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!

More than 48 hours to go before we can finally get our hands on Mass Effect over here, unlike some lucky dogs elsewhere who’re enjoying it already. For helpless souls like us that just can’t wait for our intergalactic roleplaying fix, Microsoft has been kind enough to launch the Mass Effect Experience, a great Flash site that puts you in the shoes of Cmdr. Shepard on board the SSV Normandy.

No point in me talking about the site, since it’s awesomeness redefined, but one thing that this site has managed to do is to make me try and break into the local distributors’ store to get my copy. I want my character to get some alien lovin’ already! Come on, Microsoft India, have some pity on us. Send us a review copy or something. Help me end my misery!

Reggie and myself just got back a few hours ago from Microsoft’s Gamers Night, which is arguably the biggest gaming-related event ever held in Delhi, and I must say that we’re both poop-zhausted. Between trying to talk with companies, to actually squeezing some game time with big-boys like Mass Effect and Army of Two – having an open bar with infinite Coke refills is a caffeine blessing in disguise. But the sad truth, there’s not much to talk about. At least, not until this coming Monday, when the media embargo is lifted for all of Microsoft’s and EA’s juicy offerings. Until then, you’ll just have to keep pounding on the F5! In other news, I think I may have contracted some skin disease. These PR folks can be quite the wild bunch, you know! Certainly not as terribly inconvenient as getting an error message from Gears of Wa- OOPS, will you look at the time! I can’t ride that pumpkin back home!

Expect more news at the stroke of midnight on Sunday, count on it.

Scream long and hard and chances are you’ll get what you wanted. In Singapore’s case, that seems to hold very true. Having banning the critically acclaimed Mass Effect after videos of hot alien lesbian sex scenes (if you can even call it that) surfaced on the Internet, Singapore’s Media Development Authority went back to take a look at the scenes and appear to have finally came to their senses. According to The Straits Times:

The Board of Film Censors (BFC) said in a statement on Friday evening that it will selectively use games ratings to ‘enable highly anticipated games to be launched in Singapore’ until it puts in place a games classification system in January.

The statement said that ‘this will allow such games to enter the market with immediacy and give the industry and members of the public a better understanding of the benefits of the proposed games classification system’.

So rejoice fellow Xbox 360 gamers in Singapore, for Mass Effect is banned no longer and you can all get your freak on along with the rest of us by watching your favorite videogame characters indulge in same-sex cross-species humping. Or you could just go play VirtuallyJenna, without all the messy RPG elements, if that’s your thing. Either way, be thankful the MDA hasn’t seen our Bollywood “item numbers” yet.

P.S.: As an afterthought, will Fable for Xbox Originals get banned in Singapore as well, considering it had a lot more sexual stuff going for it. Or what about Fahrenheit, with all its “interactive sex” and the full frontal nudity? What happens when the Fall Update hits Singapore December 4th?

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.

Are you one of those people that cried like a little sissy when Microsoft and Bungie announced that Halo 3 will not be appearing for the Xbox? Well, if you are, then you’ll love BioWare. In an interview with GamesRadar, President and co-founder of BioWare, Dr. Greg Zeschuk said that if things go right, they’d ideally want to have the entire Mass Effect trilogy on the Xbox 360.

Certainly out intent is to have all three iterations or installments of Mass Effect to be on Xbox 360. That’s the goal.

Thinking a year in to the future is a big challenge these days. The law we can’t control is the length of the console cycle.

I hope that this cycle is longer than the last one. We kind of just got started last cycle and it kind of ended when our second game came out. Downloadable content could also bridge the gap by giving you new little islands of story between the big game releases.

Poor deluded fella. Do they seriously expect to wrap up the trilogy on this console before it’s 5 year lifespan is up? And besides, like Halo 3’s showing us, what better way to wrap up a cherished trilogy than not rush through the development process and end it on the console’s next iteration, complete with all the latest bells and whistles, right? Right… as long as we’re talking about the end of the trilogy, how about beginning it sometime soon, huh? Kthxbye!

BioWare aims for trilogy to start and finish on 360, if console cycle lasts that long [GamesRadar]