A good session to attend to help your imagine cup 2009 Games entry…
This message from Liam at Microsoft:

Register for January 14 Live Session with Microsoft Experts

Join us for an interactive Live Session on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 (Thursday, January 15 in some regions)! In this hour-long, interactive session, Sean Jenkin will discuss how to develop a Windows or Xbox 360 based game using XNA Game Studio, even if you have never programmed a game before. During this session, you will learn about XNA Game Studio and how to get going on an Imagine Cup-inspired game in less than 30 minutes. We’ll dive into code and talk about ideas for getting started on your game!

Sean Jenkin is currently a development lead at Microsoft and part of the XNA Community Team. For the past year, he has been developing the Xbox Live Community Games system and the XNA Creators Club web site at http://creators.xna.com. Prior to the XNA team, he worked at Microsoft Game Studios helping to develop, test and publish games such as Gears of War, Project Gotham Racing, Viva Piñata, Kameo and a number of other Xbox and Windows titles.

Each Live Session is held twice, with the same material presented both times. Select the time below that is most convenient for you, and follow the directions to register with your Windows Live ID. Once you have registered, you will receive an email with information on how to download the free software you’ll need to access Live Sessions. We recommend you download this software several hours in advance to avoid technical difficulties during the session.

Live Session times:

January 14, 8pm PST Live Session (What time is this in my region?)

I’m posting James’ suggestions from our internal games club site to get the ball rolling:

Another year has almost passed and there’s been a shed load of great games, especially in the last few months. So whats everyones’ game or games of the year?

For me it has to be Fallout 3. I’ve already sunk about 20 hours into it (which may not seem like much but given a PhD student doesn’t have that much time to play games, is actually a lot of time) and absolutely loving it in the same way I loved and got immersed in Oblivion. Even though some people have complained about bugs and glitches, I’ve had a relatively flawless and enjoyable experience with it. The world is also rather stunning graphically, despite it having the 16 million shades of grey and brown palette (like Gears), but then again a post-apocalyptic world wouldn’t exactly be a festival of rainbow colouring.

Runner up for me would be Rock Band, having enjoyed a ton of fun alcohol-fuelled nights of it during the summer, and no doubt will be playing more it and Rock Band 2 over Christmas/new year. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to try Mirrors Edge / Fable 2 / CoD5 yet so can’t comment on these – they’re all on the Christmas to-do list though!

Nice footage of the first ever video game here

For 10 points now can anyone name the first ever computer game (older than the 1st videogame)?

You can now rush over to the XNA Creators club website and install XNA 3.0 – lots of nice added features and now offering us an opportunity to make money with our games. Be sure to uninstall the XNA 3.0 Beta first. Nigel is installing XNA 3.0 in our labs.

Major Nelson has posted a video of an interview with XNA Community Manager Kathleen Sanders, which gives more information about how XNA’s Community Games will work with the new Xbox 360 Dashboard (known as the New Xbox Experience, or NXE for short).

Xbox LIVE Community Games

The main exciting points raised in this video are that the games will appear on a seperate channel on the new Xbox Experience, and also that games will be available just 48 hours after submission (this time is used for peer review).  As far as I’m aware an XNA Creator’s Club subscription is not needed to play the games, only for deployment, submission and peer review of games.

The new Xbox Experience launches November 19th, as well as the final XNA 3.0 platform becoming available October 30th.

At our Monday’s games development group this week James Burke will be spending 10 or 15 minutes showing us how to get started with programming the wiimote for Xbox 360 games. James has programmed a few different games with XNA, 2d, 3d, webcam and wiimote so he has a fair bit of experience in making games.

There will also be an opportunity for you to be able to help out with his research on the night – more will be revealed in D075 at 5pm. New (enthusiastic game developer) members always welcome.

The Coleraine games club starts again today (Monday 29th Sept) and we will meet at 5pm in D075.

This first meeting is for new students to meet existing students who are already making games, find out what we were up to last year, and what we plan for this year. We hope to meet every two weeks and each week we will have a short game development talk, spend some time programming games, and end each session playing some games (if we are not too busy).

Anyone interested in learning about making computer games is welcome.

Darryl

Good luck to Richard Paul and his backroom team on his game entry into Microsoft’s Dream Build Play competition. It looks outstanding and it must have chance at one of the prizes.

What else to say, except go get it, and install on top of XNA 2.0. Don’t forget to install Visual Studio 2008 Express or the full version (which is free to our students).

I’m glad that they included an upgrade function from 2.0 to 3.0 beta. Its a shame that the new media functionality doesn’t seem to cover playing video on PC/XBox and I would love access to the 360 camera (are there ever going to be any games made for this?).

Rumours that this will be out this week. Dangerous Dave knows exactly when but he can’t and won’t say!!

I’ll be interested in looking into the media playing functionality and the new sound effect class will make life a bit easier for learners.