So, my Gold subscription expires on Sunday (21st November). I won’t be renewing it at the moment; not in protest at the recent price hike or anything like that.  Simply because I just don’t see me making any use of the premium “features” of a Gold sub any time soon.

So, what will I be doing for the next few months once I’m a XBL Free subscriber? Deprived of early access to all those great demos we’ve sene these past few months I’m really going to struggle to cope I think 😉
Firstly I’ll be going back to some of the single player games that I never really had enough time to “finish” when I first bought them due to the sheer number of great games that were being released at the time.

  1. Overtime Mode
  2. Infinity Mode

First up will be Dead Rising, which I’ve a rather pathetic 14/50 achievements to date, and more importantly I haven’t really played a full “proper” playthrough yet.  I’ll also return to one of the toughest games I’ve ever played: Devil May Cry 4.  Time to re-re-learn all those combos and go for those S ranking achievements, and have a crack at the tougher difficulty levels.  Other than Rock Band 3 I can’t see me buying any new Xbox 360 games in the next 6 months; there’s nothing I can think of that has me excited.

  1. The Best of the Rest
  2. A Cut Above
  3. Skill Collector – Nero
  4. Skill Collector – Dante

This is good news for my PS3 though, God of War 1,2 & 3 await.  Demons’ Souls has barely seen half a dozen hours of adventuring and Drake’s Fortune hasn’t even left the shrink wrap.  Oh, and some budget title you might have heard of; “Gran Turismo 5” will finally see the light of day.  I think it’d be unfair to say that the balance of power is shifting given that most of the PS3 games I’ll be playing were released over a year ago, beyond Gran Turismo 5 there’s nothing in the PS3 lineup n the next 6 months that interests me either.

I wonder how much the recent release of Move and Kinect, and their companies push to attract the more “simple” gamer to their consoles has to do with this?  Perhaps it’s just co-incidence.

I might even end up getting back into gaming on the PC for the first time in half a decade if the Old Republic can live up to the considerable hype, although I’m over the media for the game now, there’s only so many developer interviews and 3 minute “look what you could be playing” vignettes that I can put up with before I just want to scream “Just let me play the game or shut the fuck up about it already!”.  This might also be in part down to the massive disappointment that was Bioware’s dumbed down action RPG Mass Effect 2.