Welcome back to the GearGames weekly video game release feature here at Gear Diary! This week brings us the hotly anticipated Beatles Rock Band, which comes in three forms – profit, more profit, and mega-profit! Seriously though, you can get game-only for ~$60 if you want to use your existing Rock Band or Guitar Hero World Tour hardware; ‘value bundle’ for ~$160 which has the game and standard Rock Band hardware; or the ‘special edition’ for $250 which has all Beatle-themed hardware and a couple of extra items. Expect heavy demand and limited supplies of this.

Other notables this week. The multiplatform release Mini Ninjas promises stylized fun, and will actually get released this week; the console strategy retooling of IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey brings the highly rated PC flight combat sim to the consoles; the popular Disgaea PSP gets a wonderful counding and impressive looking sequel with Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Days; and the off-road racing sequel DiRT 2 comes to just about every platform. Anyway, check out the list!

• The Beatles: Rock Band
• DiRT 2
• Raiden IV
• Darkest of Days
• IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey
• Mini Ninjas

• The Beatles: Rock Band
• DiRT 2
• IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey
• Mini Ninjas
• LittleBigPlanet: Game of the Year Edition
• Trine

• The Beatles: Rock Band
• DiRT 2
• Muramasa: The Demon Blade
• Mini Ninjas
• Arcade Zone

• No New Releases

• Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Days
• DiRT 2

• Mini Ninjas
• DiRT 2

• Dawn of Magic: Time of Shadows
• Heroes Over Europe
• Fallen Earth
• DiRT 2
• Darkest of Days
• Mini Ninjas
• War Leaders: Clash of Nations

Some notes from last week:

• Guitar Hero 5

- Despite being ‘yet another of the same’ music simulation games, there is enough fresh stuff to keep it exciting – another winner!

• Defense Grid: The Awakening

- Great port job keeps this one loads of fun on the X360!

• Section 8

- Just another average shooter. Some decent stuff, but also loads of compromises.

• Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny

- Being ‘just a portable version of Soul Calibur IV’ really isn’t a bad thing … this is a fun fighting game!

What games am I playing now?:

• PC: Evil Islands – I love netbook-friendly games, and this little-known 2001 Russian RPG came to my attention in two different places last week … so I thought it was more than coincidence and gave it a shot. Very high difficulty, and graphics that time has not treated well, but some decent fun has kept me engaged.
• Mac & PC: Neverwinter Nights – since the netbook has been dominated with other stuff, the Mac has been playing plenty of of the Original Campaign, and I’ve also started characters in some of the other modules.
• PSP: Dissidia: Final Fantasy – this solid fighting game offers loads of gameplay and way too many control overloads … but in the end it is pretty fun.
• iPhone: Wolfenstein RPG – this is very long for a iPhone game, and loads of fun. Look for a review this week!
• iPhone: Luxor – when I saw that the puzzle-game classic made the jump to the iPhone, how could I resist? I couldn’t!

So what are you playing? Chime in below!

Enjoy gaming!