New Games: Activision’s new Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock wa...

My First Computer, Jakks Pacific’s EyeClops and Playskool’s Made for Me MP3 music player… Electronic Arts (EA) launched FIFA Online 2 in Asia. Seoul- based co-developer Neowiz Games will operate the title in South Korea. The first FIFA Online “has quickly become the number one online sports game in Korea with over five million registered subscribers,” EA said. The No. 1 U.S. third-party publisher “identified Asia as a strategic priority for investment and growth,” an EA spokesman said… New Midway Games titles BlackSite: Area 51 and Stranglehold are the latest to use Unreal Engine 3.0 (UE3). The publisher picked the engine for the games because “it allowed artists to get up to speed and start creating content almost right out of the gate,” Chief Technology Officer Michael Weilbacher told Consumer Electronics Daily. UE3 has a strong set of scripting and content creation tools, which he said let Midway artists “get started right away while our programmers and technologists started working on the code” for the games. The publisher’s custom codebase “Midway Core,” built on and around the UE3 foundation, “now has two years of optimizations and custom extensions added,” he said. Midway has “put an enormous amount of engineering into getting UE3 working well on the PlayStation 3, which in some ways is a more challenging platform than the Xbox 360,” he said. “At this point, Midway Core is made up of about 60 percent original UE3 code and about 40 percent custom Midway code.” Other third-party publishers have called PS3 more complex to develop games for than Xbox 360. Also using UE3 is Unreal Tournament 3, for which Midway last week announced a limited edition collector’s edition. It will ship in November at $59.95 in the U.S. with bonus DVD extras including a history of the game and behind-the-scenes looks at the series’ latest entry. It also will ship in Europe, South Africa, Australia and “most other territories,” Midway said… Preliminary retail channel checks by Stern, Agee & Leach analyst Arvind Bhatia “indicate the initial sellthrough rate” for THQ’s new game Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights for Xbox 360, Nintendo DS and PS2 is “tracking inline with expectations” but not “exceeding” them. The analyst had hoped the game would beat expectations to “make up for some of the softness experienced” in Stuntman, another recent THQ release, he said. But “very few stores we checked with were sold out and most indicated the sellthrough rate was inline,” he said. The new Juiced is expected to ship for PS3 and PSP Oct. 8 also… Among the first games from The Games Company’s new Green Kangaroo casual and kids games label will be point-and- click adventure Tell - the Game of the Movie, shipping Nov. 2. The company started Green Kangaroo to “draw a distinct line between casual games and core games for the end consumer,” said CEO Markus Malti. The casual games will have “reasonable prices,” he said, with full-price titles for core gamers released under the company’s TGC label… Scholastic Media shipped two Nintendo DS games: Animal Genius and I Spy Fun House at $29.99 each in the U.S… Sony Computer Entertainment America shipped PSP and PS2 versions of NBA 08 at $39.99 each, plus a PS3 version in 1080p (CED Sept 27 p14).