Easy Lies

There should be a special place in hell reserved for people who tell you lies on customer support just to get rid of you. I've just got a new portable media player, the Archos 504 (long story, but it is very nice). One of the reasons I bought it was because I want to load it up with music from my Napster account. It has the "Plays for sure logo" on it and everything so there should be no problem.

Of course it doesn't work. As soon it is connected it to the Napster program the device resets itself. I've emailed Archos customer support ("response in two business days"). At least they haven't told me any lies. In fact, after nearly a week, they've told me nothing.

So today I ring Napster support. Expensive, infuriating and ultimately pointless. I tell them my Napster doesn't work. They suggest a few things and press some buttons to no avail. The supervisor is fetched. He tells me that Napster doesn't work with Archos. I tell him I have another device made by Archos which works fine. He tells me it might not work now. It still does. After a while it occurs to me that I'm probably being told this information because it has the best chance of getting me off the line. In the end it does, because I ring off in disgust.

Then, after some internet digging I try Media Player 11 rather than the Napster program. It works fine.

Minibus Lag

I think I have minibus lag. It is like jetlag, but much noiser and rather slower. The journey each way was fair enough, traffic jams not withstanding, but I keep trying to do things and finding that I can't think all the way through to the end.

I''ll start writing something and then ju

XNA Launch Event

We got up nice and early and headed for the university. Unfortunately, thanks to traffic, we were a bit later arriving on campus than I wanted, but still in time to do a bunch of interviews for the press.

The morning talks were all about how the XNA technology works and how it fits into to the games industry. The answers, by the way, are very well and very well. It is really easy to use and, whilst not yet applicable to "top of the range" games is going to find increasing favour in the games industry as they come to terms with just how much easier it makes things.

Then it was lunch, another interview, and then time for my bit. The talk seemed to go OK, the audience were polite enough to laugh at most (but not all of) my jokes. You can find the presentation, complete with clip art, here.

Then Peter Molyneux gave his session. Which was excellent. The most important thing that came out of his talk was the emphasis that he places on communication skills. You should be good at your part of the game production process. You should be brave enough to take your ideas and champion them passionately. But you also need people skills. If you can't persuade, argue, admit when you are wrong and keep as many people happy as possible during the rollercoaster ride that is game development then you are going to have a hard time. That was very good to hear. At Hull we push those aspects of professional development very hard indeed, and it was good to hear one of the best game creators in the business echo them for me.

We even made the BBC News.

And then we got in the magic bus for the trip home.

One of these students has won an XBOX 360 at the XNA launch event. Can you use your powers of observation to discover which one?

Mini-buses and temporal anomalies

Today is the day we all pile into the mini-bus that I've arranged and then rumble down the motorway to the Microsoft XNA Launch event at Warwick. I'm going to give a talk, the students are going to learn things and get free stuff.

Last night I discovered that my powers of organisation had temporarily failed me, and that I booked the bus for the wrong day, but fortunately the nice man at the hire company took that in his stride and so that 17:00 we hurtled out of the university into the darkness.

The nice lady in my Gizmondo directed us straight to our luxurious Travelodge for the night. The journey was mostly painless, although the traffic was quite busy on the motorway. I have a new respect for Ford Transit vans now, this one had a seriously powerful engine and was quite happy to reach 80, even with 14 souls on board. Didn't try a handbrake turn though, not sure that everyone would have appreciated that.

Pitch me a Snake

I've spent a very happy day in the labs marking student work. Normally I hate marking. Exam scripts send me into a cold sweat. But this was much more fun. Rather than dead trees I was looking at live code. Each of our students in the first year was given 15 minutes to pitch their Snake game. And there have been some super ones. We are going to open up the "wherewouldyouthink hall of fame" and put some of these programs up there for download. Great stuff.

Next semester we are going to take the snake game and move it onto an XBOX. And I reckon we will be the first people in the world to do this in an undergraduate course at first year level.