When Saudi Arabia gets into games news here, it’s usually for banning a game (which its citizens can readily obtain by other means), although it does have developers, who recently published an Uncharted clone. This weekend saw the nation’s first gaming exposition, too, although a visit to its main page advises “Attendance for males only.” More »
Does this look familiar? Aside from the wooden animations, of course. This is Unearthed: The Trail of Ibn Battuta by Saudi Arabia-based Semaphore, and even this Uncharted copy won’t be playable on the Xbox 360. More »
In an interview with Saudi television, Microsoft marketing guy Syed Bilal Tariq has given a release date for Microsoft’s motion controller, Project Natal. More »
Our gamer friends in Saudi Arabia can’t buy titles like God of War 2. Not only are they banned for sale within the country, if you order it online you risk having it confiscated, and then you have to pay a fat fine (about $US 125.) No surprise that this kind of crackdown only breeds a black market for the goods in question, and reader Alaa A. shows us how some retailers get around things so he and others can get their Kratos on.
Alaa tells us that at Rashid mall in Khobar, he spied Chains of Olympus, the GOW version for the PSP. Wondering if that meant they also had GOW2 he inquired. Lo and behold, they did. And here’s the part where I want to imagine Alaa wearing a fedora and the clerk in an eyepatch, with a monkey perched on his shoulder, leading him into an anteroom while looking nervously over his shoulder. The guy handed Alaa a shrink-wrapped copy of Winning Eleven. When he opened it, inside was the God of War 2 disc, and the GoW cover neatly slid behind the Winning Eleven artwork.
“I got for around $US 25 and it’s an original copy”, Alaa said. “Makes me feel dirty for some reason though”.
Another pic below.
It is a day of great celebration in the countries of Greece, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and the Czech Republic, as Sony Computer Entertainment Europe launches for new iterations of the PlayStation Store for these poor, underprivileged areas. “When we launched PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3â„¢) in March, we promised that we would continue to improve the service throughout the SCEE territories and offer more stores to new regions as quickly as possible,” said Chris Stanton-Jones, VP of Distributor Markets for SCEE. “The launch of these four new stores highlights our commitment both to improving our offering and the importance of these increasingly dynamic markets.
I would have thought they’d have gotten to this sooner, seeing as Europe is the most important continent, but you can’t complain when four new countries get access to the most awesome rubber duckie game ever created. More »
