Splinter Cell: Conviction creative director Maxime Beland wants people to finish his game. Accordingly, it looks like Sam Fisher's latest adventure will be clocking in at around 12 hours.

"I want people to play my games and finish them," Beland recently told Official Xbox Magazine.

"We're going to ship with difficulty levels, at least a normal mode and realistic mode - like we did on Rainbow Six Vegas. And realistic is going to be really fucking hard - you're going to need stealth, two bullets is going to kill you, the enemies are going to be super-lethal."

Looks like the Wii will soon be saying goodbye to one of its "hardcore" franchises. In a new interview, Grasshopper CEO Goichi Suda said he wants No More Heroes to continue to grow, but that he feels it needs to go beyond Nintendo's platform to do so.

"I really want to make NMH a big franchise, and with this second episode have bigger success. I'm putting a lot of care into developing this IP, as I feel there's a lot of potential," he told Edge.

However, "I think this is the last NMH that is going to be developed on Wii."

Buy Street Fighter IV or Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and what's the first thing you have to do? That's right, unlock stuff. Tekken series director Katsuhiro Harada, however, considers that process outdated.

"Why we locked the characters originally was that in the arcades, it was kind of to extend the life of the game by gradually unlocking characters. And also with the home versions as well, because you can rent games or whatever, it was to protect us against that," Harada told VideoGamer.com at Namco Bandai's Europe event.

"That's kind of outdated now though, especially with online play. If we were to have locked characters it would irritate a lot of people, to be playing against others online and to not have all the characters available. So I think it's no longer useful."

Rock Band's DLC for next week includes the exclusive Green Day three-pack that was announced last month, in addition to eight tracks from artists involved with the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival. The Mayhem Festival eight-pack will go for $13.49 (1080 Microsoft points), and the Green Day three-pack will cost you $5.49 (440 Microsoft points). Individual songs, as usual, are set at $1.99 (180 Microsoft points, 200 Wii Points).

Expect the following tracks to show up next Tuesday, July 7 on Xbox Live and Wii, and Thursday, July 9 on the PlayStation Store:

• "21 Guns" by Green Day
• "East Jesus Nowhere" by Green Day
• "Know Your Enemy" by Green Day
• "Conquer All" by Behemoth
• "What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse" by Black Dahlia Murder
• "Hammer Smashed Face" by Cannibal Corpse
• "Empire of the Gun" by God Forbid
• "Embedded" by Job for a Cowboy
• "Disposable Teens" by Marilyn Manson
• "Black Magic" by Slayer
• "This Is Exile" by Whitechapel

What's it going to be -- a sampling of Green Day's latest, or some good old fashioned metalcore? With a song title like "Hammer Smashed Face", how could you possibly go wrong?

The past two holiday seasons have not been kind of Eidos Interactive. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men and Tomb Raider: Underworld received lukewarm reviews at best, with sales to match. Eidos president Ian Livingstone says there's no room for that this year.

"A lot of titles have already hit the shelves and there is a deluge planned for Christmas, but I think 2009 will be remembered as the year of 'roast duck or no dinner,'" Livingstone told GamesIndustry.biz.

"There's a glut of product and in a discerning market there is no room for mediocrity. To make a suboptimal game with a suboptimal marketing spend is a recipe for disaster."