Game music can make or break a gaming experience.

The best soundtracks, you remember forever – like just about all of the Final Fantasy music by Nobuo Uematsu. MADWORLD, Sega’s experimental game for the Wii had a pretty interesting hip hop score and now fans of the music or the game can relive their experiences while driving through rush hour traffic crammed behind the soccer mom van and the yuppie convertible.

The game features music by OX, Doujah Raze, Sick-YG, Bandy Leggz, Wordsmith, S.O.U.L. Purpose, and Optimus. The lyrics (in typical hip hop fashion) feature some suggestive and explicit lyrics befitting a game about smashing people with violent intent.

The game’s soundtrack includes 20 songs and will be available through retail or via sumthingdigital.com or Apple’s iTunes music store.

Sumthing Else Music Works is bringing the Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts soundtrack out to videogame music fans everywhere.

The Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Original Soundtrack features original musical compositions by Robin Beanland (Killer Instinct, Conker’s Bad Fur Day), Grant Kirkhope (Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie) and David Clynick (Perfect Dark, Perfect Dark Zero).

The Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts OST will be available at retail stores June 30 as well as for digital download on Sumthing Digital www.sumthingdigital.com and iTunes.

Last week we saw the id/Bethesda merger under parent company ZeniMax Media and there was much rejoicing, but what if Electronic Arts merged its two online game developers into one giant super developer wouldn’t that raise some eyebrows and be general cause for mass excitement?

Well that actually happened as the publishing giant reorganized a bit putting RPG mavens Bioware and long time MMO developers Mythic in the same division. While the two studios will remain mostly autonomous for the time being, they now both have a single reporting line up the chain to the big bosses and money men. That single leader? Bioware’s Dr. Ray Muzyka.

Dr. Muzyka’s ascencion to the head of the organization basically also points to the exit of Mythic’s longtime leader Mark Jacobs. According to Jacob’s blog the MMO pioneer is taking a sabatical for awhile and he leaves with a classy ‘I’m not going to dish on anything, I’m just going to thank folks and peacefully step aside’ sort of announcement – a classy response that we don’t get to see so often these days.

Regarding the future path of the now combined studio’s efforts, Dr. Muzyka indicated in an official response over on IGN that:

Anything’s possible. We can’t say it wouldn’t happen. There’s no active plans, currently to do that, but the teams at Mythic and BioWare I know from talking to all of them, they’re really excited about working together, so I think that fuels a lot of cool things.

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning is still holding strong in the WoW dominated MMO market while Bioware’s first effort – the much anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic is still a ways off. Mythic has a lot of experience that could help the minds at Bioware pull off their vision of Star Wars and maybe even put a dent in the Warcraft numbers but only time will tell if this pairing will be all it seems.

So, do you like drinking Dr. Pepper while you’re playing your EA Games? If so, you’re going to really enjoy this piece of news.

Electronic Arts and Dr. Pepper have entered into an agreement that will see Dr. Pepper providing codes for exclusive DLC for EA Games throughout 2010, starting with The Sims 3.
If you’re a Sims 3 fan, you can grab codes from Dr. Pepper that will unlock one-of-a-kind beach party items, or everything you need for a perfect tailgating party.

Tony Jacobs, Vice President of Marketing for Dr Pepper, said,

“The first-of-its-kind partnership with EA will give Dr Pepper fans an unrivaled experience by adding exclusive value to their games such as new levels and items. EA is the only media company that could reach our target audience with the breadth and depth of titles for gamers on any gaming platform.”

Honestly, these types of arrangements are going to become more and more prevalent in the future. As gaming becomes more and more accepted by mainstream marketers, there will be more tie-in opportunities to reach gamers as a market. This will end up being good for the industry, and good for individual gamers as well, as it will give us more opportunities to get cool little add-ons for our games like these.

You can check out the full text of the press release after the break.

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Are you a fan of the old school arcade action games like Golden Axe, Magic Sword, Knights of the Round or Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara? Well Nexon America, the folks behind Maple Story,  just announced that their latest online game, Dungeon Fighter Online, has just entered the closed Beta stage. The company is looking for a few good testers to help them prepare the game in its final stages of development.

Dungeon Fighter Online allows players to play as one of five character classes while proceeding through levels of combat against monsters in a side-scrolling dungeon. The game insttutes the familiar action-RPG concepts as players buy or earn new skills and equiptment to aid in their fight. Interested parties can apply at the Dungeon Fighter Online homepage and find out more about the upcoming game there as well.

I’m not one of those gamers who hates the casual game market, in fact I think its the lifeblood of gaming these days – my kids for example are for more likely to be found playing mini-games on AddictingGames.com or Gaia or any of the billion casual flash game portals than they are to fire up their favorite console games. The casual game industry has insinuated itself into the hearts and minds of every generation from toddler to elder and quite a lot of gaming is happening in browsers these days.

Well, it seems Nickelodeon, the children’s network that hosts such moments of TV gold as iCarly and Drake and Josh, has decided the time has come to produce yet another video-game award show – AddictingGames Showdown.

On July 27th at 8:00 Eastern Time they will offer a web centric special highlighting a number of web and casual games. The show is touted to be a live convergence event featuring one of the cast of the aforementioned iCarly show – Jerry Trainor. Trainor will host the event and present the insightful categotries, many o f which are obviously designed to reflect the young audiences’ sense of fun over technical art. The sneaked categories include gems like “Best Performance by a Monkey” and “Most Courageous Stick Figure Stunt”.

Personally I’m not sure we need yet another gaming oriented awards show, let alone one witht he Nickelodeon flair but it is interesting to see the network segregating casual games away from the traditional console offerings that dominate most gaming events. Also how valid would an “award show” be in any other industry if it was say the “Paramount Pictures Academy Award”?

AddictingGames.com  has a vested interest in attracting new players not to the casual market as a whole.. so I’ll be surprised if this is anything more than a coordinated marketing event for the website and Nickelodeon.

Some of the best things about Team Fortress 2 were the videos for each team player. The personality quirks (read insanities) make everything better… including crash test dummies. Here’s your mandatory laugh for the day folks…

So every week for awhile the writers all over the new looking for a simple quick movie to plug into their gaming news site flocked like rabid sheep over to online game magazine The Escapist for the witty and acerbic commentary put to film by Internet personality and slapdash game designer Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. Yahtzee’s weekly poke, jab and lancing of the festering boils of gaming left no game unscathed and is still one of the more enjoyable forms of critique out there.

The Escapist choose to expand their video offerings with a few new segments, one of these – Unskippable – is a tribute to the classic overdubbing comedy of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang – except their subject matter is video game cut scenes and trailers instead of horribly bad B-movies like Ator the Fighting Eagle.

Unskippable is a little hit or miss but anyone who enjoys making fun of this wonderful hobby of ours will soon find that you’re not the the only person out there who talks back at the screen during an interminable Metal Gear Solid Expositional Cut Scene. This week the Unskippable guys take a crack at three E3 trailers.. Final Fantasy XIV Online, Edge of Twilight and long in development online FPS Huxley.

What if you could play as a walking war-machine construct? A golem of destruction with a pure heart and good soul? This concept might fit naturally into a modern sci-fi setting or even some good old space opera, but a number of years ago – in an attempt to spice things up and introduce some new ideas – Wizards of the Coast sponsored a contest to find its next D&D campaign setting.

Greyhawk, The Forgotten Realms, Planescape, Ravenloft and the various other settings apparently just weren’t as marketable. The company wanted some fresh, new ideas. This opportunity became a chance to let the amateur and professional developers compete to see whose concept would become the next official D&D setting.

The result of that contest was Eberron – a fantasy world in keeping with the core of Dungeons & Dragons, but one that turned things on its ear just a bit with concepts like – Halfling plainsmen riding dinosaurs, living constructs, shapeshifters as player races and adding a very Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider pulp feel to its core adventures placing players in a world that operates on magic, outside the fantasy constraints of pseudo-medieval Europe or even an Asian fantasy amalgam.

Eberron was built around a different mythology and cosmic organization. There exists magic powered public transportation, airships and great dungeons of fallen civilizations alongside an invading alien force and mysterious magical elf ancestors who refuse to go off into antiquities and instead guide the path of the entire elvish race.
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Got coding skills? Like the movie WarGames? Like the idea of your “binary baby” killing virtual billions? More importantly, do you like cash?

If you said “You bet.”, then heads up.

Introversion Software has teamed up with the organizers of CIG 2009 to establish a competition aimed to create “the world’s deadliest bot.” The contest, slated for September, is part of an ongoing yearly event that draws in programming talent from abroad in an attempt to create bots from videogames that are “realistic enough into fooling an expert panel of judges that they are actually human players.”

Not surprisingly, the game chosen as the playground for this year’s contest is none other than Introversion’s own nuclear holocaust simulator DEFCON (thumbs up here). And thanks to the concerted efforts of Computer Science geeks over at Imperial College, London, potential contestants now have a practical DEFCON API to prepare with.

Basically, the rules (here) are that programmers will pit their individual DEFCON A.I. against one another in a series (30 actually) of one-on-one matches among each of the possible starting territory configurations. The player with the highest cumulative score wins. Additionally, the grand prize winner’s human creator takes home $500, courtesy of IEEE. At this point, I’m still trying to figure out if you actually have to be physically present to participate.

Anyway, if you are interested in putting your coding skills to the test, you can start by reading here. An important thing to note is that the DEFCON API will also work with the DEFCON demo, which can be freely downloaded here. Again, deadlines and rules for the contest can be found via the IEEE’s CIG website. The press release found after the break contains all sorts of info, links, and contact information.

For those of you chortling “the only winning move is not to play,” I say what’s the worse that could happen? Well, I suppose Barry Corbin could break the bad news to you in person by knocking on your door then announcing his “conclusion that your new defense system sucks.”

Ok, I’ll stop…

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