It's over folks. The end of Electronic Arts' Burnout Bandslam means that two new up and coming bands will be featured in a future Burnout game. EA ended up with over 5,000 entries from bands in the U.S. and over 2,100 from bands across Europe. Over 2.5 million voters on MySpace helped pick the top bands, and the final picks were made by an expert panel. The winni ng bands, Never Heard Of It (U.S.) and Showing Off To Thieves (Europe), will each be receiving a demo recording deal with Virgin Records and EA and the “ chance to have their song included in a future Burnout video game”. One runner-up band from the U.S. and one runner-up band from each participating country in Europe will receive an Epiphone Les Paul Custom Guitar. Want to listen to the music from the winners and the runner-ups? You can check out their songs at http://www.myspace.com/burnoutbandslam . This all sounds great to us. We're big fans of the Burnout franchise and certainly look forward to hearing some cool new tracks in the coming games, but there's one thing a little strange about all of this. Why isn't EA signing the bands onto Artwerk? It seems like a natural thing to us that a company building its own label would want to sign new artists. That's just our own spur of the moment thought, though. There's probably something we aren't aware of in the company's reasoning.

Release notes

Though we didn't get a press release about it, we do know that some games arrived, and released in stores today for Wii, Playstation 3 and PSP. Bionicle Heroes is now available for Wii. It's been available for a while now on other systems, including GameCube, but it will have some new added features that take advantage of the Wii Remote and Nunchuck, so at least it's a little different. Fear released for Playstation 3 today. It has already had a successful run on PC and Xbox 360. It was due for an appearance on PS3. Finally, two new games arrived for PSP today. The first is Cube (or The Cube), a value puzzle game that challenges players to explore and discover the solution to levels while suspended across 3D platforms and mazes. The second is The Fast and the Furious. The game has essentially been noted as a PSP version of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, though there should be some differences.