Game4U, the retail arm of Milestone Interactive, opened its flagship store in suburban Mumbai on Wednesday, having already established itself in the online space last year with Game4U.com. The new store is located at Mega Mall in Oshiwara, Mumbai, and offers an expansive collection of games and hardware across console, handheld, and PC platforms.

Visitors can also try out the latest games at the store, with PS3, PS2, Xbox 360, PC, and PSPgo units set up with full games and demos. There’s even a sweet Rock Band set up. The store is extremely well organised, unlike anything we’ve seen in India before. There’s a preorder section, a Top charts section, where you can find the best selling games for each platform, and there’s even a Game4Girls section.

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GameShastra, the Hyderabad-based studio behind Desi Adda, today announced that they’ve further expanded their relationship with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, and are set to release the first Indian game for the PlayStation 3, titled Eklavya. They’ve also announced that Desi Adda will soon be available for purchase in digital form over the PlayStation Network.

The company also revealed that to meet the requirements of their ramp-up in high-end game development, they have expanded their game development facility to house a team over over 1,000 game designers, artists, animators, developers and QA specialists, making it one of the largest game studios in south Asia.

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In 1497, the priest and leader of Florence, Girolamo Savonarola carried out the Bonfire of the Vanities. In an act of open hostility towards the Renaissance, Father Savonarola and his acolytes collected objects such as books, art, cosmetics or anything that fell under the category of ‘immoral excesses’ and burned them in bonfires across the city. Had it not been for Ezio Auditore, the golden age of Italian art, culture and architecture would have been lost.

Mixing historical events and fiction with incredible finesse, the downloadable episode that serves as the thirteenth memory block of Assassin’s Creed 2 picks up immediately after the Battle of Forli. Ezio returns to Florence to retrieve the Apple of Eden from Father Savonarola. But the good priest is in control of the city and has his lieutenants (by choice or coerced) running the city. Needless to say, these are dark times for Florence, and if the premise wasn’t bleak enough to get through to the player, the city has a perpetual cloud cover giving it a washed out look to underscore the point.

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The IVG 30-second Bayonetta compatibility test:

1. Did you enjoy Devil May Cry 1 and 3?
2. Do you like anime/manga?epi
3. Can you NOT blink for a long, long time?

It is absolutely essential that you nod your head vigorously to all three of those questions before you even think of exchanging your hard earned money for this game. Still with me? Alright then.

Hold Me

Bayonetta is the logical culmination of the stylized-action genre that a nice man named Hideki Kamiya revolutionised with the first Devil May Cry nearly a decade ago. This was however, before Capcom realised that betting their cash on games that just don’t sell despite all the goodwill and critical acclaim was a bad idea. Post epiphany, and after Clover was shown the pointy end of the stick as just reward for creating gems like Okami, God Hand and Viewtiful Joe, Kamiya left Capcom and created Platinum Games with fellow brainiacs Atsushi Inaba, Shinji Mikami and the rest of the Clover team.

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Codemasters’ Guildford facility has been hard at work on a new action first-person shooter for a while now. The studio is comprised of many former EA Criterion, Sony, and Blackrock employees, and the team behind the new shooter is being headed by Stuart Black, previously co-creator and designer of Black. The game will employ Codemasters’ proprietary EGO engine, which has powered games like Race Driver: Grid, DiRT & DiRT 2, and Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising in the past.

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Dante’s Inferno is a God of War clone. There! So now that that’s out of the way, and half the people have skipped to the last paragraph and score, let me talk to those of you who haven’t cast it aside as a bad game just because of it. Anyone who’s played Darksiders knows that a game based on borrowed ideas can still be fantastic. So if Darksiders can be great, then Dante’s Inferno can be great too.

But it isn’t. On the surface, there’s not much technically wrong with Dante’s Inferno, but the things you earlier overlooked as slight niggles, slowly gnaw at you the longer you play, which eventually sucks the enjoyment out of it. To be honest, I know nothing about the Divine Comedy, so there’s no way for me to tell how faithful to the original the game is. But in the game, you play as Dante, who must journey through the nine circles of hell to rescue his wife Beatrice, who is being held captive by Lucifer.

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In EA’s recent financial report, there’s mention of a shooter from Epic Games scheduled for release between January and March 2011. After a little digging around, it’s almost certain that this game is Bullet Storm, developed by People Can Fly, which is a sub division of Epic Games. The game will be a collaboration between People Can Fly and Epic, and will be published by EA Partners for consoles and PC early next year.

People Can Fly is the Poland-based studio that brought us Painkiller as well the PC port of Gears of War. Further evidence comes from the developer’s website which states, ‘A brand new IP is in development as a collaboration between People Can Fly and Epic Games. The title is being published by EA Partners’, although the title ‘Bullet Storm’ isn’t mentioned. It’s unknown whether this will be third-person or first-person shooter, but with release only a year away, we should see an announcement very soon.

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Those who listened in to our latest IVG Podcast would have known about a little contest we held to celebrate the release of Mass Effect 2. We asked listeners to name all the EA games that Nash and I mentioned throughout the podcast. We’ve picked six winners, one of whom will receive a copy of Mass Effect 2 for PC and an N7 T-shirt, while the remaining five winners will receive N7 T-shirts.

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The following review does not contain any plot spoilers

By now it would be safe to assume that when it comes to RPGs, Bioware can’t do anything wrong. Last year, the RPG juggernaut delivered a near flawless old-school role-playing experience with Dragon Age: Origins. And now a couple of months later, they’re back with one of the most anticipated titles of the year – Mass Effect 2, a game that sits pretty much on the opposite end of the RPG spectrum when compared to Dragon Age: Origins. Bioware certainly has broken a lot of rules and created some new ones with Mass Effect 2. RPG purists may have some trouble adjusting to its bold new direction, but whichever way you look at it, the end result is probably one of the finest and most memorable gaming experiences you’ll have in a long time. If you’ve played the first game in the series and loved it, there really is no reason for you to read the rest of the review; just go buy the game and start playing it already. The more skeptical ones can read on.

Mass Effect 2 is a direct sequel to 2007′s Mass Effect and the second chapter of a planned trilogy. Despite featuring a brilliantly realised sci-fi universe, excellent writing and an epic story, the first game was marred by a few technical flaws, largely uninteresting combat, a cumbersome inventory system and repetitive side missions. Mass Effect 2, however, addresses all of those flaws while making some major changes to the standard RPG template. A lot of fans (including myself) had expressed concerns over the game inching closer to a shooter than an RPG after some of the early previews. Yes, the combat system has been revamped to resemble a shooter, “quests” have become “missions”, complete with a summary screen at the end and many of the RPG elements are redone and some are stripped off entirely. However, the game is still an RPG at heart and everything you loved about the first game is here, better than ever and everything you hated is nowhere to be found.

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Boring!

There really isn’t a better (or nicer) way to sum up Dark Void. It’s a rare example in recent memory of a game which turned into a chore to finish. And when that happens, it pretty much defeats the whole idea behind gaming. You can very well imagine how boring a review for a boring game would be. What would be more interesting, however, is to try and re-construct the meeting between the developer and the publisher, where Dark Void got the green signal for full steam ahead. Before we begin though, it is important to clarify that while Dark Void is boring, as a game, it is technically adequate and playable. With that said, lets get cracking, shall we?

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