Activision has partnered up with Agora Games and opened a brand new Guitar Hero community website at GuitarHero.com. You can receive a “Backstage Pass” that entitles you to some exclusive GH3 content.

You’ll also be able to setup your Stage Name, which will serve as your name on the forums, and start collecting groupies. I mean, you can’t be a real rocker without groupies right? You can get groupies in a few different ways:

• Groupies will determine your popularity around this Backstage Pass, as well as on the Full Community Site.
• Get (1) groupie for Joining the Community and Referring a Friend.
• Get (4) groupies for Registering your Tour Group.
• Get (3) groupies for Joining a Tour Group.
• Play hard and play often, and you’ll be able to get new groupies every day.
• For a limited time, you can earn groupies for telling friends about your band – get them to register to the site and join your Tour Group! Both you and your friend will be rewarded with groupies.

The new community site will also have scoreboards so you can see how your shredding compares to your friends. They also have plans in the future to host online head to head tournaments. I know more than a few of you are Guitar Hero junkies so get on over there and sign up.

I’ve been waiting for Portal since I first heard of the concept and the inclusion of Team Fortress 2 almost makes the deal that valve is making available seem downright stupid. Stupid in the sense that you’d have to be a flaming idiot not to see how bad you need this.

Upon throwing the game in, you are presented with 5 game choices, which makes this post a bit skewed. To properly give you an impression of the whole disc I’d have to play portions of 5 whole games, of which I most definitely didn’t have time for. Instead I shot straight over to Portal and what I was greeted with is probably the most wholly refreshing game I’ve played in a long time. It’s no wonder that the kids who thought this up were snagged by valve as quickly as possible. These kids were thinking outside the box, something that I wish could be said about more in our industry. In a world of sequels and trilogys and franchises that won’t die, The Orange Box and more specifically Portal is a breathe of fresh air that I hope everyone tries at least once.

I’m not naive enough to believe that everyone will enjoy it or even see the value in The Orange Box, but those of us that missed Half-Life 2 on the PC will no doubt feel like we were blessed with some sort of Willy Wonka like golden ticket instead of feeling like we signed away the rights to our first born in exchange for a lackluster game that we won’t play more than twice.

I’m evangelizing now so I’ll stop, but the fact that I am so excited for something should speak volumes about how good I think this game is. This is without even touching the remaining 4 portions of gaming goodness that valve has served up. One of which I’m sure will eat into Halo 3’s MP action, Team Fortress 2.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl, one of the most anticipated new releases for the Wii, seems to be getting pushed back. The games’ official website had previously shown the date of December 3rd, but that seems to have changed overnight to a very vague “TBD”.

We’ve asked for confirmation from Nintendo of America, but are still waiting on a reply. Oddly enough, the official press site for NOA still shows the 12/3 date that the game previously held.

If the game is being pushed back in North America, and it is officially being bumped to 2008 in Japan, it’s sad news for gamers hoping to battle it out this holiday season. One bit of good news coming out of the Fall Conference is that Sonic will make an appearance this time around.

A similar conference is being held in San Francisco tomorrow so we can only assume that is where Nintendo will officially drop the bomb on us along with any other news they have been sitting on.

[UPDATE]
Nintendo has confirmed that the Japanese release date has been “pushed back a few weeks in Japan”, but they also said there was nothing to announce regarding the US release date of SSBB.

EA just dropped me an email with the recommended and minimum requirements for Crysis. Here they are:

* Supported Processors: Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (3.2 GHz for Vista) or faster, Intel Core 2.0 GHz (2.2 GHz for Vista) or faster, AMD Athlon 2800+ (3200+ for Vista) or faster.

** Supported chipsets: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT or greater; ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or greater. Laptop versions of these chipsets may work but are not supported. Integrated chipsets are not supported. Updates to your video and sound card drivers may be required.

Recommended System Requirements
OS – Windows XP / Vista
Processor – Intel Core 2 DUO @ 2.2GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Memory – 2.0 GB RAM
GPU – NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS/640 or similar

Looks like I’ll be passing on Crysis as my rig definitely won’t handle that.