Mass Effect 2 Game Review

I must admit that I’ve not actually played the game. But I have watched number one son play quite a bit of it on his laptop. Seeing him play you could have mistaken the action for a movie. The dialogue is so seamless, with the voice acting so pitch perfect for the various options he was choosing that it was only when I saw the screen that I figured out that he was actually making selections, and not just watching a cut scene.

The action looks good too, with a rich (if a bit scary) story beginning to play out. Anyone who doesn’t think that video games can stand alongside other art forms is seriously behind the times. This really is a new medium, and games like this show just what you can do with it.

Excellent.

Links for Software Engineers

I was talking to our .NET Development Postgrad students and we decided that there were a few things that you should be familiar with if you want to become a “proper” Software Engineer. These are the things I think you should do:

Read “Code Complete 2” by Steve McConnell. Perhaps the best book ever on software construction.  Then keep your copy where it is handy, and have a policy of reading a bit now and then, just to keep up to speed. If you can track down a copy of “Rapid Development” you should read this to.

Read I.M. Wright’s “Hard Code” blog. And buy the book if you like.

Read “How to be a Programmer”. Excellent stuff.

This is not everything you should do. There are other good places to look. But it is a start. Oh, and if anyone out there has other ideas about good, pragmatic texts for budding coders, then let me know and I’ll add them.

Tag those T-Shirts

I spent some time this morning working on the logo for the 2010 Where Would You Think T-Shirts. We give these away to guests who attend our Admissions Open Days in the department and they have a slightly different design each year.

The release of the design is of course an event eagerly awaited by the fashion press, and it is rumoured that Chanel, Christian Dior and Yves Saint-Laurent actually hold back releasing their spring collections until they see what we have come up with.

The byword this year is “Tag chic”. You can point your cameraphone at the design and the magic of Microsoft Tag will take you to our admissions community site.

Microsoft Inspiration Tour with Andy Sithers

One of the people in this picture is a Microsoft employee. See if you can spot him. Clue: He has his eyes shut….

..and in case the other side of the room were feeling left out…

Andy Sithers from Microsoft came to see us today. We  all went for a meal in Staff House, had a quick meeting with the Imagine Cup teams to discuss their entries (looking good people) and then he gave a presentation as part of the Inspiration Tour. Great fun.  He dished out some hoodies and T shirts as prizes and then left me with some which I’m going to give the team that comes up with the best looking game idea to enter into the Game Design Challenge for the Imagine Cup.  One of the hoodies that was left is XL, i.e. my size. Better get those ideas in before the end of the month folks, or I’ll have something new to wear…

Angry Rob

I got very angry tonight. Banging the table angry. Not like me at all. Really. I was recording another in the XNA Screencast series (you can find the previous ones here). Normally I do the whole thing in one continuous take. That’s not to say that everything always goes right, it is just that I try and keep going whatever happens.

Anyhoo, this time I made a rather serious blunder, and was forced to stop and re-record a section which I then had to tidy up. Big mistake. The program I was using to prepare the screencast has an interesting foible on my machine. When editing things the mark points are never where you think they are. Whenever I cut out a phrase the program actually removed out another part of the soundtrack so editing just got more and more frustrating as I tried to compensate by cutting the “wrong” parts in the hope I would get what I wanted. I didn’t. In the end number one wife came in to find me thumping my desk with annoyance and told me I was being stupid, which I was.

Eventually I figured out that by cunning use of the undo command I could refine my edits to the point where I actually got what I wanted. And it only took me an extra hour or so. I’ve now resolved not to bash the desk any more. It doesn’t achieve much. And it hurts.