Ever since the hilarious rumour that WipEout HD was delayed for health reasons, people who didn’t previously care about the game, suddenly started taking an interest in it. With this PR nightmare on their hands, you would think that Sony would do everything in its power to securely lock away any existing playable code of the game and keep it away from the media. But that seems farthest from the truth, and the fact that I was allowed to play the game at length during my recent visit to the Milestone office, probably means that the reason for the delay is less sensational than is being reported.

But let’s for a moment assume that playing WipEout HD at 1080p and 60 frames per second with multi-flourescent-coloured objects blazing by at astonishing speeds does pose a health risk to those suffering from epilepsy (described in Wikipedia as a chronic neurological disorder that is characterised by recurrent unprovoked seizures due to abnormal, excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain). If I was someone suffering from epilepsy, I would gladly risk an epileptic attack, just so I could feel the rush of playing WipEout HD; it’s that good!

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With gaming now become a viable career option in India, top names in the video game industry are looking at India as a future hub for quality video game development. And Electronic Arts has taken the lead, setting up a world class development studio in India, providing an opportunity for Indians to work with the best in the business.

Electronic Arts, or EA, is the world’s largest publisher of interactive entertainment. It is the company behind best-selling game franchises such as The Sims, FIFA and Need For Speed, which have now become household names. EA is also the first international publisher to set up base in India, first with its publishing business, and now with its new development studio in Hyderabad.

Currently employing 200 people, EA Hyderabad aims to grow its workforce two-fold in the near future, providing opportunities to not only engineers and animators, but professionals from various industries. The Hyderabad studio’s operations vary from end-to-end game development for mobile devices, art and assets creation for PC and console platforms for EA’s worldwide studios, online services for EA’s best-selling The Sims games, and automation and manual game testing for PC and console platforms. This diversity in operations calls for employees with varying levels of expertise and experience.

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What do Gears of War and Halo 3 have in common besides being two of the biggest titles in the Xbox 360’s three-year history? Here’s what - Ranbir Kapoor, a Bollywood star on the rise, has worked as a game developer on both blockbuster titles, or at least that’s what his latest release will have us believe.

As part of a tie up between Microsoft and Yashraj Films, Gears of War and Halo 3 will appear prominently in the film Bachna Ae Haseeno, and Kapoor, who plays an Xbox 360 developer-slash-womaniser in the film, will be seen developing these two games.

To be fair to the makers of the film, the majority of people who will watch this film will have no idea what Gears of War and Halo 3 are, so to them this would seem like a perfectly good idea. But to the rest of us, there is so much wrong about this that I’m not even going to get into it. Suffice to say that Bollywood has a glowing track-record of blending reality with fantasy and mind-boggling ridiculousness, so this shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone. And after hearing about the appearance of the Xbox 360 in a film based in 2050 (Love Story 2050), I think we’ll happily settle for this scenario.

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India is expected to see huge growth in the video game industry in the coming years, not only in terms of game sales, but also with regards to video game development. While this has been acknowledged by several industry leaders, EA has been the first to make its move, first establishing its publishing business in India two-and-a-half years ago, and now with its new state-of-the-art development studio in Hyderabad.

EA opened the doors to its new studio to the media recently, and I was one of the handful of journalists invited by EA to see for ourselves what the team in Hyderabad was up to. Currently employing a little over 200 people, this studio contributes to various aspects of EA’s business, with its main focus being end-to-end development of games for mobile platforms.

While the mobile division at Hyderabad works closely with its counterparts in EA studios across the world, it is equipped to handle all development activities, right from development, to certification and distribution. Unlike game development on other platforms, for mobile platforms, the work doesn’t end at simply making the game work. Each mobile game that is developed at Hyderabad is customised to work with the multitude of different mobile devices varying in screen size, operating systems, controls, etc. The Hyderabad team is also responsible for localisation, ensuring that their game is tweaked for the various regions and the different service providers operating there.

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Happy Independence Day and welcome to the new and improved GamingIndians.com. Yes, this is the GI 3.0 we’ve been teasing all this while. Some of you already knew about it, and some of you guessed it – this is the GamingIndians blog.

When we started off in 2006, we always knew that this was coming somewhere down the line; it was only a matter of when. And now feels just about right. Exactly a year ago, on Independence Day, we moved GamingIndians to our new servers and started from scratch. So August 15 seems like the right date to take the next step.

Forum members who have been around a while will know that we frequently cover gaming events and conduct interviews, previews, reviews and contests. We felt that a platform like this would be a better way to put this content across to the reader, who may miss it in the hundreds of threads that exist in the forums. The forums, however, will still remain the core of GI. After all, fanboy wars on a blog just won’t cut it.

We would also like to use the blog for gaming news; particularly news that affects us in India. We’re constantly in touch with industry sources to keep you up to date with what’s happening with gaming in India. If you’re a game developer, distributor, or just someone who would like to bring some news to our attention, kindly contact us.

But GamingIndians has always been about the community and we would love for the community to get involved with the blog as well. There are some brilliant writers among us, and we would love for our members to write for the blog as well. It could be anything from game demo impressions to opinion pieces. We will also look to our members to write reviews for us from time to time. We’re already off to a great start there, as you can see from keyofx’s review of Alone In The Dark.

Taking community integration a step further, forum members will now be able to use their forum IDs to post their comments on the blog. Also, each time a blog article is posted, a corresponding forum thread will be automatically created for the same, and all replies posted will show up both on the blog as well as the forums. Of course, this integration may not work flawlessly at first, but we will tweak it in the coming days to get it to work the way it should.

So bookmark us and watch this space for the latest in gaming in India.