So You Wanna Develop Games for the 360....

Now you can. Microsoft has announced the upcoming release of XNA Express, a free download for Windows XP users. XNA is a development studio that is to be given to the "real" development houses for 360 development, but now students, independents, and hobbyists will be able to create they're own games for the 360. Now the download is for free but of course there is a small charge of $99 to actually test and run you game on a 360. There was no mention of regular users being able to play these games, but I imagine if any of these titles become popular we would probably see a XBOX Live Arcade release. I'm really excited by this news, maybe now I will actually get off my but (or actually sit my butt down) and start working on something.

Can you believe we're 3 months away from all "Next-Gen" systems being released, and I still haven't decided which console to go with. The Wii is definitely intriguing as I love innovation, but will it take a year for quality titles to come out like with the DS? The PS3 of course is a powerful and exciting machine, I'm not completely sold on Blu-Ray (my DVD player works just fine), but Sony has the 3rd party support which is huge. As for the 360, well the titles are starting to come out this fall, with Gears of War and Mass Effect next year, and the price drop on the Premium package up here in Canada is nice. This is gonna be a tough decision!