It's a rarity, but we'll admit it when it occurs: We might have judged a game too quickly -- specifically, Lego Rock Band. While we assumed it would just be a brickalyzed version of the game we all know, love and are the tiniest bit sick of, a recent interview has us questioning that.

TT Games boss Jonathan Smith told VG247, "The Lego character customizer means that pirates, knights and skeletons can be rock stars too, in amazing new locations. Battle sea-monsters, smash up an entire building, or take a trip into space, all with the power of rock!"

Publishers, if you're curious about how to get our attention, skeleton rock stars destroying buildings with rock power before traveling into space is a great way to start.

Square Enix continues its assault on the Virtual Console in Japan with the third installment in the Final Fantasy series. Game Watch is reporting FInal Fantasy III will be available on the Virtual Console for 500 Wii Points some time this month. We'd be super excited about this, if not for the DS remake that had already released, which gave those of us in the West our first taste of this game. Would you prefer to play the original instead?

[Thanks, Justin!]

Yet another crazy music game fire sale from RedOctane today: For $49.99 on PS2, $59.99 on Wii or $69.99 on PS3 or 360, you can pick up a two-pack of Guitar Hero: Metallica and Guitar Hero: Smash Hits.

As an added bonus, you'll also get a free Guitar Hero World Tour shirt. Now, you should by no means wear this in public, but if you need to work on your car or play the Super Sloppy Double Dare home game, it's a nice perk.

GameStop is having a sale on a number of games; some of them flops that have plummeted from $60 to $20. Highlights include:

• Guitar Hero: World Tour (Band Kit) - $90 [360/Wii]
• Bionic Commando - $20 [PS3/360]
• Wheelman - $20 [PS3/360]
• Tom Clancy's HAWX - $20 [PS3/360]
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed - $20 [PS3/360]
• Prince of Persia - $20 [PS3/360]
• Tom Clancy's EndWar - $20 [PS3/360]
• Cooking Mama: World Kitchen - $20 [Wii]
• House of the Dead 2 and 3 Returns - $20 [Wii]

GameStop's summer sale runs from now until August 2. Check out all the goods here.

Last year, footage of an unannounced Wii horror game from Hudson, Calling, appeared on the publisher's PR server, and was quickly pulled from both the server and YouTube. Nothing has been heard about Calling since, until today, when the game was officially revealed in Famitsu magazine.

Calling: Kuroki Chakushin (Dark Call) features an in-game cell phone through which players will send and receive messages, and record audio and video, all of which will almost certainly be spooky. According to NeoGAF, the game is 70% complete, which makes sense given that it's been in the works since at least October.

Once again, Sega is giving away a fresh load of swag for its weekly Free Stuff Friday Twitter giveaway. There's plenty up for grabs, though the highlights are definitely the NiGHTS figurine, Panzer Dragoon statue and Bleach: Dark Souls for the DS. There's some other stuff, including a super exciting Sonic Heroes notepad, but we won't bother you with the details. We don't have to, because Sega was nice enough to create a video to showcase it all. You can find it after the break.

Be sure to head over to Sega for details on how to enter.

Amidst one of our furious brianstorm sessions, the staff at Joystiq concurred that site readers -- who never miss a beat -- would undoubtedly be hungry like the wolf for a full Guitar Hero 5 track list. Under pressure, we toiled six days a week and pulled together previously announced artists and trusted sources to obtain the complete (though not officially confirmed) set of tracks, soon to be transformed into rapidly approaching note charts. Why bother?

Because we wanted to see smiles on all the pretty faces. And ... we're only happy when it rains. Smells like teen spirit is a song that is in this game.

Are you the best of the best when it comes to soft, safe firepower? EA is going to give you a chance to prove your dominance of the Nerf battlefield once again, in the sequel to last year's Nerf N-Strike. This release coincides with Nerf's 40th anniversary, a fact touted by EA in its press release.

Most important among the new features of Nerf 2: N-Strike Elite, of course, is the new version of the Nerf Switch Shot EX-3 gun, which works both as a standalone Nerf dart gun and a Wii gun shell. The new blue gun includes a red decoder lens that reveals secret messages in the game -- otherwise, it appears identical to the previous (kind of awesome) gun controller.

The game includes new in-game weapons and upgrades, and "enhanced co-op play" with jump-in play. Nerf 2: N-Strike Elite will be out this fall.

When we first saw Wii Sports Resort last year, all Nintendo had available were three of the game's events: swordplay, power cruising, and Disc Dog. It turns out that those three (quite polished) events are pretty much all that existed at the time. In the latest Iwata Asks interview, the Wii Sports Resort team reveals that they didn't have anything but the idea of maybe doing another sequel until three months before E3 2008. Above, you can see what had been done: a MotionPlus test involving a virtual toy.

As usual, the Iwata Asks interview is full of surprisingly forthright discussion about the inner workings of Nintendo, including the team (and Shigeru Miyamoto) expressing its elation about a MotionPlus delay that allowed for more work on Resort, everyone's relative confusion at Miyamoto's "Wuhu Island" franchise idea, and, best of all, Miyamoto's deceptive methods of team motivation.

At one point, Miyamoto announced in an interview that golf would be in Wii Sports Resort, and that the MotionPlus would allow backswing to control the strength of the swing, instead of just speed -- and the team had to rush to actually put golf in the game afterward. Later, he describes how he faked a directive from Satoru Iwata to add an extra game mode. And apparently a programmer couldn't demonstrate the archery feature for Miyamoto because he was too nervous to aim the bow properly.

Shigeru Miyamoto sounds like kind of a jerk, actually.

Ah, snowboarding in the middle of summer -- well, on a screen and using a Wii Balance Board at least. Our recent trip to Ubisoft provided a brief opportunity to get our feet snowy with the Wii-only sequel to Shaun White Snowboarding and, well, the experience was familiar.

The biggest difference: new events in various parts of the world. One we were able to take a crack at was a half-pipe run in New York City's Times Square. The Balance Board control felt great, apart from the act of jumping, which required us to quickly dig our heels into the board rather than, y'know, lifting them off of it. The game really didn't like it when we tried that.

Since it was first revealed that members of the Super Smash Bros. Brawl team were crafting Ubisoft's new TMNT brawler, the expectation has been that it will be a total SSBB play-alike. From our time with it at last week's UbiNintendo day, we can confirm that there are similarities, but, if anything, it's more like "SSBB lite."

The four-player, multi-tiered arena aspect is there, for sure, but the complexity of the controls (and, with it, the number of moves and weapon pick-ups) has been dialed back a few clicks. At the same time, the pacing and presentation has been turned up, making for an extremely frantic experience.

Africa is fast becoming a hotbed of activity in games, and EA is the latest to take us there with its new game, SimAnimals Africa. In an attempt to improve the public image of the deadly animals there, EA will put a pleasant face on these creatures in this sequel to the original SimAnimals game on both the Wii and DS. Each are aimed at the casual crowd (of course) and will focus on providing players with "challenges and mini-games that players solve to unlock new items, animals and levels to explore."

SimAnimals Africa migrates to retail October 23, 2009.

Since their introduction in the minigame compilation, Rayman: Raving Rabbids, the title characters of Ubisoft's latest Rayman spin-off (a platformer!) have been among the least psychologically stable game characters ever. This is reflected in nearly every nuance of Rabbids Go Home, from the sadistic "inside the Wiimote" bonus mode to the piloting of a stolen jet engine through an airport terminal.

That first bit we mentioned is a detailed interior of a Wii Remote, which reacted to every twist and button press of the real one in our hands during a recent demo of the game. Inside the Wiimote: a Rabbid, subject to all manner of mishandling as we slammed it this way and that before inflating one of its eyes, deflating one of its ears, sticking a squid on its head and diving into the game proper.

Martin Lihs and Frank Matuse's WiiSpray, the art project that combines a projector, a custom Flash interface and a Wiimote inside a spray can-shaped enclosure, now has documented proof that it is awesome. Over the weekend, International Forum Design awarded the creators of the WiiSpray project its iF Communication Design Award in the category of product interfaces.

In August, International Forum Design will announce "gold award" winners from within the group of iF winners. Even if WiiSpray doesn't get that, it's already noteworthy enough to see a Wiimote-based homebrew project win a design award. And it's quite an achievement for a couple of students!

[Via GameSpot]