Tonight I actually considered quitting my job because of violence in a computer game. And no, I don't work in the games industry. Nobody tell Jack Thompson. He'll get upset that he's wrong.

The Good: Currently I'm playing lots of Heavenly Sword. It looks great (except the shadows, but shadows look awful on all consoles) and it's a lot of fun to play. I can feel the story running out though. The most amazing thing? It's got good acting and mocap in it! And some bad acting too, but I'll gloss over that. The Bad: It's made the triangle button on my controller break! I've not exactly used that controller much you know... The Better: Sometimes things happen for a reason? http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15564 The biggest problem with it according to some sites? It's heavier....

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...

In this day and age I expect to be able to download demos from the internet. It's that simple, I have no need to buy computer game magazines beyond Edge and so it was with a certain amount of general background annoyance that I braved a proper shop and grabbed a copy of the September issue of the official XBox magazine. Why? Yes, the desire to roll more Katamari. The comic is from the excellent xkcd.com, go read it. So why an exclusive demo on a magazine? A desperate attempt to make people buy it I think. Words...

Things I still suck at: Golden Axe Sonic Well that's the Xbox live arcade games for this week out then :) Pretty good versions of both games though, so 10 out of 10 for trying. Right! Back to Sonic! I'm sure I can remember the level layouts if I try!

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!

I sometimes wonder if what I want to write here will be of interest to anybody. Blogging about my daily work would be dull and my XNA stuff at the moment seems to be turning into researching medieval architectural design that involves having zero lines of code written. That leaves gaming so you'd all better get interested in what I'm playing on my Xbox.  Saying that I'll start off with some thoughts about a 360 game design decision: Achievements. As anybody who knows me will tell you, I'm an Xbox 360 achievement whore. At the time of writing this post I only have a...

Lots of apple announcements happened yesterday. We're getting Safari for Windows (1st install failed with an error and the 2nd on my work PC failed to get through to external websites because it's not as clever as every other browser ever made. There isn't going to be a 3rd attempt for a while), which is strange and quite possibly a very bad move because it'll just cause more people to target it while looking for vulnerabilities and quite soon it'll be like Firefox and start loosing it's secure reputation. Now I use Safari all the time because it's so much better than...

If Sony really want to make the PS3 better then I'd suggest they fix the bug that crashes out all of the controllers. Yep, even the DVD style remote control. It seems that every time I use the damn console I have to reset it using the old pull out the power cord trick after the latest patch, which isn't good as whenever a friend asks if they should buy one I have to say no. There are no games and it just plain doesn't work right... I only use it as a DVD (SD and Blu-ray) player nowadays, they...

Seriously I do. Is there some facility that I can check myself into that will cure me of my console buying obsession? Maybe I need to up my "It must have two games I want" rule to 10 or something. I'm even considering a PSP now, that's how bad it's got. While I'm here, have some advice for the street racing mode in Crackdown. Most of the time you have enough time to go back to the agency garage, grab the supercar (aka the Batmobile, only with more guns) and be waiting back on the track before the other...