BluePhaze

So I haven't been that active lately on the blog or on Xbox Live. This is due to a couple of factors. 1. I sold my house. I am currently waiting to move into my next house as soon as all the paperwork goes through. But that will take a few days. In the mean time I am living at my mother in Laws house. My wife and I will also be leaving for Hawaii this week as I have business out there. So while I am at work my wife will get some much deserved relax time on the beach. Grandma will watch the baby back here at home till we get back. Which means I don't officially get to move into my new house until I get back from Hawaii, September 1st and 2nd.

2. The second item keeping me from being active online game wise is the fact that while at the in laws house, my 360 was setup and though I usually have it lying flat, it was up on it's side. My 1.5 year old son knocked it over. As it fell over the Unreal Tournament 3 disk inside slipped out of the track and fell deeper into the 360. Needless to say the disk was destroyed and is a scratched mess that will not even register now when I put it in. But more than that, the DVD disk player in the 360 can no longer ready any disk. No matter what game I put in, I get an error message that tells me that I need to put the game into an XBox 360 console. Too much fun... so the console is dead, I have tried everything I know and even though I am a Microsoft employee, we don't get any special treatment, so looks like it is time for me to buy a new console. But OH well, this is a great excuse to finally pick up an Elite.

So I will probably have to wait until September 15th to get another XBox. But oh well, I guess thems the breaks. I can't play any of my PC games as my PC's are all packed up for the move. But I did get a nice new work desktop, Quad Core (Intel Core 2 Quad), 64bit with 8Gigs of DDR2 a Geforce 8400GS (Not bad for a workstation) which I will be installing Server 2008 on it so that I can run Hyper-V to simulate a 5 server SharePoint farm. :)

Anyway... so gaming wise I will be limited for a bit, but oh well. I will have a blast in Hawaii and when I get back I get to move into my new home. Here are some picks:

Some stats:

Square Footage: 2800
Bedrooms: 5
Bathrooms: 3

In contrast, my old house was 3 Bedroom, single story, 1250 square feet. So it is quite a bit of an upgrade for me. It will also be my first official house purchase as the old one was my wife and her father who were on the title.

Anyway, I look forward to playing with you all again soon...

There are very few games that have taken up so many hours of my time as the first two Diablo games. After years of no news other than rumors, and multiple upheavals at blizzard due to change of parent company and the coming and going of many of the developers who worked on the original Diablo games, I had honestly started to think there would be no Diablo III. The fact that other companies made up of ex-Blizzard employees are making games in the same spirit of Diablo has been nice but still not the same. Flagship Studios, helmed by ex-Blizzard employees has Hellgate Londong, which is a future set spiritual successor to the overall idea of Diablo and carries over many of the games gameplay mechanics. Item Customization, Skill Trees, Multiple Classes, Randomly Generated terrain and layout for the different levels, etc... Even the story line is similar in that the forces of Hell have broken out of hell and are taking over the world. But no matter how good or bad (I actually like Hellgate a lot) it is not a replacement for Diablo. For the core Diablo fan Flagship has done some other work as well and have an upcoming game called Mythos (www.mythos.com) which is being developed by former Blizzard Diablo developers as well as the fella that is responsible for a very nice Diablo style game that some of you may have played called Fate. Mythos is VERY Diablo style game and is looking amazing, but... again it is not Diablo. Other project over the years since Diablo II have had hope but ultimately failed. Titan Quest was an amazing game, even had an expansion and I thought the game it self was amazing. It was the first truly 3D game I have played in a while that really got the Diablo style of gameplay right. Unfortunately the developers (Iron Lore) closed their doors and no further work on the game will happen as far as I know. There have been many others that emulated the style but never quite got it right, Blade and Sword, Dungeon Lords, Divine Divinity, Loki, etc... Many of these games had good ideas, but when you are going to try and be successful in a genre you have to improve upon what is already come before. Diablo really gave birth to the Action RPG genre. And improving on the work Blizzard did on Diablo is a very tall order indeed to fill let alone improve on. If you are going to make a game that feels like it is trying to follow in Diablo's footsteps, you really need to make sure are putting extreme attention to every detail, and also hope that you are not going to be drowned in the backlash of the hordes of hard core Blizzard and Diablo fans. Hard order to fill indeed.

But now the wait is over... sorta. Blizzard has announced Diablo III. And from the looks of it, this will be a definite blow against any other company that is even looking to get into this genre. As with most Blizzard game the mantra of "When it's done..." means that the game may still not ship for years yet. But even in the state it is currently in, it looks to blow away anything else I have seen in this space (Action RPGs). So far all that has been revealed are two of the character classes and a bit of gameplay. The known character types at this point are the Barbarian (A re-imagining of the class from Diablo II) and the Witch Doctor (A new magic caster class.). Of these two the Barbarian of course is the most familiar. He is still a straight up Melee fighter with the ability to Dual wield weapons and deal ridiculous amounts of damage. New skills and a hefty dose of Bad-Ass have been added and I am excited as the Barbarian was my character of Choice in Diablo II. The other character, the new Witch Doctor class at first resembles the Necromancer from Diablo II. He is a wiry looking fellow. But after watching some gameplay footage (links below), while in some ways similar to the Necromancer the Witch Doctor has some tricks of his/her (more on this later) sleeve. Turns out the Doc has the power of fire and disease at his control as well as the ability to summon minions. Sounds similar to a blend of the Necro and the Sorceress. Blizzard has stated that the Witch Doctor is not a replacement for the Necromancer and that there is still nothing keeping them from possibly including a Necromancer class in Diablo III. Only two characters have been announced at this point, and much of the initial materials and announcements surrounding the game have made mention of 5 character classes in Diablo III. However during some of the announcement and Q & A sessions this weekend a couple places have reported that the Blizzard team has said that they are not locked in yet on the total number of characters. This could be a good thing. While I don't feel it is necessary to include all the classes form the previous game, it would be nice to at least have a few. The Witch Doctor has some very nice skills that show some of the new directions that the team at Blizzard has decided to take with the characters and their skills. in Diablo II we were introduced to the concept of skill synergies. Skills that boosted or worked in conjunction with other skills. in Diablo III it look like they have taken this to a new level. The Witch Doctor can summon minions (not sure how many types yet) and then can cast some of his other spells on his minions. Now these are not Buffing skills, these are his attack skills. The Witch Doctor has a skill called Locust Swarm, that is similar to a poison skill, it hits an enemy with a green cloud of locusts who then proceed to attack enemies in a cloud doing damage over time (DoT), this skill is remarkable in the fact that the locust swarm will spread from enemy to enemy if they are in proximity to eachother. This allows for some good crowd control techniques which you will need with the amount of enemies this game is going to throw at you. But another nice thing about this skill, is that the Doc can cast it on his minions and they begin to glow green and there attacks are now boosted by the locust swarm. Looking closely at some of the gameplay footage, I also noted at one point (though it wasn't mentioned in the video commentary) that the Fire spells of the Doc also affected his minions making them glow with flames and do fire damage to enemies (you can see this in the video footage during the big boss battle towards the end if you pay close attention). I am very excited to see how other skills work together as well.

One other item that will thrill some is that choosing your class in Diablo III no longer means choosing your sex. In the past Diablo games the character classes were locked to a particular sex. Babarian was Male, Sorceress was female ,etc... if you wanted play that class you had no choice in the matter. With Diablo III all that changes. For each character class you can choose the Sex of your character with no ill consequences. So you can now be a Female Barbarian, or a Female Witch Doctor. The choice is yours with no change in the stats or abilities of the class chosen. About time, I am sure my wife will appreciate that as she pretty much stuck to the Sorceress and the Amazon in Diablo II.

For those of you who are wanting to see the game in action you can check the Blizzard Diablo III site and hit the video links. For your convenience I have put together a short list of some of the online resources that will give you all you want and more on Diablo III.

• Blizzard Diablo III home page
• Blizzard Diablo III video and Media page
• DiabloII.Nets Coverage of Diablo III including videos and transcripts of the announcement
• Diablo III gameply footage on GameVideos.com (19 minutes of AWESOME!)
• Gamevideos.com Diablo III Video Channel
• Kotakus Coverage of Diablo III

That is about it for now... I am sitting in the airport in Dallas waiting for my once cancelled, twice delayed flight to Oakland so I can spend some time at home before another week of work can tackle me... But at least now I know that Diablo III is coming and I definitely have something to look forward to. I will post more as I find more info but there is plenty out there to keep you happy.

Have you ever gotten so excited about an idea that you lost hours of time just brainstorming? Happened to me tonight. I have been working on getting up to speed on some of our newer technologies lately. I am learning WPF(Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight. For those of you unfamiliar with them, WPF is the part of the .Net framework that allows us to make really slick user interfaces such as you see in windows vista. The glass effects, the transparencies and animations etc... WPF gives programmers and designers the tools to do these types of things. Silverlight is the web based version. It allows for very rich and exciting user interfaces for the web. I am learning them for my own personal enjoyment as opposed to any job related reason. But to give myself a project to help me dig deeper in to them, I have decided to start with making some games. In a past life before coming to Microsoft I spent a lot of time as a Flash Developer and Designer. Since coming to MS I have had very little opportunity to put those skills to use. Now with WPF and Silverlight (as well as the Microsoft Expression tools) I can now start using those skills again in the context of some of our own products and I am extremely excited about it.

I was sitting at dinner tonight just thinking about what I might want to do in terms of a game. And started thinking about some of my favorite games and what aspects of them really made me love to play them. I don't want to give away any details yet as I want to get some groundwork done first to prove out some ideas. But I thought about a couple different game types and how I could combine some of the elements of a couple of completely non related game genres that I happen to like. AND POOF! The ideas just started flowing. I opened up OneNote and started making a list and the next thing I know it was an hour and a half later (I am in Tennessee this week so had plenty of free time at dinner since I was alone dining at the hotel restaurant.) I ended up with a huge list broken into a few major categories from Game Engine Features all way down to lists of features common to games of each genre and features of the game that would be unique to itself. The list is hundreds of items long and really lays out a great groundwork for what I believe will truly be a great game combining some of the best elements of a couple of my favorite genres. Now I am even more excited because going over the list I am seeing how each item can be implemented and going over details in my head of how they would fit into the game engine.

I will be blogging most of the technical details of the game design and development, including my learning process of WPF and Silverlight on my MSDN blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/jamesway I may post some of it up here as well if there is enough interest over on this blog. Anyway, I just had to share as I can't remember the last time I was this excited about something. Even if the game ends up just being my own private little toy, at least i know it is something that I want to play. And that is enough to keep me going. Anyway.... Catcha later...

For those interested in finding out more about WPF and Silverlight as well as the Expression tools check the links below:

WPF:

• WPF Home Page
• WPF Developer Center on MSDN
• WindowsClient.net learning Site for WPF (Includes Videos)

Silverlight:

• Silverlight Home Page
• Silverlight Development Center on MSDN
• Silverlight.Net learning Site for Silverlight (Includes Videos)

Expression Tools (Microsoft Tools for Designers)

• Expression Home Page
• Expression Tools Suite
• Expression Learning Site

Those should be able to get your started. If you are working with any of these or start to, let me know how it is going.

Been awhile since I posted last so figure I should get myself back in gear. Most of my gaming lately has been Lego Star Wars II: The original Trilogy. My wife as been playing it with me and last night I finally finished all the achievements. Talk about a damn chore! Not only do you end up having to play through the whole damn thing multiple times but a great deal of the achievements (18/29) are only achieved by beating every level in the game without dying and without turning on any of the extra features that you unlock during the game. Most of them honestly weren't that bad, but the last level is a beast. You have to escape from Death Star II. You can do it in free play mode which gives you access to all the ships, but it is a ridiculous level. Here are my tips on how to beat that level for the undefeated achievement:

1. Use the Tie Interceptor. It is very fast and has quad lasers which tend to destroy anything that gets in your way.

2. ROLL & FLIP! Keep hitting that A button! They can't hit you while you are in the middle of a role or flip. They can hit you as you are leveling out from doing a flip though so be careful. Rolling is accomplished by hitting left or right on the analog stick and hitting the A button. Flipping is hitting the A button without hitting to either side. Rolling is more useful as you can shoot as you role. I tend to use this to role side to side while in the tunnels and fire the whole time to clear the way.

3. Hearts on this level do not seem to disappear as they do on other levels. There were many times where I would destroy some enemies and come back a few minutes later and there were still hearts left over. Use this to your advantage, if you get low on life, head back to the last place you fought, of course this depends on you not picking up every heart that drops out of shear habit when you are already at full health.

4. For the area with the core, line your ship up with the areas on the walls that you need to shoot. Do not get to close or they will zap your ship and your ship will sit there unable to move and you are a sitting duck. With the Tie Interceptor it should only take a couple shots to kill each wall turret. Some people have recommended using the Millennium Falcon for this section, I get destroyed trying that. It has a nice gun that can shoot in any direction but does not shoot fast enough or do enough damage to help me.

5. NEVER STOP SHOOTING! NEVER. EVER. EVAR!!!

That is about it. You should be able to do it after a few tries. Once I get home (More on that later) next week, my wife and I are going to start working on Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. And after that she wants Lego Indiana Jones. And I assume after that she will want Lego Batman... I see little blocks in my sleep...

One item I have always felt was missing from Consoles has been Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Over the last year or so though that has started to change. The first RTS I noticed come to the 360 was Command And Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (C&C 3). I have played through about a third of the game so far and am enjoying it. One thing that always seems to hamper RTS games on the console is the control scheme either has to be limited way down due to a lack of available buttons, or they have to implement ridiculous menu options for the same reason.

C&C 3 plays pretty well. It is rather simple compared to most RTS I have played in terms of number of units, but plays well still. Some others that I am excited about are of course our very own Halo Wars! But besides just that we have more good news for RTS fans as Supreme Commander (SUPCOM) is coming to the 360. SupCom is by far one of the most robust RTS games around. The shear number of units, buildings, etc... is staggering. For those of you who have not played SupCom, you are in for a treat. Massive battles with 1000's of units on Globe spanning maps make for a ridiculous numbers of strategies. The fact that SupCom includes not only ground units, but Air and Sea units really makes for varied gameplay. Each race in the game has it's own strengths and weaknesses. You also have the ability to zoom way out to a global view of the action so that you can truly use strategy to plan your overall offensive. Most RTS games keep you tied close to your units and limit the number to very small groups which makes them much more tactical than strategic.

Some other RTS games you may want to check out as well are the upcoming Command And Conquer Red Alert 3, World in Conflict and Universe at War: Earth Assault. I have Universe at War on the computer and the xbox 360 version allows for cross platform play against the PC players! I know there are more games in this genre coming to the 360 I just can't think of them off the top of my head. Let me know what you are looking forward to!

So now the 360 (already the king of the Console FPS) is really looking good on the RTS front. Now I need more hack and slash RPG type games ( Diablo Style) and I will be set.