Are you game for a Game?

It's time to celebrate for all the hardcore gamers. X-Box Live is finally coming to India! X-Box Live is an online network on the X-Box 360 video game and entertainment system. It will enable you to play with friends online, chat with them directly from your television, download trailers, demos, videos, and much more.

The X-Box Live network connects you with more than seven million members across 25 countries. Live members spend more than 2.9 billion hours playing games on X-Box Live, which is equal to 121 million days. According to Juan Posada, Senior Global Marketing Manager, X-Box Live, "X-Box Live makes gaming a very personal affair. The controls are in the sole hands of the user, if you do not approve of any particular gaming partner you can discard him from your list of friends." All you need to do is sign in and then your friend list opens up (if you have a hotmail account). You can ask your friend to play a game and once he approves your request you are in for a one on one fight.

So all you need is a X-Box 360 gaming console and a broadband connection to experience this amazing gaming experience. But this will only happen once it is launched in India. When asked Mohit Anand, Country Manager, Entertainment and Devices Division, Microsoft India said, "Very soon!" How soon is "very soon"? We will all have to wait and watch.

A man in southern China appears to have died of exhaustion after a three-day Internet gaming binge, state media said. The 30-year-old man fainted at a cybercafe in the city of Guangzhou on Saturday afternoon after he'd been playing games online for three days, the Beijing News reported.

Paramedics tried to revive him but failed and he was declared dead at the cafe, it said. The paper said that he may have died from exhaustion brought on by too many hours on the Internet. The report didn't say what the man, whose name was not given, was playing. The report said that about 100 other Web surfers "left the cafe in fear after witnessing the man's death."

China has 140 million Internet users, second only to the United States. It is one of the world's biggest markets for online games, with tens of millions of players, many of whom hunker down for hours in front of PCs in public Internet cafes. Several cities have clinics to treat what psychiatrists have dubbed "Internet addiction" in users, many of them children and teenagers, who play online games or surf the Web for days at a time.