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.

Free stuff.. and you're helping!

Right, back on track for useful stuff. This weekend during our 'crunch' to get abYss working on phones other than the Nokia 40 series, we ran into the major hurdle of testing on emulators vs testing on physical handsets. Well today I found a great solution to that problem, and it will appeal not only to developers, but to those that want free games and apps for their phones as well!

It's called GetJar.com, and it's a site that allows developers to upload demo copies of their J2ME applications, to be downloaded and/or beta tested by the community. It has a list of devices owned by registered beta testers and the number of testers that own each of these devices. It also has some simple management tools to manage your uploaded applications.

On the consumer side, it's a fantastic way to get free demos for your phone- you might just download something so great you'll want to play the full version :) And you're actually helping by downloading the games and testing them for bugs, so you can do your good deed for the day and have fun doing it ;-)

Give me wings to fly!

Ok this does not quite fall into the 'useful stuff' category, but it is interesting. National Geographic is running an article on medical experimentation that makes cloning look like a high-school science experiment. Apparently there are a number of laboratories around the world working on the creation and medicinal use of 'chimeras'. Named for the mythical Greek creature with body parts borrowed from a number of different animals, a chimera in lab terms is a hybrid creation that is part animal, part animal.

One of the biggest anticipated uses for such creatures is the ability to grow 'spare' body parts that could be used for transplantation, but some of the experiments really do cross the line into the world of crazy science. For example, Dr. Irv Weissman (director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine in California) is working on creating mice with human brains. The reason for this is apparently to help understand how the human brain develops and works, but it certainly raises some scary moral, ethical and spiritual questions (as do many of the ongoing studies in this field)!

It's a really good, thought provoking read, so pop on over to NG on your lunch break for a real-life freak show.