Released this morning on Xbox live is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.  I had actually never played this particular game, but was a big fan of the original Castlevania game.

This installment stays classic to the original, being a 2D scroller.  That said, you don't scroll through a predetermined path.  It's very open ended allowing you to go almost anywhere you want to go.  It also has some RPG elements such as collecting equipment and gaining experience levels.

I'd post more, but the wikipedia link above covers it as well as I could.  All I can add is that it is proving to be a FUN game!

If you have an Xbox live account, check it out.

I was reading Marq's blog earlier this morning and went to leave a comment.  When I did, I realized that the pc I was on had me already logged into blogger.  The thing is, I don't remember signing up for blogger.  Actually, I doesn't surprise me that I would have done it sometime in the past.  I'm sure I have blog posts floating out in the ether that I have completely forgot about.  A few minutes of research pointed me to this old blog:  http://johnwashere.blogspot.com/    Apparently, I set this up back in October 2004.  Who knew?! 

So in my quest to reach a full saturation point, I have sync'd up john was here with my other blogs johnarmitage.net and my live.spaces site.

Fancy.

Many of the games (including some of the winners) from the Relatives of Spacewar challenge can be downloaded over at XNA Matrix.

So the warm up challenge for the Dream Build Play contest ended last week.  In the end I found that I had won nothing....

In looking through the entries, people put way more time into their games than I did into mine.  Not that I actually expected to win....  This first contest was titled "Relatives of Spacewar".  My game was actually more of a "Twin Brother of Spacewar That Plays By Different Rules".  Basically I took the starter kit, added some modifiers and a menu to offer an easy way to set those modifiers, and that was about it.  Here are the modifiers that I put into the game:

• No Collision Damage: You run into stuff, and now it doesn't hurt you.
• No Time Limit: The game clock doesn't count down.  You just play until someone gets five kills.
• Black Hole Sun: Basically turns the Sun in the game into a black hole that bounces you out of the middle of the playing area

The main goal of my game was to take the Spacewar game that I liked to play and make it a little easier so that my four year old son could play with me.  So from that point of view the game was a total success, as he loves playing that game....although not as much as Lego Star Wars II.

So now my XNA time is focused on a bigger and better game for the next challenge.  Which is just a bit bigger as far as time to make your game and prizes offered.  When I first took a look at the prizes for this next challenge all I was able to do was point at the computer screen and say "DUDE!" just a bit too loudly.  That was all that I could get out before my brain closed down all non essential functions and started going into overdrive trying to compile a list of every good video game idea that I had ever thought up.  If you didn't follow that link, here's just a highlight of the things you win if you take first prize in this next challenge:

• An invitation to enter into an Xbox Live Arcade Publishing Contract
• $10,000
• Alienware Aurora 7500 desktop system

There are a few more items on that list, but those were the ones that caught my eye. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some code to write.

This video starts out a bit slow, but it gets funny pretty fast.  But maybe it's only funny if you've ever had to be in the role of tech support either professionally or for family.