European gamers who can't wait nine days or just want to get a better price on the planet killing title of the month, now have choices, as imported copies should work just fine.
The very kind people at
Xboxic have pointed out a blog entry at
Video Games Plus where a caring blogger has gone to the trouble of testing several new games to confirm that they are free from the shackles of regional encoding. Gears of War, Call of Duty 3 and Tony Hawk's Project 8 all made the cut.
This isn't just for impatient types. European gamers pay some of the highest prices on earth for Xbox 360 games - as some of you have angrily pointed out - and retailers like
Play-Asia.com have copies available at more reasonable rates. As an example, the GoW Limited edition will cost you only 37 GBP as an import, as opposed to 45GBP for a local copy.
That price on Gears is no discount in the US, but we Yankee gamers should take note that we haven't entirely been left out of the bonanza. A region free Call of Duty 3 for NTSC systems is also available at
Play-Asia for only $48 shipped.
The History Channel Civil War seems to be held back by the cruel and controlling encoding scheme. It is a budget title, but a deeper discount would have been nice. Them's the breaks. See if Gears or CoD3 will make you happy enough.
