Halo: First Strike

The third book in the Halo series is title “First Strike.” Eric Nylund, author of the first Halo book “The Fall of Reach” returns to finish some of the unresolved plots from the first book. The book takes place between Halo 1 and Halo 2 video games.
The novel also provides the Halo gamer with insights [...]

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Star Wars Padawan Training Available in July 2009

I just discovered this unique and interesting toy via Scott Adams (Dilbert Blog). Well, it’s not so much a toy as it is just a cool device.
Wearing a custom built device that slips on your head, you can use your brain waves to move a sphere vertically in a container. There’s no wires and [...]

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Halo: The Flood (Book Review)

The second book in the Halo series is titled “The Flood.” The book is written by William C. Dietz who’s background of serving in the US Navy as medic might have helped him with the characters and background stories.
This book is a novelization of the first Halo video game (Halo: Combat Evolved). I never got [...]

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Halo: The Fall of Reach (Book Review)

I wasn’t too familiar with the Halo series until last year when I played Halo for the first time. I knew it was a FPS (first person shooter) and knew that it involved running around and shooting aliens, much like most other FPS games. Since FPS games weren’t my speciality, I had never spent much [...]

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Mass Effect: Ascension (Book Review)

Mass Effect: Ascension is the second novel of the Mass Effect series. The book is based on the game of the same name by BioWare. The author, Drew Karpyshyn, works for BioWare and has also written books on the BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic game.
I read the first Mass Effect novel before the Mass [...]

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A Week of Wii

Last week, I got a chance to play with a Wii for the first time. I’ve been a recent console convert and picked up a XBOX 360 last year, so most of my comparisons will be versus the XBOX 360 and XBOX LIVE.
At first glance, the Wii interface is much more simpler than the current [...]

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Gary Gygax (1938-2008)

Most people will probably not know about Gary Gygax, but his influences have been instrumental in the gaming and fantasy industry for over the last thirty years or so.
If you’ve ever played a role playing game, such as World of Warcraft, Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, then [...]

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Does playing video games make you a better software engineer?

Jason Kealey of LavaBlast wrote an interesting piece of how Super Mario Brothers made him a better software engineer (or “junior engineer” in his Canadian terms).
I think this is an interesting viewpoint to take. I remember having one of the first Nintendo system of my friends, but even before that I had a Coleco system [...]

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How to create a heightmap and skydome using Terragen for XNA

In this example, I’m going to use the Generated Geometry Sample provided by the XNA Creators Club as the code base, so we can just focus on creating heightmaps and the skydome.
Terragen is a great scenery generator and best of all, it’s free for personal (non-commercial) use. However, the unregistered version has some limitations such [...]

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Democratizing Game Development

I’ve long been a fan of games and game development. I created my first game over 20 years ago and saved it to a cassette (remember those things we used to have in cars before CDs?) on my Coleco Adam computer.
I also remember creating numerous text driven games for my Apple IIc Plus using Applesoft [...]

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