DigitalLife Summary

There really isn't much new to report on the DigitalLife expo.

MC Frontalot was awesome as usual, his 2 sets were spectacular and drew a sizable crowd considering how sparse the floor was populated in general.

Here's a clip of the front performing the pr0n song recorded by a fellow fan:



And here's a clip I got of the front busting crazy dance moves on my cellaphone during the breakdown in Hassle The Dorkening:



I got some views of Guitar Hero 3 rocking, but there was far too large a crowd and far too little patience in me to wait. It looks and plays pretty much like Guitar Hero 2.

The counter strike tournament going on was interesting but mildly so. I could've sat and watched for hours, but I could do the same watching my bro play super mario bros.

There was some Halo 3 action kicking. I watched a little bit of that, but the game play is still very slow. I think coming from the fast paced world of PC FPS's, it will unfortunately always be so. I did pick up Halo 3, not at the convention... I didn't see anybody selling it there. It's fun, but not crazy good.

There was a decent sized free play area with some PS3's and 360's setup. I played some racing game on the PS3, not sure what it was called. It was surprisingly mediocre. The graphics weren't that fantastic, and the game play was standard.

The US Army was there showing off a new game, similar to America's Army, but for the 360, they also had a large simulator game, but while I was there, the line was far too long.

I think that covers all the interesting parts of DigialLife, I'll update this post it anything new shows up.

All my DigitalLife videos can be found here: On YouTube. While you're there, check out the young kid busting out some crazy DDR moves.

DigitalLife pre-summary

So much to write about from yesterday, but today is beer fest day and I'm too tired right now to cleanup all the videos and images I got.

Expect more later!

DigitalLife part 2

Word from on high has it that MC Frontalot will be performing at the DigitalLife expo on the very same day I am attending.

I urge anybody who has/hasn't seen/heard about the good MC to attend and witness glory. He's doing two short sets, one at 2PM and one at 5:30PM.

I've spread the word to some friends in the area about the expo, but it doesn't look like anybody else I know will be attending.

I will do my best to take some good pictures of what's going on.

I'll try to put up some YouTube footage from my celephone as well.

DigitalLife

I was lucky enough to manage getting a free 4 day pass to the DigitalLife Event at the Javits Center in NYC through 1up.com. Now I need to decide which day(s) to go on.

I think I'll probably take a half day on Friday and head over after lunch.

There are a lot of events going on there, but I have to say I'm most interested in the gaming side of things.

There is the Pro-Am Gaming tournament with a $100,000 prize.

There should be tons of yet-unreleased games to demo. I hear that Guitar Hero 3 will be on display. I'm hoping to take a shot at the multi-player action going on there.

All in all it should be a good time.

XNA

Last night I went through the process of installing all the software I needed to start deving on XBox 360. It took longer than I felt it should have to get all the download links for each part.

First I grabbed the XNA specific stuff and tried to install that. It wouldn't work with my copy of Visual Studio 2005 and requires Visual Studio C# Express.

After all that fun, I got all the specifics installed and fired up the IDE for the first time. Visual Studio C# Express has an annoying green tint to it.

So now that all the software is installed on my comp, I need a starting project.

I was thinking of pinball-ish type game. Should be simple enough.

We will see how my motivation turns out.

I picked up Drawn To Life for the DS for nak. Watching her play gave me a nifty game idea, that I may try to flesh out into an project.

What?!

Who needs this kind of help? BestBuy is a silly store.

Game Development

Some of my peoples know that I consider myself, very lightly now a days, a programmer.

It's always been a goal of mine to write some interesting and useful programs, but more specifically, I'd like to make some games.

I put out a couple small demo's to the Dark Basic community back in those days, but nothing too serious.

Currently though, there are some potential opportunities on the Horizon for me.

WiiWare was announced by Nintendo back in July, 2007 as a low budget, indie-developer solution for creating games on the Wii. I was ecstatic about this! I think of all the current consoles the Wii is my favorite. I've already had a few vague concepts floating around in my mind on what I could develop for the Wii using the unique control system.

On the Microsoft side, there's XNA. A set of tools and whatnot for developing games for the XBox360. I'm already familiar with Visual Studio and slightly so with DirectX so I've got a head start in that department, but I don't really have any motivation to dev anything for the 360. The Wii is clearly my preference.

Unfortunately, Nintendo is sparse on the info relating to WiiWare. Aside from the official announcement that it's coming, they haven't dropped any new info... cost, time frame, API's, etc.

The other problem is that I'm really a one man shop. Not terrible mind you, but it can be crippling when I come to a roadblock. I don't have many system programmer friends, they're mostly web guys. The ones that I do know aren't generally interested in doing this kinda work. I have found one, but I haven't really talked to him in ages (it seems anyway :))

Maybe the next step is to sit down and really flesh out a few of my ideas to see if they're truly feasible or if I'm just spinning my wheels on an unlikely goal.