No one can deny the popularity of the Guitar Hero franchise. Guitar Hero is so popular that it has spawned an ecosystem of aftermarket controllers specifically for the game and even copycat products like Rock Band.

Today marks the launch of the latest version of Guitar Hero called Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. This is the first Guitar Hero game to be built around one band. Activision says that Aerosmith even re-mastered some of the tracks digitally for the game.

It may be difficult for the hard core gamers among us to fathom that one of the most popular and best selling game franchise around is The Sims from EA. The casual game has sold more copies than most games ever dream of. I have played The Sims before, and even reviewed the recent title The Sims Castaway Stories for Computer Shopper and found it to be a fun game.

As such a popular game the number of expansion packs is huge and most of them center on stuff that you can add to your Sim characters home. With so much available in expansion packs EA has decided to make getting new stuff for your Sims characters easier with a new online store called The Sims 2 Store. The store is in beta form now, but allows gamers to shop for items offered in all the expansion packs and exclusive items to buy.

Eidos and Funcom announced today that Age of Conan has remained at the top of the PC sales charts for the first 2 weeks NPD data is available. The game is now the second most popular subscription MMO in the western world.

According to Funcom more than 700,000 gamers have signed up for Age of Conan accounts since the game was released in May. That puts it far (far, far, far) behind the genre leader World of Warcraft. Funcom says that it believes Age of Conan to be the most pre-ordered game in PC game history.