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Finally! After having harped about the fact that how Delhi and Mumbai have been enjoying all the Gaming Nights, Microsoft-India has decided to show some love to the gamers from namma Bengaluru!
Microsoft-India in association with The History Channel is bringing to us the “Human Weapon Gaming Nights”. To be held at The Living Room on 19th September, the event will pit gamers against each other in Halo 3, Ninja Gaiden II, Dead or Alive 4 and Gears of War. Winners will get to walk away with an Xbox 360 and other cool swag. The best thing about it is unlike other events, this is not only for the press. Gamers can register at the Human Weapons Contest site to be a part of it. With only two days to go, you better hurry!
Full press release after the jump.
Games improve your memory. Research has proven that people who play games have higher levels of concentration than those who don’t. Games help develop strategic thinking. Games help surgeons improve hand-eye coordination skills. Managers leverage games to help build and develop team dynamics at work.
BULLSHIT!
This one believes claims like these hold about as much water as the allegations that games inspire violent and psychotic acts. It’s a simple fact, that the roles games play in our lives are the roles we choose to assign to them, just like the roles movies, books or music play! Games are a means of entertainment, a story-telling medium, and by their own right, works of art in the interactive space. Analyzing their contribution to society from a utilitarian perspective is just a vain attempt to hook the nay-sayers in, and dispel (VERY widely held) notions that games are “a waste of time” and “meant for kids”. Honorable intentions for sure, but this just ain’t the right way to go about it!
Hit the jump for more of this drivel.
So much for a Day 1 release! Ages after everyone has finished playing Gears of War and Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties, we’re finally getting to see the retail copies roll out into shelves here. In an official press release sent out today, Microsoft India announced that copies of Zoo Tycoon 2: Extinct Animals Expansion, Flight Simulator X Expansion Pack, Viva Piñata (PC), Age of Empires III Gold (including AoE3 and The WarChiefs expansion), Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties and Gears of War for Windows will now be (finally!) available starting tomorrow.
Pity a lot of the people in India gave up waiting and bought their copies elsewhere.
The official pricelist:
Zoo Tycoon 2: Extinct Animals Expansion Pack – INR 1149
Flight Simulator X Acceleration Expansion Pack – INR 1649
Viva Piñata – INR 1649
Age of Empires III Gold – INR 1649
Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties – INR 1149
Gears of War (PC) – INR 1649
Enjoy. That is, if you haven’t already!
Mumbai got lucky this time around as well, considering we are seeing so many events going on here, with Sony and Microsoft both vying for our attention. As we had mentioned earlier, the Mumbai Microsoft / EA Game On event was on at The Squeeze and me and my GamingIndians friends were there to take in all they could throw at us.
Sadly though, the whole event was a relatively low-key affair, with maybe just 20 to 25 people in attendence – more television channels and online / print publications than a gathering of gaming fans. Good thing the place was small, making it look crowded enough! Guess Microsoft India E&D Country Manager saw this coming and chose not to attend, even though other Microsoft execs including Sanjoy John and Xbox India’s Product Manager Vivek Kulkarni hobnobbed with the attendees.
There’s nothing more annoying to a PC owner than having to wait for a game that millions of others are already enjoying. Used to waiting ages for games like GTA, Halo and Fable, it came as no surprise to the PC aficionados that they’d have to endure yet another interminable wait for Gears of War, the game that sold the Xbox 360, to get to their beloved platform of choice. And just about a year later, Gears of War finally arrives for the PC, and to make up for all the lost time, brings along enough candy and flowers to make sure you don’t ever remember being stood up on this grimy, bloody date.
This has been a tough couple of weeks for Indian gaming, what with games delayed every which way. But fear not, according to distributors World Wide CDROMS and Excel Interactive, our games should be here real soon.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 should be available at stores around tomorrow, along with The Orange Box for the Xbox 360, Gears of War for the PC and Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties for the PC. According to distributor Excel Interactive, though, Crysis has been delayed by another week, so expect it to be here in the first week of December. The game should retail for INR 999, but there’s no word on whether it will be the regular edition or the Collector’s Edition that will be available here. We tried contacting e-Xpress Interactive and Milestone for comments and release dates, but it looks like they’ve taken an early Christmas vacation or something, since we’re yet to get a reply from them.
To make matters sweeter, Guitar Hero III should also be available in stores at the end of the month, with the Xbox 360 version retailing for somewhere over INR 6,000, along with LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, which I just can’t wait for, even though I’ve played Lego Star Wars I and II: The Original Trilogy to death!
And let’s not forget the ultra-great Mass Effect, releasing just two days from now! We’ll have a lot more on this soon, including information and impressions from the launch party, as well as a gushing review sometime later this week.
Keep watching this space for updates for more information from other distributors, if we ever get around to getting them!
We have been pretty much content living in Bangalore, that is, until now. With our correspondents living up north getting lucky two times in a row, it has become more and more difficult. First, it was the Halo 3 pre-launch party followed up with the XBL India launch announcement party, both in New Delhi. Come 16th November 2007 and these buggers will strike gold again when they get to attend yet another event being organized by Microsoft India.
Touted as the, “Biggest Gamers Night Ever Seen”, the event will be showcasing Mass Effect, PGR 4, Army of Two and The Orange Box besides Age of Empires 3: The Asian Dynasties and Gears of War for the PC. The event is an invite only with limited invitations being sent out to the early birds. But if you hurry, there still might be a few seats open!
Needless to say, we’re invited and are eagerly looking forward to all that will be on show besides the excellent food that our reporters, Vijay and Reggie, have become so accustomed to gorging on. Though NDAs are expected to be in place, rest assured that we will be bringing to you all the details that we are allowed to talk about. Expect to see in-detail coverage of the event with pictures and videos of our stuffed reporters putting their best foot forward as videogame “journalists”.
In the meantime, we will resort to poking needles into voodoo dolls of their likeliness, as we try to get a little love sent to us poor folks in other cities as well.
There are good sides and bad sides to living in India, especially if you happen to be a die-hard gamer. The good deal is that almost all PC and Xbox 360 games are a lot cheaper than their US/UK counterparts. That is, if the games actually release down here before the rest of the world has finished playing them three times over. Or worse, like UbiSoft Xbox 360 titles, turn up their noses and ignore us completely.
With first party titles like Halo 3 and Mass Effect enjoying a simultaneous release with their American counterparts, it was more than a little upsetting to PC owners here that Gears of War still wasn’t available on shelves. Naturally, Xbox 360 owners weren’t too happy with the regional restrictions and extremely low content on the Marketplace. After all, Reggie’s not in the best of moods if you keep him from buying DOOM!
However, talking to our stalkers in a short email interview, the good folks at Microsoft India let us know that they are indeed working to fix said problems. According to Sanjoy John, PC owners desperate for their Gears fix will be able to pick up their copies this week, while Xbox 360 owners will see a lot of new content, including more Arcade games and Bollywood related content (blech!), headed their way.
And to feed us rabid Mass Effect hungry zombies, copies will be available with the distributors on the 15th, and in stores around the 20th. And yes, there’s probably even going to be a nice, big launch party, where some of us will be gulping down food while the sane desperate ones try to get as quickly as they can to the alien boobies! Wonder if we’ll get to see any Liara cosplayers at the event.
Gentlemen! Start your chainsaws! Microsoft, in an official press release, has announced that the hotter-than-hot Gears of War for the PC has gone gold and will be made available to retailers across the US on November 6, with Europe set to follow three days later.
As we’d noted earlier, the game will indeed bundle along all of the previously released downloadable content for the Xbox 360, including the bonus maps and the Annex game type, and five new chapters for the single player campaign. In addition to all of this, PC “pwners” will get to experience three exclusive multiplayer maps as well as a “King of the Hill” gametype, as well as being able to create their own custom content through the bundled Unreal Editor.
We’re still trying to contact Microsoft India about when this game would be made available here, but strangely enough, they seem to be dodging this one for some odd reason. With the possibility that Xbox LIVE might launch here soon enough, it’d practically be the best damned Diwali gift we’ve treated ourselves to in a long, long time. Hit the jump for the official press release while we go squeeze in some practice on our Xbox 360s.
Life just doesn’t get better than chainsawing and curbstomping (or getting ‘em done unto you) hapless virtual characters in Gears of War. PC owners, who will experience all of this come November 6th, now have a list of achievements to go with all their fun as well. With less than a month to go, Xbox360Achievements.org have gotten their hands on the PC Achievements for the game and, disappointingly, it looks like nothing’s changed, at least from the perspective of an Xbox 360 player looking forward to the Brumak fight. It looks like they removed 10 GS awarded to the “A Series of Tubes” achievement to make space for the new Secret Achievement, which is probably related to defeating the Brumak and the new Act, but that’s pretty much all there is. We’re still not sure if the Annex mode and the Hidden Fronts map pack will be made available for the PC as well, since the 250 GS for those achievements seem to be missing from the PC version, even though the promos say that the game will include three new multiplayer maps and a new multiplayer game type. Either which way, everyone but the achievement whores shouldn’t have a problem with this, I guess.