Tuesday next, you may suddenly find yourself with more friends than you ever knew you had. The coming Xbox dashboard update will give you the ability to browse the friends list of everyone you know on Xbox Live (similar to Facebook), allowing you to pillage their social networks in order to stockpile your own massive squadron of fellow gamers. It would be wise to keep logged in to Xbox.com in order to manage the influx of friend requests.
The XNA team will make their Game Studio 2.0 beta available for download soon, and according to the team’s blog post last week, feature complete. One of the more exciting features coming is support for network games between Xbox 360 consoles and Windows machines. Live Anywhere, as this ability was originally dubbed at E3 last year, is an architecture to allow games to interact across any platform available (desktops, consoles, and mobile devices).
The first game to ship that supported Live Anywhere was Shadowrun, which PC Gamer felt wasn’t all it could be. It seems clear that development of the game was focused primarily on proving the cross-platform concept, and hopefully future implementations of Live Anywhere won’t sacrifice sheer entertainment.
Enter the soon-to-be released XNA 2.0 beta. By providing game developers of every stripe the ability to provide network gaming between my friend Dan at his desk, and myself on the couch, we each will be able to have our preferred experience. A brief word to developers: might I recommend starting small? Build a port of Drug Wars that I can play with a couple mates, then worry about the flashy graphics.
photo credit: Ken McGrail
Getting under the skin of this week’s Zune launch, Saul Hansell has posted a three-part interview with Microsoft’s J Allard at the NY Times Bits blog. There’s a great amount of candid conversation around all aspects of Microsoft’s growing entertainment movement.
On the perpetual rumor of a Zune phone:
The phone will be one part entertainment…. What you will see from us is more of these signature experiences. When you see the Zune, you’ll say say, I want my music experience on the phone to be like that. Hey, I want my telecommunication experience on the phone to be more like that.
On the evolution of Zune devices:
I’m a big believer in failing fast… If we skipped last year, we would have never come out with the product we did this year… We learned that because of the shortfalls in the PC client [software], the device was less useful… People hated that there was no podcasts, that they couldn’t fill their cultural cache [the Zune] with the stuff that was meaningful to them.
On the evolution of a new Microsoft entertainment platform:
Today we have Xbox live for $50 a year. We have Zune Pass at $15 a month. We don’t have a rationalized premium version yet. Fast forward a little bit, and you can image a menu like DirecTV. There is basic, there is enhanced, there is movie pack and NFL Sunday ticket.
It’s exciting to see another solid base hit for Mr. Allard. His laser focus on consumer experiences and the interaction between Microsoft and individual human beings is right up my street. There’s a gravity around personalities like J and Ray Ozzie that fill me with a lot of hope. They both seem to understand the importance of user experience, and seem to place more importance on them than traditional Microsoft thinking.
This week the WIndows Live team announced the availability of an API for Windows Live Spaces Photos (don’t get me started on the name). Those of you who write software can now exert some control over the photos kept in a Live account. More interesting though to the rest of us who can’t code is the Live Data Interactive SDK, which shows off the functionality of this new API. Giving the human beings a view into what developers work with is very educational, and more than a little bit entertaining.
A long-standing source of intrigue around Microsoft headquarters in Redmond is, ‘The Golden Helmet.’ Apparently his real name is Stephan, and he has the horror story to justify his glittered headgear. From Ariel Stallings’ interview:
So, you never feel dorky wearing a gold helmet?
Come on: I’m riding a Segway — I’m already dorky.
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