EA News Roundup

There’s been so much EA news released in the last 24 hours that it seems wasteful to give each announcement its own post (it is EA after all). Lets start small and work our way up shall we.

EA have signed a deal with Fender (the guitar people) to include Stratocasters and Telecasters in their upcoming rival to the Guitar Hero series, Rock band. This adds to the number of music equipment manufacturers who have signed up to have their stuff appear in game, along with Fender, Boss and Roland are reported to have done deals as well. Whether this deal means that the guitar controller for Rock Band will be a replica Fender guitar is still to be determined.

The much anticipated genre busting action adventure game from the team that brought us Diablo I and II, Hellgate:London, (published by EA) is to have two tiers of online play. The Elite tier, which will be subscription based, will give players double the storage space, unique armour, elite only transportation options, and priority access to servers. It will be possible to play online without having to subscribe but it looks to be a nobbled version of the game. Only U.S. pricing has been announced so far and comes in at $9.95 per month, with Asia expected to be cheaper and no information about european pricing as yet.

It has been announced that EA will partner with 20th Century Fox to produce a Simpsons game which will satirise many of the current fashion s in the industry, including World of Warcraft. I wouldn’t be surprised if EA themselves becomes a target of the Simpsons’ fun poking. The game will reportedly be a free-roaming type affair, not unlike Simpsons Hit and Run, with many of the family being playable.

Spielberg’s latest game project (remember The Dig, anyone?), developed in collaboration with EA, is to be a Wii exclusive. No clues as to a name, subject matter or gameplay as yet, but expect the Wiimote to be used to its full potential. Spielberg is said to be a big fan of the innovative controller and probably has some huge ideas about what could be done with it.

Anf finally, Spore has slipped. Orignally slated to be out before the end of this year it has been put back until March 2008 at the earliest and may be even later. This announcement caused a 3% slip in EA’s share price yesterday, and affected the company’s expected profit projections for the year ending in March 2008. EA has a reputation of sticking to release dates no matter what, whipping their coding sweatshops into a frenzy to get a game finished on time, I can only imagine that Will Wright has a certain amount of clout at EA seeing as his Sims games have made them obscene amounts of money.

That’s it for the EA news,we now return you to news about other game related shenanigans.

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