EA has announced that it will be collaborating once again with MTV on Rock Band 2, scheduled for release on Xbox 360 in the U.S. this September with other platforms (PS3, probably) to follow.

Meanwhile little old New Zealand and big old Australia are still waiting for a release date and pricing for the original Rock Band, which released in the States last year.

Back when EA announced that it had decided to rip off U.K. gamers with Rock Band, I hinted that the game might never make it to our shores… and that is seeming even more likely now. With Rock Band about to be superseded, why bother? And why will Rock Band 2 be worthy of release if Rock Band wasn’t?

Activision might well find an exclusive market for its upcoming band game Guitar Hero: World Tour if EA continues to neglect the Australasian market.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve worked on any web project for myself, but quite some time ago I had an idea for an online workout logging application; something you can use to keep track of your gym workouts and see how much weight you’re lifting and how your progress is going.

Last week I got a prototype of the site online at strengthfu.com; it’s not open to the public just yet, but if you want to be the first to know when sign-ups are open then please register your interest on the site.

I’ll have more news on this soon.

Blizzard has announced Diablo III! There is of course no word on a release date yet, but there’s no doubt that it will be one of the biggest games of the year… whichever year that may be.

Check out the official site for trailers etc.

We’ve pencilled it in for late 2009 at this stage, and you can pre-order now.

Who says golf is boring? Tiger Woods’ U.S. Open win this week caused measurable traffic spikes in the U.S.A., with numerous ISPs apparently initially believing the spikes to be a denial of service attack.

You can read the full story here, but here’s the summary:

Starting around 9 am Pacific and peaking at 1:30 pm yesterday, many ISPs noticed an unusual increase in traffic. At first, a few security engineers worried they were under some type of new DDoS attack. But the flood of traffic did not appear directed at any individual customer — the gigabits of anomaly traffic surged to almost all customers from multi-national banks to the bakery down the street and home DSL / Cable users. For several ISPs, traffic into their network grew by 15-25%. In one provider, inbound traffic nearly doubled.

It turns out that the U.S. Open played at Torrey Pines yesterday generated one of the larger Internet-wide flash crowds this year. Traffic dipped and peaked corresponding to Tiger’s initial
misses and subsequent spectacular comeback as millions of office bound fans tuned in to the live NBC and ESPN coverage.

Firefox 3 is out today. I urge you to download it.