Adding a keyboard to a console is easy, even the Wii is getting (so far limited) USB keyboard support and so you just plug a keyboard in and go for it. On the PS3 you can use bluetooth keyboards too I believe, which helps with that whole sitting on a sofa and not wanting cables problem. Microsoft have now come out with the Xbox 360 Messenger Kit (another brilliant name there!). Can adding a keyboard to your controller actually work? First off it's a really nice piece of design. It uses the 2 screw holes at the end of...

There's a distinct relationship between how much I've got on at work and how much I feel like coding in the evenings and weekends, and that's not made much better by the nagging feeling that I could be spending my time writing useful utilities for work that I've been putting off instead of messing around with XNA, WPF or something else that's cool, interesting and worth blogging about. I have actually been doing a bit of XNA when the mood takes me, and that includes finally taking a look at the Racing Game starter kit. It's a fun enough game,...

This is my new favourite thing in the world. Yesterday my favourite thing was Powershell, but I'm very fickle. http://www.joystiq.com/2007/06/19/ace-combat-6-flight-stick-bundle/ This had really better work with XNA!

It's all the XBox 360's fault. You start launching retro games and people think they're cool again. Sure, you get Doom and Jetpac, but you then have to put up with Paperboy. That wasn't even fun the first time round! Well the latest on the long list of games is Q*Bert on the PS3. I was never a real big fan in the day, but it was enjoyable enough so I set the download going and dived in for some retro goodness. The looks pass fine, the gameplay passes better than I remember it but if there's a problem with...

I'm a little obsessed with Crackdown at the moment, which means I'm not getting a lot of useful things done. I'm getting to the point where the achievements are going to be harder to get now so hopefully that'll die down and I get on with something useful. So what do I class as useful? Playing with XNA of course! I've pottered around for a while now not produced anything noteworthy so I need a project to play with. Lucky for me I have a massive number of notes on various ideas so I'm going to do something I never even...

I have a new cool gadget, and this time it's a handy one as well. It's the XBox Wireless gaming receiver for Windows. What it does is allow me to use my wireless controllers with Windows, which is great as Games for Windows means that a lot more are going to use the controllers in the future. What's really cool about it is that it doesn't just work with the standard controller. I also have the wireless headset and wheel and they also work with it. The headset is great for teamspeak as the wires on my old headset really got...

First, read this. The pertinent section is: I started working on Mono.XNA today. For those of you that don't know what it is, it's a cross platform implementation of the Microsoft XNA framework. So in a good few months, it should be possible to write a game once and then play it on MacOS, Windows, Linux, Xbox 360 and if you're really lucky, the PS3 aswell. http://monotorrent.blogspot.com/2006/12/i-started-working-on-mono.html This is of course great news, I'm a big fan of XNA and getting it on more platforms is going to be really great. Getting it on the PS3 will have the...

Because I'm sure that everybody uses my opinions to base their own on (or was that nobody?) here's a quick roundup of things that I've decided are good at the moment. 1. XBox 360 Since I caved in and brought an XBox in order to kill zombies and save the galaxy from oppression (among other things) I've been getting back into console gaming after a stint of pure PC games. Ignoring the great graphics and games the XBox 360 has some really nice features. It works as a media center extender, which doesn't effect me as I use a Mac and Frontrow as...

Last night my brother gave me his comments on XNA after having tried to use it for a full day. The API and usability are very good, but the experience is bitterly let down by the documentation at this stage. The examples contain errors that, OK, I can fix but only because I know enough about how DirectX works in the first place in order to make the fixes but if you don't then you're pretty much stuffed. The rest of the documentation is unfinished and missing pages and methods which makes exploring the API hard if you don't have...