CollectorMania Again

Perhaps I'm getting too old for this. Perhaps not. At least the fact that we british are messing around with our clocks again this weekend meant that the half five start didn't feel quite so painful, what with the extra hour in bed and all.

Anyhoo, it was off down the motorway to get autographs and stuff. Lots of things to do, and stuff to wish we could afford.

 
Jewel Staite does the business

..or we could have a new kitchen...

The Milton Keynes tree

Wii Table Tennis

Some time back I got a copy of table tennis for the xbox 360. When the Wii came out I remember thinking how great the game would be on that platform. So I was well pleased when I found a copy up town. I checked the reviews and they seemed ok so I bought it today expecting great things.

And it has been downhill ever since. I just can't get the hang of the controller and the game just isn't fun for me. I'm going to have a few more goes before it gets traded in, but if you are thinking about this title I'd advise you to try before you buy. Like I wish I had.

Get Paint .NET

I've been messing around with images and for some time I've been using a free program called "The Gimp" which can do useful things like layers and transparency. It can probably do lots of other tasks too, but it is such a pain to figure out how it works that I will never know.

For some time I've been looking for a decent free graphics editor which doesn't make me tear my hair out, and luckily I seem to have found one. Paint .NET started life as student project and now is a very well specified graphics editor which is great to use. It has a bunch of artistic effects as well as those features that I need to create images for the XNA games.

If you are after a good program to work with images, take a look here.

Resolving the Eternal Struggle

Some questions may never be asked. Others might be asked, but probably shouldn't be. But that doesn't stop us asking anyway. Questions like:

Which is mightier, the Bread or the Carrot?

In an attempt to answer this, XNA, in association with VerySillyGames.com, will soon give you the chance to take to the table cloth of destiny and find your own answer by scoring cheese goals of fate between the tomatoes of goalpostness.

Maybe the carrot isn't so hot after all.....

This is a simple mod to one of the games in the XNA book that I'm working on at the moment. It took me one "Division Bell" by Pink Floyd to complete. I started writing the code at "Cluster One" and I'm just listening to the end of "High Hopes" at the moment. It's a great album by the way.

The full version will be coming to VerySillyGames.com soon, with full on eight player action using four controllers.

Delayed Answer

Our new answering machine is a bit tempremental. It seems that sometimes it takes a while to tell us about new messages, and it doesn't always give us all of them. This could of course be us not using it properly (as if) rather then a fault. Either way, it got me to thinking.

Perhaps one day there will be a market for unreliable devices. Perhaps people will pay extra for a slightly duff model so that they can say "Oh, sorry, the machine must have lost that one, sorry I didn't get back to you".

With the guaranteed delivery of SMS and universal voicemail, maybe we will eventually welcome a little bit of uncertainty in our lives. Perhaps our machine isn't broken, just ahead of its time.