Good news for all those unsure of whether to buy Rock Band 2 or Guitar Hero World Tour: At Activision Blizzard's press conference yesterday, Neversoft director Brian Bright stated that Guitar Hero World Tour could be played with non-Harmonix instruments... if you buy the XBOX 360 version, that is.

As you may already know, the Rock Band drums (top) have only four pads plus a foot pedal, while Guitar Hero (bottom) has five. To accompany this Neversoft has designed Guitar Hero to recognize the four-channel input. The orange cymbal will become the green or blue pad with the Rock Band drums, whichever works best with the song you're playing.

Says Bright: "It's ridiculous to expect people to have two, three drum sets." And yes it is. Thank you for taking this step, Activision. I'm now officially ready to buy Guitar Hero World Tour.

AlmightyMax

I'm sure that if you know anything about Peter Molyneux or his many unfulfilled promises regarding what will be in his games, you read the title of this post and sighed... or perhaps rolled your eyes. The fact that you're reading this means that at least you decided not to just ignore it completely.

This particular promise of innovation looks like it will actually bear fruit. Molyneux claims that development on the game is actually complete, so the fact that this "innovation" actually sounds pretty darn cool is compounded by the fact that it has apparently already made it into the final build of the game.

The innovation is what Molyneux referred to as "friend orbs." Friends orbs are actually representations of all your Xbox Live friends as they play in their own Fable II single player game that manifest as glowing purple orbs at the same time in your single player game. For example, if a friend of yours is playing and standing in front of a shop on his/her Xbox, then in your game there will be a little purple ball of light floating in front of that same shop in your own game at the same time. Wherever that friend is in their game, the little purple orb will be their in your game all in real time, (provided you are both connected to the internet). You can then walk up to the orb and invite them to join you without going through any Xbox Live menus and if your friend accepts then BANG you'll be playing coop instantly.

Molyneux may be a man with a reputation for having enough hot air to lift a balloon into the sky and may believe that every time he farts it is a new innovation, but while this particular innovation is small, it is truly an interesting concept and I can't wait to try it myself. I just hope that it works just as advertised and that there is an option to turn the friend orbs on or off on the fly.

HeliosAI

Earlier today during the Microsoft keynote, Cliff Blezinski announced that Gears of War 2 would be hitting store shelves on November 7th. As well as a demo during the conference (which included, among other things, Brumack riding), Cliff mentioned that a new game play mode entitled "Horde" will force 5 players to join together to fight off wave after wave of increasingly difficult Locust hordes.

Keato

I'm prepared to officially declare a winner. After a lengthy press conference it was revealed, in traditional Microsoft fashion, at the end that Final Fantasy XIII, which has been repeatedly and officially reported to be exclusive to the Playstation 3, is hitting the Xbox 360. No release date has been announced, but Sony's got a lot of 'splain to do.

Slackerchan