So, its again been a little while since I had an update.

Game: Well, I'm now (or still) working on an inventory system for our game, which i'd like to point out, is not as easy as you may think. We have to do a small presentation about the game next week in our lecture in front of everyone in the course, but that shouldn't be too hard, since we already have movement and camera controls, as well as an almost finished level.

Things I've been playing since last posting:

Gears Of War 2 (360) - Started another run-through on Normal to see whether I could play it, and guess what, I can!

Lego Indiana Jones (360) - Striving to get the last 4 achievements!

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (360)

Midnight Club: Los Angeles (360)

Need For Speed: Most Wanted (360)

Skate 2 (360) - Finished the career, at long last

Little Big Planet (PS3)

Wii Fit (Wii)

Half Life (PC)

Left 4 Dead (PC)

Portal (PC) - Finished the main game

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 (DS)

Cooking Mama (DS) - Maybe its because i'm a girl, but I quite like this, mainly because I can play in short bursts

Mystery Case Files: Millionheir (DS) - Quite enjoyed this, even though its aimed at the casual market, might just be my skil for these hidden object games

Tetris DS (DS)

Games bought and still to play:

Alone In The Dark (360), Resistance: Fall Of Man (PS3), Turning Point (360) - Borrowed, Mercinaries 2 (360), Bioshock (360), GTA: China Town Wars (DS)

Will try and post regularly, if not for your enjoyment, but for me keeping track of things.

Well, I kinda realised I hadn't written a blog entry in quite a while.

On the game front, we have made lots of progress, we have a first person camera and movement controls which are good, although, the person that the view belongs to clearly doesn't have a spinal column, as he can look 360 degrees in all vertices. I myself am continuing to learn C# so that I can handle creating lots of the interface programming for the game. Thanks to an awesome book somone told me about, I can now assign controls to keyboards and xbox 360 controllers, as well as using the vibration functions on the controller, display colours and change colours of objects, display premade images inside a game and display text and add a date/time to the program. Hopefully, some of that might help at some point.

In other news, I have a 360 back, well, it's actually my 360 back (same serial number and everything) with a new motherboard so now I can play a copy of the Sega Megadrive Collection that I had pre-ordered before it died.

Some games I've played this week:

Guitar Hero 2, Guitar Hero Aerosmith, Guitar Hero World Tour (My god is trapped under Ice on hard drums painful!!!)

Sega Megadrive collection: I'm quite liking this thus far as I can finally play some early games I'd never played before (excluding Sonic, everyones played Sonic right?)

Race Pro: Just got this yesterday and haven't really played it too much, but its definately more of a sim with the realistic controls, it's also taking me quite a while to figure out correct speeds for corners as the physics are very realistic.

Well, continuing with the 'OMG I need to make a game' thing, progress has been made.

There is now a group, consisting of 5 people, myself included. This means we have a Project Manager, 2 artists and 2 programmers, but no doubt, we'll all do bits of each others work.

We also have a reasonably stable idea, but all i'm saying for now, is to expect a technical demo of a XNA based point and click puzzle adventure, and I promise, it's not as bad as it sounds. We have a large amount of the story decided, in other words the main outline, but progress is still to be made.

In other news, my Xbox 360, after surviving for just about 14 months, has red ringed, and will soon be shipped off to Microsoft, so they can send me somebody elses... for now, it looks like the PC, PS3 and Wii will be getting more attention (look out LBP!!) but it still feels like a part of me is gone :(

Also, as part of another unit this semester, I might just take a stab at attempting to review games, I doubt they'll be much good, but its all part of understanding games in order to make games.

So here's the background, it's the first week of my second semester, actually, rephrase that, it's the first DAY of the second semester.

Well, after being distracted by the Yahtzee Zero Punctuation review of Little Big Planet, we are informed that we have 10 weeks to create a fully working technical demo of a game with a report, diary and all the documents so we can pitch them to actual game developers/publishers :O

We'll also get shuved into groups with 4 other people we've never worked with before, I guess to emulate the real world of developers.

I'll keep you posted...

It really really does, especially when it doesn't snow this much in Portsmouth, so we made sure we had fun :P

I finally got to the end of Gears Of War 2, although my lack of ability to play shooters with stcks and not a keyboard and mouse has let me down, so I finished it on casual, but that doesn't bother me.

I'm going to try and ramp up the difficulty, I probably won't get very far.

As for the game, I enjoyed, the story is interesting however there are moments that are a little too slow, some elements of the story were a little odd, like a certain moment with Tai, and the Carmine jokes were priceless.

Yep, I did give in to Sony, I bought a PS3, with Little Big Planet, Ratchet & Clank: Quest For Booty, Motorstorm and Resistance in tow. Haven't opened it up yet, but will sure be spending a lot of time on LBP probably!

Also, coincidentally, somehow the timing was right to find that the gamespot ad background was for none other than PSN... strange

Today seemed to be the perfect timing for a game release, not only that, but a game I've wanted ever since finishing the first many months ago.

This would be Skate 2.

I went straight from handing in my last piece of coursework to my local GAME and picked up a copy. From first sights, I like the game. I think its a little more frustrating, especially with the vert challenges (Vert with vampire anyone) but thats only from a days playing. The environment looks fantastic, and the on/off board movement is much improved, but still intuative, both for old and new players.

My only main dislike with the game is that the female gender seemed a bit of an afterthought, the models aren't incredibly female looking, only a few minor changes from the male model, and also that all the text and speech will always say "dude" or "him/his" which just makes it seem odd, especially with a female name.

Also, the realisation, I've been on gamespot for 5 years XD