This week saw a lot of interesting announcements, and we’re not just talking about the newly-appointed Microsoft India E&D Country Manager (but I’ll point it out anyway). Nope, Sony’s also been making the rounds this week. Aside from some game development and industry chatter, we got PS3 titles going for cheap and silly viral marketing videos to gloat about. Read on, scallywags!

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Come Friday and we normally sneak out early off work, go some place and get drunk. Thankfully, we still had not managed to sneak off and get ourselves drunk silly when we realized that we have stumbled upon a treasure trove of sorts. On our hands here, we have an awesome quantity of previously unreleased details of the upcoming DICE game, Battlefield: Bad Company scheduled to be seen on both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. In the next few hours, we will give up on the bottle for a while and keep updating you with more juicy details of the game, at least until EA decides to send some lawyers our way. If this has got the Battlefield fans salivating all over their keyboard already, hit the jump to whet your appetite with a look at the Achievement list for the Xbox 360 version of the game and know for yourself why the much talked about Trophy system won’t be seen in the PS3 version.

Update: EA India has kindly asked us to remove the Achievement List for the time being. When we’re given proper notification, we’ll go ahead and put it right back up. Sorry for the inconvenience!

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I’ve always been a huge fan of quizzes, having been through hundreds of contests all through school, college and even the workplace. I’ve even spent a small fortune on Microsoft Encarta just so that my brain can be treated like a soft punching bag for hundreds of hours by the MindMaze’s dungeon dwellers. So when I first saw Buzz! almost two years back, it was head-over-heels love at first sight, with other games getting completely ignored until the disc gave up the ghost from overuse. But for all us Indian gamers that can’t wait until around March for the next-gen version of Buzz! Quiz TV for the PS3, SCEE, eager to duplicate the SingStar Bollywood experience, has launched an Indianized version of Buzz! The Mega Quiz, finally bringing the cheesier-than-cheesecake Buzz and his lovely redheaded assistant Rose (you know, the one with the exploding bustline in a Size 6 dress) officially to the country.

Working with the local quizzing legend Derek O’Brien and his talented team, Buzz! The Maha Quiz - now with 40% localized content (yum!) - looks like its set to complement the thousands of general knowledge questions already in the game with an assortment of questions that should be “more relevant to the Indian audience”. I guess that probably means that they’ve swapped out a lot of the Hollywood and Western music content for Bollywood films and songs (uh-oh!) and replaced a lot of the general knowledge trivia geared towards the Americas and Europe in favor of India - which is something that we’re really happy to see.

Launching the game at the swank Vie Lounge in Mumbai last Thursday, Sony Computer Entertainment India’s Country Manager, Atindriya Bose joined big-ticket personalities (what, no David Amor?) including cricketing firestorm Sreesanth, Radhakrishnan from NEO Sports, Rajeev Masand from CNN IBN and Bollywood celebs Neil Mukesh and Sonia Mehra in the first official Buzz! quiz in the country. We’re not really sure who won that round, but in an official press release sent our way, Atindriya Bose quipped:

Buzz enjoys a tremendous fan following across the globe because of three key elements - accessibility, character and sociability. It’s the live-in-your-living-room game show experience that everyone can enjoy, thanks to the Buzz! Buzzers. The cheeky personality of Buzz guides the tone of the game and related communications, setting it apart from bland competitors. Rose with her vixen-like appearance and appeal, also adds glamour to the game. After the success of Singstar Bollywood, it is only natural that we bring in Indian game contents in such a popular franchise as Buzz! ™: The Maha Quiz.

Amen, but wait… “bland competitors”? Was that a dig at the terrible voice acting and the annoying IR-based “Big Button Pad” controllers for Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action that turned out to be infuriating ripoffs of the Buzz! Buzzer? Oh well, we’re just happy that Sony India has released a great party game for the PS2 and has gone to enough trouble to show that they care about actually generating localized content for their games, instead of just importing the generic UK versions we are so used to getting. We’re still to get our most eager hands on the game, but this definitely looks like it could knock Guitar Hero off from its “Most Played Game at Parties” throne. Buzz! The Maha Quiz is priced at INR 1499 and is available now at all game outlets.

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I have no qualms admitting it. I’ve been unabashedly advicing people who ask me that the Sony PSP is the best damned investment they can make in the console gaming market, if they can buy only one. No other device lets you be entertained so well on the move, allowing you to watch movies, browse the Internet, listen to music and yes, play games no matter where you are. Perfect for when you’re stuck in a boring meeting, or stuck in an elevator without a sweet thing, or bored to death the next time the Electricity Board decides to see what would happen if they pulled the plug on your power line.

And if Sony has their way, you will be able to see movies of unprecedented quality end up on your PSP straight from your BluRay movie and your PlayStation 3 console. After making the announcement that users on the handheld wonder will also be able to Skype to their hearts’ content, Sony has said that it plans to include special version of the movies on certain BD discs, which when loaded into the PS3 and connected to the PSP, will transfer a hi-def “made for PSP” version of the movie onto its memory stick.

While there’s no confirmation on which discs will start to see this functionality (we’re guessing movies under the SPE banner will be the first to use this, duh), this certainly beats sitting around for the better part of an hour with third party video conversion programs.

[via Wired]

I just hate contests! Yes, I know we’re running a whopper of one right now on this very site, but it completely sucks when you can’t really win anything for yourself. And if you thought my luck held out when it came to other contests, boy are you mistaken. In any case, the guys over at Tech2, in association with Milestone Interactive, have managed to snag a 40 GB PlayStation 3 and a copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune to give away to one lucky…. fellow. (See how I didn’t use extreme profanity there? I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my anger management therapist for trying to cure me of my addiction to rageahol.)

All you need to do to win the shiny, sexy black beast with the Spiderman font and the best damn game for the platform is simply head over to the contest page here, read through the three articles that contain the code, crack it and then sit back and relax and pray like hell you win. Hurry, you don’t have a lot of time left. A small tip if you want to win: hire a harem of supermodels and send them to the Tech2 Editor’s house to, erm, fortify your standing in the prize line. But whoever wins, listen up, the second I come to know you’re not a fan or you’re going to eBay it ASAP, you will get hunted down like the dog you are and blown up like a midget in a microwave. Consider yourself warned… Or you could just choose to give me the goodies and die a relatively painless death. Your call.

Whoever said Microsoft was the only one serious about hosting game events to promote their flagship console baby, should check out Sameer’s excellent hand-on report on Sony’s Playstation Experience in Mumbai - which include dozens of pictures and even some shaky-cam style video clips. My one and only favorite! Man, now I wanna see one of these in Delhi too. But they better not make me have to sit in those retardedly small go-karts, or have me sit on the floor to play a bunch of friggin’ shooters. And would’ve it killed the event organizers to throw in extra controller for the games that had support for it? Make it so, Sony, make it so!

Update: Wow, it looks like one of our own attended the event as well! Even though Roshan couldn’t make it because of a bad mushroom-induced fever, his sister Mary D’Silva was nice enough to do his job and enjoy herself at the event with Need For Speed: ProStreet, MotorStorm, Ratchet & Clank: Deadlocked and good ol’ Resistance. Pity she couldn’t get her hands on Uncharted or R&C Future: Tools of Destruction, thanks to some spoilsports that stuck to the gaming stations like leeches. And no, before you ask, she didn’t embarrass herself by playing SingStar! And she took PICS, YAY! Thanks, Mary!

Hit the jump for the pictures.

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With more and more confusion reigning supreme on the home console front, I still think the PSP is one of the best purchasing decisions I’ve ever made in my life. A face that got reinforced ten times over, thanks to Ready At Dawn’s spellbinding God of War: Chains of Olympus demo.

Reggie’s already got the dirt on the dirt on the demo, and since I really can’t add much more to it without sounding like a hyperventilating, pheromone oozing teenage girl on her first date, I’ll just shut up and post screenshots we’ve managed to lift straight off the game. Feel free to kill yourself after seeing the framegrabs and wishing you hadn’t blown a staggering twenty thousand bucks on a lousy 21″ HDTV instead of spending it on a PSP. Or a DS. Or two thousand donuts. Or twenty high quality blowjobs… Hit the jump to take a look at what could very well be the killer app for Sony’s handheld platform, especially if this too happens to have a mini sex game.

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