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Ubisoft's guitar teaching tool Rocksmith: 2014 Edition launches today, and two new trailers force players to make a difficult decision: Pixies, or Aerosmith? The Pixies headline the European trailer above with the Fight Club anthem "Where Is My Mind?", while North America's trailer below features "America's favorite rock band" Aerosmith and their hit 1975 single "Walk This Way."

Let's pretend that you get to choose which band lives and which one dies. It might help to weigh their songs against one another. Do you prefer "Monkey Gone to Heaven" or "Love in an Elevator"? "No. 13 Baby" or "Uncle Salty"? "Gigantic" or "Dream On"?

(For the record, the correct answers, in order, are A, A, and - just barely - B. Pixies win.)

Ubisoft announced that the European version of South Park: The Stick of Truth will receive a pair of retailer-exclusive pre-order bonuses when it launches later this year for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

Buyers who pre-order the game at ShopTo will receive the Ultimate Fellowship Pack, which adds four new in-game costumes that grant bonus gold, defense, weapon damage, and fire damage. The three costumes featured in GAME's Super Samurai Spaceman Pack focus on party buffs, awarding enhanced attack and defense during battle.

Pre-orders placed at Ubisoft's Uplay shop will receive both packs upon the game's release. Players in North America will receive the Ultimate Fellowship Pack as part of The Stick of Truth's bonus-bundled Grand Wizard Edition.

Prepare to rock the casbah with Rocksmith 2014's complete, 55-song tracklist, revealed today by Ubisoft. (It should be noted that The Clash's "Rock the Casbah" isn't one of the songs in Rocksmith 2014.)

The game will launch with "Walk This Way" by Aerosmith, "R U Mine?" by Arctic Monkeys, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" by Bob Dylan, "Everlong" by Foo Fighters, "Sixteen Saltines" by Jack White, "Cold Company" by Minus the Bear, "Knights of Cydonia" by Muse, "Heart Shaped Box" by Nirvana, "We are the Champions" by Queen, "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead, "Blitzkrieg Bop" by The Ramones, "War Ensemble" by Slayer, "Stuck on a Wire out on a Fence" by The Dear Hunter and "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, along with more classic and modern rock tunes.

Owners of the original Rocksmith will be able to import their current songs, though an extra cost will apply. DLC for the first Rocksmith is compatible with Rocksmith 2014 at no additional cost. Rocksmith 2014 is due out on October 22 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Peep the full tracklist below.

Panzer General Online is looking pretty slick for a browser-based thing, which I suppose shouldn’t be surprising: the tactics game is being rolled out by Ubi as part of their new free to play offensive. And it’s not relying on multiplayer, either, as they explain: “In the singleplayer campaigns you lead your army through historically inspired missions. All campaigns can be played as either the German or the US army.” Quite how much territory this will capture them isn’t clear to me, but it does seem like it could be a big deal in WW2-fancying tank circles, if just from the lovely presentation.

Anyway, the closed beta can be signed up to over here. So you should probably get on that.(more…)

Coming from a conference call with Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot...

"...the Watch Dogs development team has been working night and day to deliver on this ambition for this Christmas. And today, we can say we already have a great game in hand. This delay will increase its potential next year. In a world of mega blockbusters, we have come to the conclusion that the team needed additional time to realise the game's full potential. This will put us in a position to build Watch Dogs as a long-term pillar of our future performance alongside the likes of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry."

Ubisoft expects Watch_Dogs to sell somewhere around 6.2 million units.

Making a pleasant change from the usual pre-release drivel, Ubisoft has teamed up with VICE to make a series of short documentaries about the golden age of piracy. So that when you're playing Assassin's Creed IV, you can...I don't know, appreciate the piracy some more.Read more...

More bad news coming from Ubisoft today. During a conference call, the company stated that both Rayman Legends and Splinter Cell: Blacklist both sold below expectations. That's not just Wii U, but all versions that were released. I understand there's franchise fatigue with Splinter Cell, but what happened with Rayman?

Strangely enough I only badgered the poor, beleaguered PRs at Ubisoft this afternoon to see if there were any surprises in store for the release date of Watch_Dogs. I’d spotted that South Park: The Stick Of Truth doesn’t actually have a PC release date right now, despite the consoles being set for the 13th December in the UK, and wondered about their biggest Autumn title. Turns out I’m a proper, bona fide psychic. Very sadly, one of the most exciting-looking games of the year is no longer of the year.

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Ubisoft's open-world game Watch Dogs has been pushed back to spring of 2014, the publisher just announced on their blog.Read more...

Second star to the left and straight on 'til morning: Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag docks on PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles worldwide on October 29. The game was due in the UK and Europe on November 1, but Ubisoft got its Oprah on and decided everyone gets to plunder and pillage starting two weeks from now.

Well, not quite everyone. European Wii U and PC owners still have to wait until November 22 to nab AC4, as do prospective PS4 and Xbox One owners. As for North America, the Wii U version is due October 29, the PC version November 19, and the PS4 and Xbox One versions on the consoles' respective launch dates.

In another example of society inching closer to SkyNet, Rocksmith 2014 features a "Session Mode" that features adaptive A.I. In the jam session mode, the customizable band you select will play and react to your riffs helping you create sweet music. Music that will become the soundtrack of your death when the A.I. kill you in your sleep.

The first update for Ubisoft's Might And Magic X has arrived, bringing with it "a large list of enhancements" - most notably, four new character classes.

Alongside the addition of Chinese and Japanese language support for Might And Magic X, the patch also extends the game's day/night cycle, gives players the ability to immediately compare new items against those they have equipped, and fixes "over 100 bugs." The game's new classes include Mercenary, Shaman, Druid and Scout characters.

Ubisoft notes that downloading the patch is as simple as firing up your Steam client and allowing Valve's digital distribution platform to pull down and apply the update. Keep in mind however, that due to the number of changes in this patch Ubisoft warns players that save files created prior to the patch may no longer function.

Ubisoft's pernicious, bawling bunny creatures will invade iOS and Android with Rabbids Big Bang on October 17. The physics-based game has players piloting a jetpack-equipped, spacefaring Rabbid around planets to collect coins across the universe.

The game will feature 150 missions, which include "crash-landing on planets, bouncing off of space cows and reaching specific speeds." Items can also be upgraded and there's plenty of costumes for the Rabbid to wear. We don't know yet which items can be earned and those that will require microtransactions, but the game itself is priced at $1.

Aveline, star of last year's Vita tangent Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation, returns for about an hour's worth of PlayStation 3/4-exclusive content in Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. She and her machete will chop people up over three missions, according to this latest trailer from Ubisoft.

In 22 days' time, we'll know what's really up with the next Assassin's Creed. We'll know if all of those trailers and videos Ubisoft has been pumping out for AC IV: Black Flag—13 of them!—have been the oozing confidence of a team that knows they've made a great game or have been the sprayed misdirection of a marketing team that doesn't mind once again raising expectations too high.Read more...

Rocksmith 2014 Edition will have a color-blind mode. If it adds a Talent-Blind mode, I'll be able to play guitar.Read more...

Rocksmith 2014 expands on the tutorial set established in the inaugural release, but more pertinent to the visually-impaired rockers out there is an optional mode for the colorblind. Producer Taylor Benson, who is colorblind, says players will find adjusted hues and color saturation levels that will span the entire game, from the advanced lessons to the new Guitarcade mini-games, in colorblind mode.

The first Rocksmith actually caught some flak for not being so kind to colorblind students. But Benson concludes that those who have the two most common forms of colorblindness - the third is far too uncommon and problematic to account for - should hopefully have no problem laying down some sweet licks in Rocksmith 2014. And with yesterday's news about the Battlefield 4 beta having colorblind options, isn't it nice to see more developers recognizing this fairly common affliction?

If you'd asked me in 1998 to look fifteen years in the future and guess who the the most enduring names in video games would be, I might've listed the usual suspects: Sid Meier, Tim Schafer, Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto and maybe a few others. I probably wouldn't have included Tom Clancy.Read more...

Although everyone likes to throw around genre tags, it’s occasionally worth stopping to acknowledge they don’t really tell us anything. Take The Crew, Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world driving game. ‘Open world’ in this case means a lot of interconnected roads that have mission boundaries placed atop, a much larger but less sexy version of Burnout’s Paradise City. And as for the driving, I can’t think of a single other racer that plays out in quite this fashion.

Forgive the pun, but The Crew’s in the title. Let’s explain that joke, in painful detail, below.

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While the rest of the world has to wait until the end of this month to get their hands on Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, I've got Edward Kenway and friends right here on my desk, ready to pillage, loot, burn, and maybe make-out a little. Read more...

There have been a whole mess of Assassin's Creed games leading up to this year's Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. In an attempt to catch players up on the battle between assassins and templars, Ubisoft is releasing the Assassin's Creed Heritage Collection in Europe.

The Assassin's Creed Heritage Collection bundles together Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed 2 (the Game of the Year edition which includes the Battle of Forli and Bonfire of the Vanities add-ons), Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed Revelations and Assassin's Creed 3.

The Heritage Collection will launch in the UK on November 8, for Xbox 360, PS3 and Windows PC. When asked whether this bundle would come to the US, Ubisoft reiterated that it was for Europe only.

Rocksmith 2014 Edition bulks up its playable tracklist with eight newly announced songs, marking the first time Def Leppard, Green Day, and other acts have been featured in Ubisoft's guitar-teaching music simulation series.

Today's announced tracks include Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me," Deftones' "My Own Summer," Green Day's "X-Kid," Queen's "We Are The Champions," Ratt's "Round and Round," Rush's "The Spirit Of Radio, and "Mary Jane's Last Dance" from Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers.

"GO FURTHER" from B'z guitarist Tak Matsumoto rounds out today's setlist announcement, joining the game's previously announced B'z track "ultra soul." A full list of songs featured in Rocksmith 2014 Edition is after the break below.

Ubisoft announced today that it has acquired Future Games of London, a prolific mobile game developer with a string of free-to-play hits in its app catalog.

Future Games of London found its biggest success with the Hungry Shark series, which was bolstered post-launch by the Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week event in 2011. The most recent entry in the series, Hungry Shark Evolution, has been downloaded over 25 million times across iOS and Android platforms. Future Games of London also developed the popular iOS billiards sim Pool Bar: Online Hustle, along with the arcade-style action game Grabatron.

"The decision to sell is always a difficult one, especially when we have built so much success as an independent company, with our own IP and a direct relationship with our players," the studio states at its website. "However, as we grow the team and as the mobile free-to-play industry around us evolves, we want to be in a position to place bigger bets on better games. Being part of Ubisoft's family gives us the support, experience, marketing and resources we need to make a very big impact with our future titles."

Blood and Thunder: Ubisoft has released the full tracklist for their guitar-teaching game Rocksmith 2014, the upcoming sequel to 2011's Rocksmith. They've also released a video with some well-known rock guitarists weighing in on the software. Full tracklist below the break.Read more...

The PC version of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag will come out on November 19. That's right in between the PS4 and Xbox One versions, which will launch alongside their respective consoles on November 15 and 22. PS3 and 360 versions come out on October 29.Read more...

By now, Assassin's Creed fans know more or less what to expect from the game's controls. Running, jumping, climbing, stabbing… they're pretty established at this point. But what of the PS4's touchpad?Read more...

Hey, Assassin’s Creed IV has something in common with Grand Theft Auto V. No, it’s not sharks. The newest trailer for the Caribbean-set open-world action game shows an all-star cast of history’s most infamous pirates teaming up to pull off a massive heist. Heists! They’re so hot right now. Read more...

Ubisoft announced that the Windows PC version of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag will premiere on November 19, launching alongside releases for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Black Flag tracks the swashbuckling life of Captain Edward Kenway, who heads up a high-stakes heist in the Caribbean. The new trailer above features Kenway's accomplices, introducing his shipmates Blackbeard, Anne Bonny, and Charles Vane, among others.

Assassin's Creed 4 will hit the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U on October 29.

Richard Tsao has had his fair share of interesting stories about China. Tsao, who headed up Ubisoft's Chengdu office, will be leaving China for personal reasons; but even as he leaves the Middle Kingdom, Tsao says China's game industry is still the place to be.Read more...