Off To Kumbalgarh

I am off to Kumbalgarh for a week or so - I will be back in Delhi on Monday. Before I left, I wanted to give a brief update.

I got accepted into the XBox Live Update Preview program. This is an update to the XBox that contains a bevy of new features - the most important of which is Games On Demand. This allows you to download full XBox 360 games to your hard disk - meaning I no longer have to suffer the ShopTo/Play-Asia nightmare anymore.

Another interesting feature - it seems M$ figured out how to significantly reduce game installl sizes. This will be useful- once I buy a hard disk for my XBox :) Some numbers are mentioned here and here. It seems some games may save as much as 1GB of space being installed on the new dashboard. Not bad!

My trial of XBox Live Gold ran out, I doubt I will renew it - I dont really play online. However, it seems once you hand M$ your credit card, convincing them to stop charging it is complicated enough that there are entire articles on it. Wow!

On the portable front, it seems Nintendo blames Apple iPhone/iPod Touch for its financials. One developer in the meantime, went as far as to say that an iPhone is more powerful than a Wii. Amazing - which one though? The original one? 3G? 3GS? On the other side of things, Apple is evidently starting to get worried about piracy - they have put out a statement on how jailbreaking your iphone/ipod touch may cause problems for you...

Nice! For some reason, I never really liked Nintendo - maybe its because they just ignore India as a market, or maybe because they keep putting out ridiculously underpowered consoles. In any case, its good that they are finally getting some competition in the handheld space...