Just missing a perfect opportunity for firework promotion during the July 4th celebrations comes word of DLC for Boom Boom Rocket. The package will include 5 new songs and will touch on new styles of music. What those new styles will be, and when this pack will arrive is anyone's guess.

Bizarre Creation's Ben Ward does hint that the new songs will be an extra challenge. "...they do seem to be a level above and beyond what we're all used to. That can only be a good thing for all the hardcore, blindfolded, multi-fingered BBR experts out there," he said.

One of the complaints about Boom Boom Rocket when it first arrived was the small song list. Anyone out there willing to shell out more money to fill out the game more? And if so, how much would you pay for 5 songs? 800 MSP?

[via IGN, thanks Blue_Falcon]

Xbox360Achievements.org have once again done the impossible in getting their hands on Xbox Live Arcade achievements early. This time they have docked with Wing Commander Arena to load up on all 12 of the achievements for the game. It appears that the achievements may possibly on the easier side of the arcade with the exception of a shoot down 1000 pilots achievement, which should prove time consuming. The "Untouchable" achievement where the player must reach wave 10 without taking any damage may also prove to be quite difficult. With the release of these achievements this week, I wonder if this can be thrown in with the other two titles that according to previous reports were supposed to come out in June (only one week left after all)?

The Wing Commander CIC has updated their website to allow the creation and management of squadrons for Wing Commander Arena. After release the site plans to host tournaments, so if you have a group of friends to fly with you might as well sign-up now.

Two new Wing Commander Arena videos have popped up on the internet including a nice video interview/walkthru. The other video is from GameVideos and is embedded below. It's nice to see so much media and information streaming out of EA about this game. It would be nice if other developers would take a similiar stance.

[Via Wing Commander CIC]

The recent Street Trace: NYC community event has led to a blowout in not just Street Trace news but Wing Commander Arena news! The most important of which comes straight from DaKing240, who you may recall dropped hints prior to the WCA announcement about it's existence. Still, remember to take this with a grain of salt. According to DaKing240, Wing Commander Arena will be "coming soon... my guess is within 3-4 weeks".

Next up is that Gamertag Radio has released a podcast containing an interview with Gaia industries about Street Trace: NYC and a bit about Wing Commander Arena. The Wing Commander CIC has transcribed the Wing Commander Arena portion and posted it on their site, but of course you can always listen to the excellent Gamertag Radio for the full interview. They also took this lovely shaky cam.

Lastly, Wondermonkey2k has posted a few pictures from the event on his Flickr account.

The fly boys over at the Wing Commander CIC have pieced together all known information about the ships of Wing Commander Arena. The page goes into brief detail about what each ships role is and also shows the historical accuracy of the models for Arena vs old school Wing Commander. The information should give any of you who are green to the WC universe a bit of a chance to catch up on just what are the ships and what they will more than likely be good at.

X360A.org have gotten their hands on Boom Boom Rocket's achievements list. If you recall BBR will be released very soon - possibly next week. The achievements themselves are based mainly around getting various skill ratings on the songs as has been common with other rythmn games released for the 360.

CVG has been informed by Bizarre Creations that Boom Boom Rocket will be landing in mid-April. Keep in mind that next week Wednesday will be the 11th and the 18th is after that, which puts a release date at probably this upcoming Wednesday or the one after that. Keep your eyes peeled to XBLArcade.com on Monday as that is the normal day that the arcade releases are announced.

EA has launched a new dedicated official EA Xbox Live Arcade website with information about their games and forums. Currently, the website has four slots for upcoming games with two of them being filled by Wing Commander Arena and Boom Boom Rocket and another two blank. This makes me wonder if either 1) EA has two other titles that are currently well into development or 2) the designers felt the need to reserve that space for future use. Only time will tell how soon the third and fourth titles from EA will be revealed.

[Via Wing Commander CIC]

Criterion has revealed in a GameTrailers.com video interview that they are "working on some of the Live Arcade stuff in the background that we want to hopefully do". Criterion is a UK based developer currently owned by EA and is best known for their Burnout and Black series and middleware engine, RenderWare, which is used by the likes of the Grand Theft Auto 3 series and most recently Crackdown. With this semi-announcement it can be readily seen that EA is taking downloadable services seriously with titles being developed by some of their main studios (or at least this one) in addition to the outsourcing they have done with titles like Wing Commander Arena and Boom Boom Rocket.

Via NeoGaf