Been on an Odyssey

Haven't posted in a while as I've been pretty busy over here with non-game related stuff. Some of it interesting and others not so much.

But, I have had time for Etrian Odyssey! I just got this for the Nintendo DS and it is all I hoped it would be. Dungeon Crawling at its finest for me. It's weird, recently I have been hankering for games that are more about gameplay than story or narrative (that is not intrinsically tied in to the gameplay) and I think this is down to the fact that I am having less and less time to sit down and play games, and I don't want anything to make me hanker after it because I want to see what is going to happen after I beat a certain area. Etrian Odyssey is really cool. I have only been playing it for about a week or two now and am on the 6th floor, making progress slowly but surely.

In other news, gaming in Nigeria can be really sucky. I finally bought an X360 (Elite!) and I didn't get any games with it. Weird I know. But, the thought of having Master Chief speaking in German was not really appealing to me (in the long term; short term would have been great). So, I have had my 360 for two weeks and I have not been able to find Halo 3 anywhere in any of the shops in Lagos. Actually, I lie, I have found one person that has it, but they say that they will be selling it to me for fifteen thousand naira (USD126). Not that we don't pay close to this for our games anyways. On average, we pay between twelve thousand five hundred naira to fourteen thousand naira (USD105 - USD118) for a PS3 or Xbox 360 game, but still.

I am in the middle of ordering some games from Play-Asia.com and I am having trouble with my Nigerian VISA card going through. Even though I definitely have the right amount of money on it, it is still refusing to reflect on the card and so my purchase keeps on getting cancelled because they say I do not have enough money on it. Very annoying. At least they accept the card and will deliver to Nigeria. Unlike Xbox LIVE that refuses to acknowledge my postcode in Lagos. We already have difficulty purchasing games in this country and now, so much is going online. I can't play Braid, Pixeljunk Eden, Rez HD, Ikaruga, Bionic Commando or any other game that requires purchasing online and downloading to the console hard drive. At least PC transactions are a little bit more friendly in that respect. The console manufacturers just behave like we don't exist over here in Africa (unless you are South Africa) and make no provisions for people not present in places that are not directly served by one of their distributors.

Okay...woah, that went way off topic. Anyways, I got some games for the 360 from a friend and now have Oblivion, Gears of War and PES 2008 to look forward to...I am wondering whether I really needed any of these games after all. Two of them are fairly narrative heavy and seem to require a fair investment of my time, and the PES...well, let's just say football is not my thing.