Frederick County “Future Link”, and memories of the past

I gave three half-hour hands on presentations at the Frederick County, Maryland Future Link conference for high-school sophomores Thursday. It was pretty fun, and the students (about 25-30 in each group) were great!

Preparing for this, I remembered that back when I was in junior-high and high school, I’d learned a ton about programming by typing in the game programs in SoftSide magazine, a little bit at a time to see what they did and debug them. Later I branched out to writing my own (very simple) games, which I gave away to my friends. One was a snake game, using the IBM PC’s line characters for the snake body. I wrote it as a high-school student in Maryland, then went off to college in Illinois. One day, I came back from classes to find my roommate from Washington state playing it! I don’t know how it made it coast to coast, but I really hoped to be able to give that sense of possibility to the students Thursday.

We used Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio, in part because it’s free and very accessible, in part because it has a rich set of examples, and in part because their new community game distribution system gives a way for individually created games to get out there. Plus, I was able to bring one of our XBox 360s to show what we did running on a game system. We started with the catapult mini-game example. With only half an hour, we could only do relatively simple things, but I wanted to show how easy it is to get started. First I dropped in an image of my head to replace the pumpkin that the catapult normally flings, then we walked through changing the bounce logic to do random bounces instead of the simple predictable bounces it normally does. Some of the students went off in their own directions, creating other simple modifications beyond the ones I’d suggested. Not bad in half an hour!

Posted in CS, Events, Game consols, General, History, xbox | 1 Comment »

Halo 3 release party, 7-12pm Fri 9/28 UMBC Gameroom

There will be a Halo 3 release party Friday night September 28th from 7:00 pm to Midnight in the UMBC Gameroom. The event is sponsored by the UMBC Commons Gameroom, Microsoft, and the UMBC Game Development Club. The release party will feature a multiplayer tournament (4 vs. 4) in which pairs of four-person teams compete in a Halo 3 match and winners will receive Gameroom Free Play Passes. Up to five Xbox 360s will also be available for individual Halo 3 play. Microsoft will provide free pizza and Xbox 360 games to give away. Pool will be free all night.

Halo 3, a first-person shooter game developed by Bungie Studios for the Xbox 360, will be released on 25 September. It follows and builds on the two previous successful Halo games.

Update 9/24: Matt Hurst notes that “Halo 3 is being touted as not just the biggest launch for a video game, but also the biggest launch of anything.” and backs it up with a graph of mentions on the blogosphere in a “comparison of the Halo brand with mentions of Resident Evil (the top release from last week) and The Bourne Ultimatum (one of the largest films of the summer).”

Posted in Contests, Events, GDC, xbox | No Comments »

Xbox Red Ring of Death to cost Microsoft $1.15B

The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft will spend up to $1.15 billion to repair failing Xbox 360 game machine consoles.

“The company declined to explain the nature of the failure, but said that it was not caused by a single problem in the console, which it said contained 1,700 components and 500 million transistors. The company also said there were no health or safety concerns involved. The problem began to appear over the last three to four months, Mr. Bach said, after “significant usage” of the consoles. He said the company has taken steps to correct the problem in new devices. Microsoft said it would extend the warranty of the game console to three years to customers worldwide. Previously, products sold in the United States were covered by a one-year warranty, while Xbox 360 units sold in Europe had a two-year warranty.”

Microsoft has sold over 11 million Xbox systems. Some estimate that between one third and one half of these suffer the flaw that results in the red ring of death symptom.

Posted in xbox | 3 Comments »