Friday, December 26, 2008

Christmas and Gaming

Merry Christmas everyone! Well I have had a very nice Christmas - for some reason, today of all days, the crazy guys at Pallika agreed to swap three old games for three new ones for just Rs. 900/- (I swapped out Assassin's Creed, The Darkness and Devil May Cry 4 for Siren: Blood Curses, Dead Space and Ninja Gaiden Sigma)

I am planning to buy an XBox sometime, but with the new Jasper motherboards just out, having 256 MB of onboard storage and a much lower power usage, buying the old 20/40 GB Falcon (or god forbid is it Zephyr?) model XBoxes that Pallika people are selling right now seems like a bad idea. Also, the ones they are selling dont have NXE installed on them. NXE allows XBox games to be fully installed to HDD. Here is a list of the advantages this brings to some games and how much space is required. This does mean I will lose out on M$'s "Buy an XBox Live Gold membership before Jan 1, get a free game" offer... BTW, did you know the 360 can write its own blog?

Square has released a (not) Final Fantasy game for the iPhone - Crystal Defenders, basically a tower defense game with characters from different FF games in place of actual towers. Its ok if you like that kind of game, not for me though (definitely not at 8 USD). Not that there is a dearth of good games on the iPhone.

I stumbled upon an Indian gaming community recently; its really nice to see fellow desis talk about gaming :) Also, Nokia's N-Gage platform seems to have somehow produced a winner - Reset Generation (also playable in-browser for free) Alas - there is no N-Gage on the 5800

My office is shut down till the 5th, so I will probably have a lot of free time on my hands :) I am off to Dharamsala in early Jan, will probably go to some places nearby/in Delhi before that.

Update 12/26/2008 - Kotaku has just released (via MTV. via Metacritic) the 10 best and worst games of 2008. In a strange dichotomy, 7 of the best games are Playstation games (but not exclusives) and 7 of the worst games are Wii exclusives (ya, I know its wrong to club PS2/PS3/PSP and not club Wii and DS, but hey - this is not a ranking :) )

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Man, I haven't played any recent games in ages.

I'm like one of those old geezers pining for the "good old days". The last time I played any game at all was probably the old Zelda games on an SNES\N64 emulator.

Speaking of which, have you played any of the old Legend Of Zelda games?

Are there any games today that are remotely like that? :)

Ashish Vashisht said...

I haven't really played any of those. I never was really much into Nintendo before the DS came out... I dunno, if you want to play a really immersive game, God of War on PS2 is really good; also Oblivion if you are into RPGs :)