GameStop has announced that they will be holding a summer sale that will see a plethora of games get dropped from their normal $60 price all the way down to $20.

Below is a list of highlights compiled by Joystiq:

Guitar Hero: World Tour (Band Kit) – $90 [360/Wii]

Bionic Commando – $20 [PS3/360]

Wheelman – $20 [PS3/360]

Tom Clancy’s HAWX – $20 [PS3/360]

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed - $20 [PS3/360]

Prince of Persia – $20 [PS3/360]

Tom Clancy’s EndWar – $20 [PS3/360]

Cooking Mama: World Kitchen – $20 [Wii]

House of the Dead 2 and 3 Returns - $20 [Wii]

This sale apparantly runs through August 2nd with the full list of discounted games here.

It seems that our friends over at Joystiq have taken the time to thumb through every Guitar Hero 5 announcement thus far and compile a master list of tracks that will be featured in the game.

If you’ve been paying attention you’ll have already seen all of these tracks in bits and peices over the last couple of months. However, the end of the list also lets us know that musicians such as Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash will be featured as characters in the game.

Guitar Hero 5 will be out for PS2, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii on September 1st of this year.

Full track list after the break.

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To stand out in the MMORPG market, developers have to make compromises and do things other developers aren’t willing to do. The guys behind Dungeons and Dragons Online decided to re release their game as a free to play MMORPG called Dungeons and Dragons Online: Unlimited.

As for a release date, it was announced today that Dungeons and Dragons Online: Unlimited will be made available for play on August 6th.

Monster Hunter is widely known to be a huge success, especially in Japan, but I doubt anyone could have predicted the exact scale of said success.

Capcom is excited to announce that Monster Hunter Freedom Unite has sold 3.5 million copies in Japan. Not only is that a huge feat, but it’s a record; the only PSP game ever to hit the 3.5 million copy mark.

With Monster Hunter Freedom Unite only recently hitting retail in the US it’s still to be decided if American gamers will take to it like the Japanese.

Read (Destructoid)

We learned back at E3 that Microsoft would be discontinuing their Xbox Originals service to make way for their all new Games on Demand service that would let gamers download full Xbox 360 titles. This led many gamers to turn their head towards Sony asking if they too would offer an extensive library of full retail games for digital deliver. I mean they already offer games like Warhawk and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, right?

Eric Lempel, an exec over at Sony, responded to the idea:

It’s not something we have planned, just because the size of the games is massive. With Blu-ray we can put up to 50 gigs on a dual-layer disc, while [Xbox 360] is still on a 9-gig media. So technically it’s possible, but I think the issue would be, ‘Do you want to download 40 gigs and keep that on your hard drive?

I’ll have to agree with Mr. Lempel, downloading a 40GB game and storing it on the PS3′s harddrive wouldn’t be my idea of a walk in the park. However, waht about the multiplatform games that only take up a fraction of a Blu-ray’s

Read (Kotaku)

EA’s European PR department accidentally Twittered the following message (with a bit of CAPS fever): “EA LOS ANGELES ANNOUNCES DEVELOPMENT OF COMMAND & CONQUER 4″. It also linked to an official press released regarding the game, which has since been taken down. Obviously, we’re not surprised, Command & Conquer is one of the great RTS franchises, albeit the last few games (including the Red Alert ones), haven’t lived up to its predecessors.

It seems that Battlefield 1943 has had a rather successful launch, considering that EA and DICE are now adding more servers because the initial ones can’t handle all the players. However, as DICE points out in a forum post, the addition of the new servers might result in some connection problems during today.

Yes, it’s yet another in a long, long, LONG series of racing games currently available for the Xbox 360.  This time, we’re talking about Race Pro, a game that breathlessly promises to be “the ultimate racing simulation experience”, and I’m sure that is the case on planets where no one has discovered driving, video games, the internal combustion engine or the wheel.

That’s the thrust of the review today, folks–this IS in fact the ultimate racing simulation experience if you’ve either never actually had a racing simulation experience before or you’ve never actually driven anything before.

Basically, the plot of the game, such as it is, is exactly that. You’re going to drive cars.  No, this doesn’t exactly have the same literary quality of Ridge Racer’s young up-and-comer looking to burn his way through the ranks of the professional driving circuit, or the various underground racers where you’re out to gather pinks and impress hot chicks who like to wave flags half-naked for little or no conceivable reason.  You’re just here to go fast and turn left, except for when, on occasion, you will be called upon to turn RIGHT.

You may be asking yourself at this point, hey, if that’s all I’m supposed to do, then why even bother?  I mean, if I wanted to be stuck in traffic for twenty minutes while I tried to drive a car down a twisty, windy track, then why don’t I just jump in my car and actually, you know, go somewhere?  At least then everybody on the Internet’ll stop calling me a basement dweller because I haven’t left the house in months.

Sadly, I don’t have much of an answer for that.  Oh, sure, with Race Pro you’ll get to try out various different kinds of cars, on various different types of tracks, with various different types of options.  I give Race Pro due credit for having an almost OBSCENE number of options–not only can you tweak the difficulty, you can also tweak subclasses of the difficulty as well.  For instance, if you’re racing on hard mode and find the AI’s just a little TOO aggressive with the competing drivers, you can actually dial down the racers’ AI difficulty level.  It’s an absolutely customizable racing experience.

Absolutely customizable, yes…but worthwhile?  That’s where I’m going to have to say no.  I had SERIOUS problems with the controls on this one–even something that should be video-game simple, the drift maneuver, I couldn’t manage to pull off.  In fact, driving the Mini Cooper in the first level felt exactly like the headline described, like driving a brick through wet cement.  I remember trying to pull off a turn, so naturally, I decelerate so I can jam on the gas after I’ve started to pitch my nose a bit.  The car promptly decides that it prefers going straight, and thusly goes COMPLETELY OFF THE TRACK and into the dirt.  The game then warns me that I’m “cutting track”, to which I respond with a torrent of obscenities detailing the fact that, one, I already KNOW I’m off the track and, two, that I wouldn’t have been if the game had done what it was told to do in the first place.

This is, of course, profoundly irritating, but there’s probably a workaround if you’re desperate enough for a new racing game to try.  I personally say that there are better racing games out there–vastly better, in fact–but if you want a driving sim that’ll give you a huge fight, then Race Pro is the game you want.

While the self-appointed cultural crusaders raise an eyebrow at excessive violence, nothing gets them more frothed up and ready to bust heads than sexual content. Recently video games have begun to take the romantic component that some RPG makers have been including to the next level in a more visual format. This stirred up a mildly ricidulous hornets’ nest of controversy when Mass Effect was released, though most of those complaining hadn’t actually played the game.

Bioware’s newest RPG, Dragon Age Origins reportedly contains similarly racy content at some point as well and one can only assume that Mass Effect 2 will allow more boffing of sexy blue aliens (or aliens of some other hue). In an interview Bioware co-founder Greg Zeschuck defended his company’s decision, citing that that they’re doing this to reflect real human relationships in a “sophisticated mature experience”. He admitted that they’re not necessary for every game but “in certain types of games it makes sense to have them.”

Do digital recreations of sex scenes, no matter how tasteful, really improve the immersiveness of a video game’s romantic subplots? Public opinion still seems to be split on the matter, so what do you think?

When it first began, DLC seemed more like an experiment into how much extra companies could charge for new content than anything else, but these days it’s almost a guarantee for any major release. Though it might not have gotten the acclaim of most other titles in the series, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe performed well enough to warrant some DLC of its own.

Unfortunately this won’t ever see the light of day due to the financial stumblings of Midway and their buy-out by Warner Bros. Ed Boon posted a render for sorceror Quan Chi onto his personal twitter account with the commentary “Excited about MK9 and WB, but wish we could have released DLC for MKvsDC”. Due to the abbreviated nature of twitter there aren’t any more details but with a huge roster of Mortal Kombat characters who hadn’t made the cut we’d probably have seen a fair number of fan favorites added to the list.