hurdle in the early 90’s with Mortal Kombat, a game so cartoonish and innocent now, that it’s very hard to see what all the fuss was about. Bad language has crept in slowly, seemingly one curse at a time, until with trailblazers like The Getaway, no word was unmentionable. Sex; however is still the thorniest subject in an industry that regularly produces entertainment that involves slaughtering Nazi’s, drug-dealing or dismemberment on such a regular basis that we see these as commonplace, even conventional. A rough sort of acceptance has formed in the minds of outsiders. The above is just the sort of thing that happens in video games. But sex is different. Look at the examples we have of games that dared to deal with this nest of vipers; Custer’s Revenge on the 2600, in which you play the famous General defiling various Native Americans, Leisure Suit Larry, with its smirking innuendo and juvenile attitude, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, with the drawn out court case over “Hot Coffee”. Then there’s the actual Japanese PC-based rape simulator “Rapelay” by Illusion Soft, which Amazon wisely decided to stop selling. Projects like this, whatever the intent of their developers make it hard to build a positive case for sex in games and seem to serve only to inflame public outrage.

Violence is horrible and illegal to the vast majority of non-incarcerated, non-military citizens, but sex means so many different things to so many people that there is no way to reach a general consensus. It’s totally subjective, and highly likely to provoke a negative reaction. It’s an act that can be beautiful, embarrassing, incredibly fun or utterly awful, different every time or always the same, may be meaningless or lead to life-changing relationships and indeed the continuation of the species. Asking why it can’t be in a game is a question with its answer rooted in culture. I could (and should) write a thesis on this, but the short answer is that the public appreciation for sex is changing with the times, slowly, as we crawl away from the Victorian period when it became so utterly reprehensible to even mention. It took decades for sex and nudity to be accepted in books films and TV, but those are long-established entertainment forms and comparatively video games are still in their teens. It will take a few more generations before all the people who only remember Pac-Man are gone and those born into an era of Mass Effect and any other game that dares to tackle intercourse reach the obvious conclusion that people of all ages play games and those of a certain age should have no problem exploring relationships of all kinds, with and without sex. The detail and emotion-heavy gameplay of the future could indeed prove quite interesting. Taboos are broken all the time. Last month’s cocky, male full-frontal in GTA: The Lost and Damned was a first, and whether Ms. Sellers is right and the scrawny chicken-neck of a reproductive organ on offer was a poor example or not, I agree with her that it’s steps forward like this that bring the industry that little bit closer to real maturity. Maybe then we’ll get to see “My First Time” as a full game.

Written By: Alex Shaw

Harmonix have revealed plans for Rock Band song packs released specifically to tie in with Triple-A releases starting in the Q1 of 2010. Community development manager for Harmonix Sean Baptiste released this information in talks yesterday. Tying in with the release of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, on November 6th will be the first of these packs, which comprises Prince’s long awaited Rock Band debut Purple Rain, the song classic rockers will be looking forward to the most; Guns N’ Roses November Rain, and the most interesting addition to this trio: Tay Zonday’s Chocolate Rain. Zonday has said in interviews he is “Very pleased” with this development.

The catch is that it’s console specific. Only Playstation 3 owners will be able to buy this pack day in date. Reports indicate it is only a timed exclusive, however and 360 owners may be playing these before Christmas, but only as separate tracks with no reduced cost. Fortunately for Microsoft fans they get their own timed exclusive song pack comprising of Wake by Linkin Park, Wake Up by Rage Against the Machine and Wake up Dead by Megadeath, released to coincide with the November 8th release of the long awaited Alan Wake.