It took much longer than some would have liked, but the first wave of Greatest Hits game for PlayStation 3 have finally arrived. Starting today, this line of budget games can be picked up in extremely ugly red boxes for the price of $30, which puts it $10 higher than the PS2’s Greatest Hits, but also $10 less than where Microsoft tends to discount its first-party 360 titles.

The nine games are Warhawk, Motorstorm, Resistance: Fall of Man, Call of Duty 3, Fight Night Round 3, Need for Speed Carbon, Rainbow Six Vegas, Assassin’s Creed, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Not a half-bad assortment, but which ones are worth buying?

PS3 Fanboy has assembled a buyer’s guide for the nine titles, giving you a quick rundown on what to expect from each game and which ones are worth buying. Unsurprisingly, Warhawk and Oblivion get a thumbs up, while Motorstorm should be avoided with the sequel, Pacific Rift, not that far off.

They do however refer to Ninja Gaiden Sigma as “THE definitive NG experience,” something that I think Itagaki-san would disagree with.

It’s Thursday, so PS3-owning Rainbow Six fans needn’t wait any longer: the Vegas 2 Gift Pack DLC has finally arrived. PC and Xbox 360 owners have had it for almost a week, but when you’re talking about playing the same exact maps you’re already used to — only at night — there’s really no wait that’s too long. That might not be entirely true, but as I said before, at least it’s free.

Rock Band’s weekly track release includes four songs from Rush and Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is also the number of new demos that have been released: Siren: Blood Curse, Monster Madness: Grave Danger, WALL-E and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian are all available in demo form on the PlayStation Store.

And there’s all sorts of trailers for you to check out, including one for the Super Stardust HD add-on which I’ve been raving about ever since it was released. Now you can see what I’ve been talking about.

Hit the break to check out the full list of content.

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Ubisoft wasn’t particularly clear as to when we could expect the free Rainbow Six Vegas 2 DLC that we found out about last week, but it’s already here — on 360 and PC, at least. The “Gift Pack” DLC includes all sorts of changes and enhancements, as well as three reworked maps, including fan-favorite Calypso Casino.

You’re out of luck if you’re in Germany, as the content on the Xbox Live Marketplace isn’t available for our German friends. But if you’re located anywhere else, you should check out the official Rainbow Six website for the full list of changes. PC players can download the latest patch for the game right here.

After a nice day off yesterday, which was filled with fireworks, swimming, and drunken shenanigans, I am happy to give you a nice rundown of the demos and patches that hit FileFront this week despite the hangover, repressed memories and the smell of gunpowder still lingering in the air.

Demos

• Platinum Arts Sandbox Beta v2.2.0 – Windows: Sandbox is a game design tool based on the Cube 2 engine that allows users to quickly and easily create and edit their own worlds in game, even cooperatively. It is free, open source, multiplatform, and easy to use for Kids and Adults.

• Mount & Blade v0.960: A new trial version of Mount & Blade is now available. (Devs Note: It is like yesterday that I had announced the first beta version of the game. Yet it was more than four years ago, and everything was so uncertain at the time. If the players had not supported the game as avidly as they did, the whole project would surely die out somewhere along the way. But it didn’t die out, we released many versions throughout these years, got the most wonderful feedback a game developer could hope for, saw amazing mods come out, and I personally had the most interesting time of my life. Now, four years later, it is time to announce the last beta release of Mount & Blade. I want to thank everyone who walked with us in this adventure. And although this is the last beta release, I am sure there will be lots of exciting things in the coming months and years.)

• Puzzle Hero: Embark on a thrilling and amazing journey in this unique puzzle-RPG (role playing game). Puzzle Hero lets you defeat more than 50 mystical 3D monsters, while you charge through picturesque environments. Hero in you must save your kidnapped brother, Tristan, from sorcerer Zalock?s spell and his Army of Darkness. Outwit the puzzle and battle the mystical monsters that guard the road to Kingdom of Fog. Increase your power by gathering gold and using it to shop for magical amulets, amazing selection of weaponry, armor, and clothing accessories

• Venture Arctic: Brighter Minds Media and Pocketwatch Games have released a demo for Venture Arctic, a game where you have to create and maintain ecosystems of the Alaskan tundra inhabited with caribou, polar bears, bowhead whales, arctic wolves and orcas.

• Live For Speed S2 Alpha Z: A new demo for the Live for Speed S2 alpha has been released, adding new/updated interiors, interface/graphics improvements, suspension improvements and other tweaks.

Patches: Rainbow Six Vegas 2 v1.03 (Worldwide Patch), Mount & Blade v0.950 to v0.960, The Sims 2: Free Time v1.13.0.161, Granado Espada v2.6.3 (Manual Patch), World in Conflict v1.009 US, SS3: Arms for Victory v1.4 Patch/Addon (UK), and of course Warcraft III.

As always for the full list of demos and patches click here and here.

While I thought the game was just an expansion pack to the first Vegas, Ubisoft is at least supporting the game with some significant downloadable content next month. New maps, new options, new ranks; there are going to be a lot of reasons to pop Vegas 2 in once the “Fan Pack” is released next month. The best part of all is that the pack will be free and will be released for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. Niccceee.

The list of tweaks and new options is fairly long, but if you’re interested, you can find it all at the official R6 website. The stuff that’s particularly noteworthy are the three new maps — or rather, there’s one new map which is just a remake of Calypso Casino, and two of the existing Vegas 2 maps have been made into “dark maps.” In other words, they haven’t change the map’s layout in any way, they’ve simply turned the lights off.

Hey, don’t whine. At least they don’t expect you to pay for it.

Atlantic Inc. has announced it will be sponsoring MLG pro gaming team CaRNaGe N ChAoS. The team will be using Atlantic’s GameKeeper gaming products in practice and while on tour including the Ultimate Gaming Backpack and the Four-Tier Wire Gaming Tower. Atlantic specializes in transportation and organizational gaming products that keep consoles cool and accessories organized.

CaRNaGe N ChAoS competes as a five man team on Rainbow Six Vegas 2 on the Xbox 360.

Ranging from students to a career in nuclear cardiology, the players consider gaming a second job or hobby that brings in additional income from sponsors and tournament prize money. The team consists of five players:

• General Manager & Coach – David “GaM3 Ov3R” Park, 25, 1st Place Orlando & 1st Place Toronto; 13-time Online Champion for Ghost Recon Series
• Captain – Robert “StOp N G0” Hoffman, 19, placed top eight in every event last year and finished 5th overall in MLG 2007 Pro Circuit last year at Nationals
• Member – Matt “Mr. X” Morello, 19, 1st Place Meadowlands & 1st Place Toronto (1st Place Overall Team for MLG 2007)
• Member – Jerry “JwHoJcAsH” Torres, 18, 1st Place Las Vegas (National Champion)
• Member – Brandon “PRoBLeMz” Greffe, 16, 1st Place Las Vegas (National Champion)

CaRNaGe N ChAoS will be competing in the MLG San Diego Tournament June 13-15. For more information on the team check out their website .

via Business Wire

You may recall awhile back that some observant PC gamers noticed an odd thing about their version of Rainbow Six Vegas 2. Namely, they noticed their hard drive space was slowly dwindling because every time the game crashed it would create a crash log file that took up almost 1GB of space. Well, PC gamers will be happy to know that Ubisoft has finally released a new patch that should fix that issue as well as a few others. Besides the crashing problem, the new patch fixes bugs involving lost XP and connection issues; plus it adds some KillCam options and better speech recognition to the game. To download the patch and stop your computer from being slowly dissolved from the inside out, just click on the link below.

Ubisoft recently released a new title update for the Xbox 360 version of Rainbow Six Vegas 2, which feature a lot of fixes and general improvements for the game. Most of the fixes address the many issues reported with unlocking some basic achievements, eliminates one infamous “XP farming” area in the story mode, and corrects some general graphical glitches and bugs. Some of the more notable improvements include faster respawning, random respawn points in Team Deathmatch (to reduce spawn camping), and some changes to the XP modifiers. You can check out the detailed list of changes by clicking the link below. Ubisoft is also currently working on a similar update for the PS3 and PC versions of the game. Now if they could just make a patch to eliminate all the d-bags on Xbox Live…

Via Ubisoft Forums

Let’s face it: love ‘em or hate ‘em, PC games have a tendency to crash every now and again. It’s frustrating, but usually all it eats up is some of your time. If you’re playing Rainbow Six Vegas 2 however, it can take away a chunk of your hard drive space as well. Many eagle-eyed PC gamers have noticed a bizarre issue with the game where it creates a “Crash Report” every time the game fails that somehow takes up 850 MB of space for each instance where it crashes. That means each game crash is like a little timer ticking away part of your hard drive space. Luckily the files can be simply deleted without affecting the game it seems, but this is still a strange thing for a game to do. Just how much space do you need to record the words “game no work?”

Via Ubisoft Forums

Wow. We only received five demos this week and that is pretty weak considering we normally get at least six. Ok, I am kidding – but seriously we usually get more than this. The most interesting, and surprising demo was the one for the upcoming CG movie “Kung Fu Panda” which stars Jack Black. Angelina Jolie also lends her voice to the movie and her character is “Master Tigress”. I don’t know if you will actually get to hear Angelina Jolie’s voice in the game demo or not, but if you are fantasizing about her as a pixelatd tiger – you have got some major issues dude – so put the bottle of lotion down and back away from it very slowly.

Here are the demos that hit FileFront this week:

• Caribbean Pirate Quest : Spell of Play Studios announced the release of Caribbean Pirate Quest, an adventure puzzle game where you will have to use clues to navigate your ship on several different maps and find the treasures.

• Lights of Dreams Demo V2.10: This is the demo version V2.10 of Lights of Dreams : The Angelical Blade. Play as Xylvan to find a way to save the future Earth of 3800. Walk, Run, Jump Fly in 50 (3 available in the demo) flowers and grass vasts inspirational worlds to find 10 Spheres, 11 Parchments and 10 unique Elements and more than 20 unique items to accomplish your mission. This version provides more lifelike effects including potion, magic, regeneration and mass attack.

• RedLynx Trials 2 – Second Edition v1.06 : Version 1.06 of the game has been released. The new version contains lots of technical enhancements to improve compatibility, and five new tracks for the owners of the full version. Trials2 provides Trials-game fans even further developed physics model and core gameplay-features. Trials 2 two also takes advantage of RedLynx’s further developed RedLynx Theathre – game engine: Trials2 has ultra-high quality graphics mode, that uses deferred rendering to deliver impressive effects, including depth of field, ambient occlusion and per pixel realtime lighting and shadows. In addition to addictive single-player mode, Trials 2 allows players to compete with each other with global highscore lists, and allows replaying and viewing trials rides – in order to learn from the more experienced players.

• Kung Fu Panda: A demo from Kung Fu Panda, based on Dreamworks’ upcoming CG-animated comedy about a lazy, irreverent slacker panda, Po (voiced by Jack Black), who must somehow become a Kung Fu Master in order to save the Valley of Peace from a villainous snow leopard, Tai.

• Night of a Million Billion Zombies! v1.11: PowerUp Studios has released an updated demo for NOMBZ: Night of a Million Billion Zombies! This is a 3D action shooter that challenges the player to lead a posse of survivors through a zombie-infested city.

For the a list of the more popular patches that hit this week, click through the jump.

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