Noooooo.. My precioussss..

Sony has announced that the PlayStation Portable (PSP) will not be reaching European territories for 'at least a couple of months'. Since South Africa traditionally falls under Europe when it comes to distribution of games and console hardware, that means we wont be getting our hands on Sony's little black miracle for a good couple of months yet. This SUCKS. The PSP is the first console I have been really excited about since the original PlayStation, it seems to get pretty much everything right, and the library of games available for it is already incredibly impressive (yes, I'm a fan boy).

Sony have cited hardware shortages as the reason for this delay, and while that is understandable (and good news since it means that commercially the PSP is a live and well), it doesn't make the whole situation suck any less. I suppose I will just have to vent my PSP woes by updating this blog with regular(ish) PSP news ;)

For more on the delay, visit Eurogamer.net. For really good overall PSP coverage (although being American they don't really care about the EU delay..) visit IGN's PSP site.

On a somewhat more positive note, Abyss (the first game by the mobile development 'studio' a friend and I have started, smallfry mobile) is finally commercially available, on the Hungarian site Jocuri. This is a big step for us, even if it is only in Hungary so far (we have distribution rights to an aggregator, MobilityZone, that covers a number of European sites).

XNA Studio

This week at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) Microsoft announced XNA Studio, a full toolset for game development built around Visual Studio and the XNA platform (announced at last year's GDC). The product suite promises to provide not only programming tools, but workflow and asset and build management tools as well. Anyone who has worked on a modern game development project will immediately realise how useful such an environement would be. Unlike most corporate development projects, game dev projects involve a huge number of non-code assets that are a pain to manage, as well as many different builds to cater for different platforms and configurations (and you thought keeping your debug and reatail builds in synch was tough ;-) ).

With game development becoming increasingly complex, middleware and prebuilt tools are fast becoming the preferred way to develop. With XNA's aim to become a common development platform for multimedia development on PC, Xbox and even Windows mobile platforms, MS is obviously looking to cash in on that trend.

For more info on XNA and XNA studio (and I mean just a tiny bit more, there's not really a heck of a lot of info available) visit the XNA website.