More Wii Magic

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The more I play with the Nintendo Wii the more I like it. In fact, just watching other people play with it is fun enough. We went to see more folks today, and I unpacked the Wii and turned it loose. There were conversations like:

"How do I use this then?"
"Just hit the ball"
"So, which buttons do I press?"
"You don't, just hit the ball with it"

And so they did. Watching four people play tennis together is very amusing, and some of the rallys went on for a fair time. I reckon that we will soon outgrow the simple games that come with the device. I just hope that they produce some "proper" sports games to go with it.

Live to Shop

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We went up town this morning shopping. So did everyone else. We didn't have a huge amount to buy, which was just as well, it is just that I'm addicted to the almond croissants that they serve in Costa Coffee and number one wife likes the tiramisu coffee (we are becoming terribly cultured).

Anyhoo, it was hell. We went to Marks and Spencer's to get some food and joined "The Longest and Slowest Moving Queue in the World"(tm). At one point I said out loud "This isn't just queuing, this is Marks and Spencer queuing" in what I thought was a clever parody of the current advertisement campaign they are running in the UK. I don't think this went down too well. 

Eventually we made it back home via a few present drop-offs and I'm just about to begin the wrapping up process. And yes, I have bought some sticky tape. But somebody has made off with my scissors.....

Previously on Veronica Mars

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I've started watching season 2 of Veronica Mars. If you haven't seen it, oooh you are in for a treat. In the UK they show it on one of the minor satellite channels which is a crying shame. It has all the snappy dialogue of Buffy alongside neat whodunit stories and well constructed story arcs.  Strongly recommended. Number one daughter has been watching Gilmore Girls, which looks pretty darned good too.

Christmas Do

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Getting into the spirit of the day....

Today we had our staff christmas lunch. For a change we had the meal at a nearby golf club. Very posh. The car park was full of expensive cars and a good time was had by all.

Then in the evening we repaired to the Hive Virtual Environment suite and found out what you get if you plug a Wii into a huge video projector and play tennis and bowling. The answer? Big fun.

Easy Lies

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There should be a special place in hell reserved for people who tell you lies on customer support just to get rid of you. I've just got a new portable media player, the Archos 504 (long story, but it is very nice). One of the reasons I bought it was because I want to load it up with music from my Napster account. It has the "Plays for sure logo" on it and everything so there should be no problem.

Of course it doesn't work. As soon it is connected it to the Napster program the device resets itself. I've emailed Archos customer support ("response in two business days"). At least they haven't told me any lies. In fact, after nearly a week, they've told me nothing.

So today I ring Napster support. Expensive, infuriating and ultimately pointless. I tell them my Napster doesn't work. They suggest a few things and press some buttons to no avail. The supervisor is fetched. He tells me that Napster doesn't work with Archos. I tell him I have another device made by Archos which works fine. He tells me it might not work now. It still does. After a while it occurs to me that I'm probably being told this information because it has the best chance of getting me off the line. In the end it does, because I ring off in disgust.

Then, after some internet digging I try Media Player 11 rather than the Napster program. It works fine.

XNA Launch Event

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We got up nice and early and headed for the university. Unfortunately, thanks to traffic, we were a bit later arriving on campus than I wanted, but still in time to do a bunch of interviews for the press.

The morning talks were all about how the XNA technology works and how it fits into to the games industry. The answers, by the way, are very well and very well. It is really easy to use and, whilst not yet applicable to "top of the range" games is going to find increasing favour in the games industry as they come to terms with just how much easier it makes things.

Then it was lunch, another interview, and then time for my bit. The talk seemed to go OK, the audience were polite enough to laugh at most (but not all of) my jokes. You can find the presentation, complete with clip art, here.

Then Peter Molyneux gave his session. Which was excellent. The most important thing that came out of his talk was the emphasis that he places on communication skills. You should be good at your part of the game production process. You should be brave enough to take your ideas and champion them passionately. But you also need people skills. If you can't persuade, argue, admit when you are wrong and keep as many people happy as possible during the rollercoaster ride that is game development then you are going to have a hard time. That was very good to hear. At Hull we push those aspects of professional development very hard indeed, and it was good to hear one of the best game creators in the business echo them for me.

We even made the BBC News.

And then we got in the magic bus for the trip home.

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One of these students has won an XBOX 360 at the XNA launch event. Can you use your powers of observation to discover which one?

Mini-buses and temporal anomalies

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Today is the day we all pile into the mini-bus that I've arranged and then rumble down the motorway to the Microsoft XNA Launch event at Warwick. I'm going to give a talk, the students are going to learn things and get free stuff.

Last night I discovered that my powers of organisation had temporarily failed me, and that I booked the bus for the wrong day, but fortunately the nice man at the hire company took that in his stride and so that 17:00 we hurtled out of the university into the darkness.

The nice lady in my Gizmondo directed us straight to our luxurious Travelodge for the night. The journey was mostly painless, although the traffic was quite busy on the motorway. I have a new respect for Ford Transit vans now, this one had a seriously powerful engine and was quite happy to reach 80, even with 14 souls on board. Didn't try a handbrake turn though, not sure that everyone would have appreciated that.

Pitch me a Snake

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I've spent a very happy day in the labs marking student work. Normally I hate marking. Exam scripts send me into a cold sweat. But this was much more fun. Rather than dead trees I was looking at live code. Each of our students in the first year was given 15 minutes to pitch their Snake game. And there have been some super ones. We are going to open up the "wherewouldyouthink hall of fame" and put some of these programs up there for download. Great stuff.

Next semester we are going to take the snake game and move it onto an XBOX. And I reckon we will be the first people in the world to do this in an undergraduate course at first year level.

Busy Sabbath

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I know you aren't really supposed to work on Sunday, but I'm afraid I must add this to my, already long, list of sins (which I am most definitely not going to blog about).

I'm writing the material for the XNA Launch talk I'm doing on Wednesday next week. For some insane reason I've decided that, because I'm speaking after lunch, I need to make sure that nobody falls asleep during the talk.

The answer, I've decided, is clipart. If I put a piece of witty and amusing clip art on every slide people will be so agog that they will forget to drift off to sleep. Problem is, I now have to find around thirty pieces of witty and amusing clipart. So there goes Sunday...

I've seen a PlayStation 3!

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I have! There's one in a shop in the Prospect Centre in the middle of Hull. Very big and very shiny. It is not for sale (just as well) but it is definitely a PS/3. They were even letting people have a go on it. I watched someone playing a driving game, probably Ridge Racer. The car was shiny, the road and the landscape were detailed and things moved along very smoothy.

The kid at the controls had obviously played driving games before. He drove round the twisty highway with a miniumum of fuss and the occasional powerslide. It was hard to tell whether he was impressed or not.

And there's the rub. Wind back the clock 24 hours to the kids having a go on the Wii. They were waving, clapping and cheering. At the moment it seems to me that the PS/3 gives you a very high quality "same again" whereas the Wii gives you something totally different.

Even allowing for the fact that perhaps folks behave differently in shops, I reckon that this underlines the validity of the Nintendo approach. Perhaps over time the PS/3 will catch up and truly new forms of game will emerge as developers get the hang of its enormous power. But until then, I'm going to be in front of my Wii, waving the controller around like a mad thing.... 

I took the camera up town too:

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Shiny building

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This was in the art gallery. It is made entirely of seeds and flowers and should last around a week. Very clever.