Braggart–a great game of boasting

Spent some time today playing Braggart. This is a splendid little card game. Each player takes the role of a hero in a bar, boasting of their great deeds and daring dos. You assemble your boasts and present them to your opponents to gain points and win the game. But they can call you a liar and change your story to one which is considerably less impressive. The artwork on the cards is great and the tales you can spin are hilarious. Great fun and well worth tracking down.

GI Joe: Retaliation Movie Review

OK. Lets get this out of the way at the start. GI Joe “Retaliation” is as good as any movie inspired by plastic dolls made for boys to play with can be. I saw the very first one and thought it was a great piece of lightweight throwaway fun. This one is a bit darker though. And they’ve thrown away the silly gadgets and added Bruce Willis. I think the director must have watched “The Expendables” a few times before making this film, and made a few changes to match. Unlike “Trance”, there is hardly any plot and things are mostly moved along by cartoon violence and blowing things up. Which is fine by me.

XNA Resources Follow-up

Further to the talk on XNA earlier this week, some folks have been in touch for any other XNA references that I might know of. Here are a couple.

You can find a complete course which teaches programming using XNA at Microsoft Faculty Connection here. There are slides, labs and all kinds of good bits and bobs that you an asset strip and use as the basis of your teaching.

My Microsoft Press XNA 3.0 book (not the most recent, but still good for getting started) can be found as a free download from here.

All of the stuff will work on MonoGame too.

Trance Movie Review

We went to see Trance tonight. We got a two for one deal on the tickets, which is kind of appropriate, because you get around twice as much plot as you need in the movie. The starting point, art heist that goes wrong when the man on the inside forgets what he did with the haul, is enticing enough. But then things go pear (as well as a whole number of other fruits) shaped really quickly. It is as if they sat down and decided every possible permutation of bad person and sucker and then worked through them in sequence for completeness.

The gushing interviewer on the “One Show” (always a source of unimpeachable and incisive movie reviews) said something along the lines of “Just when you think you have it figured out there is another twist that changes everything”. What happened to me was that after the film has led the audience through the third successive “bait and switch” move with the plotline you just stop caring who did what to who and just wait for the credits to roll so that you draw some kind of line under the thing.

Sometimes when I write about a film I worry about spoiling the plot. But this time I reckon that this time the director Danny Boyle (who did a great job on the Olympics)  got there first.

Windows Gaming Awareness Event

 

A great audience. I kind of have to say that because I’ve not left Birmingham yet. Although they actually were a great audience.

Just done a talk at the Windows Gaming Awareness event about XNA and MonoGame.Great fun. Well worth getting up at 5:45 am to catch a train to Birmingham to deliver. You can find all the content here.

It has also been very interesting to see what other gaming tools and techniques there are out there. I’m going to have a play with quite a few of the things that have been discussed.