Yesterday I assisted to the 3 E3 main press conferences by Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.
Lately I haven’t been such an active video game player as I used to be some months ago, but now I’m feeling that during this year and the next one I’ll come to my roots 
Microsoft XBox 360
From Microsoft, as a XBox 360 owner I was glad to hear that XBox Live will have integration with Facebook and Twitter, my two main social networks. For gold membership owners will get full access to Last.FM through their XBox 360 systems.
But the best of all, that really got me crazy was Project Natal. My friend Marco wrote a post on his blog about it and it has 2 MUST SEE videos.
Nintendo
The news about Nintendo DS weren’t that appealing to me, since I don’t own a Nintendo DS, but it’s obvious that Nintendo is targeting young women with several games meant to them. The focus in user generated content is a great initiative. It doesn’t apply only to Nintendo DS applications but also video games with user generated levels.
As a Wii owner I really must buy Wii Sports Resort with Wii Motion Plus that is coming to stores in July.
As a fan of one of the best games I’ve ever played (if not the best) I was glad to ear that a Super Mario Galaxy sequel is coming. You can watch the trailer at GameTrailers.com
Nintendo also announced Wii Vitality Sensor which can read your vital signs and find out whether you’re anxious or focused, etc. I’m not really convinced, but I’ll wait and see.
Sony Entertainment
I own a PSP 3000, and I won’t buy PSP Go, but a new handheld video game console it’s always good news for gamers. And I didn’t pay attention to Playstation 2 and 3 news…
You can what the 3 press conferences though Gamespot at http://e3.gamespot.com/press-conference/
This release represents the beta of Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0, which enables hobbyists, academics, and independent game developers to easily create video games for Windows and the Microsoft Zune digital media player using optimized cross-platform gaming libraries based on the .NET Framework.
The XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta is a chance to get an early look at XNA Game Studio 3.0, and provide feedback on the product that is currently in development.
in XNA Creators Club
Now it supports Zune with the 3.0 software version. The CTP version didn’t have support for XBOX 360 development, now it is fully supported Finally we can use Visual Studio 2008 for XBOX 360 development! Other features that please me are the Rich Presence support (that message in XBox Live that tells you what are your friends playing in the context of a game. eg: level, dificulty,etc.), and Invites for joining you in a multiplayer game.
De 25.000 pontos para 75.00 ainda vai um bocado. 
Descoberto a navegar no site XBox Live ao trocar a lingua de pt-PT para en-US.
You probably already know that developing a game that runs both in XBox 360 and Windows is possible and pretty manageable using XNA Game Studio. If you start developing your game for Windows (which is great to compile/debug your code more quickly), you can then duplicate that project as an XBox 360 game. The same files will be used, but during compilation, the assemblies of XNA Framework that are used are chosen based on the target platform.
Developing a game for both platforms isn’t that trivial. There are a lot of functionalities that are exclusive to each platform. For instance, the Gamercard integration that I talked about in an earlier post, only works in XBox 360. In the other hand, since XNA games targeting Windows are pure .NET managed code, you can use whatever .NET libraries you want (such as WiimoteLib )
If you have a game that you want to compile to both platforms, but which has slight differences, you can use the C# Preprocessor Directives. When you create an XBox 360 project, the XBOX and XBOX360 conditional compilation symbols are used by the preprocessor.
Those symbols can be used to create conditions that make the preprocessor able to choose which lines of code of a file to compile. The example bellow is pretty self-explanatory.
If you compile this game targeting the XBox 360 you’ll get a blue background, otherwise you’ll get a red background.
This is not a XNA or XNA Game Studio feature, but this was the first time I needed to use such feature. More information about C# Preprocessor Directives are available at MSDN.
One nice XNA feature is the ability to manage Xbox 360 users gamer data. This way you can access your gamercard information which include your name, avatar, achievements, played games and list of friend among other things. How can you do that?
In the Initialize method of your game you must add a specific component into the game, in order to prepare the game to access the data.
Since while the Initialize and LoadContent methods are executed, the gamer data is not available yet, you must access it in the Update method. There you can check if a variable is set, and if it is not, you load the gamercard information. Be careful, you must not load the gamer data in every iterations of the game loop. Your Xbox will hang if you do that… It is an expensive operation. Try to load this data only one time or so during the game lifetime.
This example show your gamer picture in the screen, followed by some of your informations such as your gamer tag.
You can download the full source code and deploy it into your Xbox 360 console and give it a try. (I’ve written before about how to get a free XNA Creators Club Membership in order to allow XNA deploying).
