You Xbox junkies are all probably aware of the New Xbox Experience coming down the pipe in November.  The NXE is going to completely change the dashboard as well as add a ton of new features and avatars and a bunch of improvements to the marketplace.  All of that is fantastic and I look forward to it, but what really is the exciting part is the inclusion, finally, of XNA Community Games to the 360.

There are some who claimed this day would never come.
http://squawkbox.ca/news/


Tonight we have released a public beta of Squawkbox 4. This nearly complete program has everything you expect from Squawkbox, will work the same and will allow you to fly on VATSIM with FSX via SimConnect. It is fully-functional and not limited in any way.

Why call it a beta then? Well, there's still more to do. A few minor but persistant bugs pop up in certain situations and there are some nagging issues that have hung around as well. By releasing now, we get a stable program out to you and it gives us the opportunity to continue to improve the software.

Please, if you have any issues with SB4, post in the forums. There are so many bright people there and it allows us to track things all in one place.

Thanks, of course, goes to Joel for building the foundation of Squawkbox and giving me the honor of participating in it's development.

Yes, I still have the big announcement coming in a day or two, but I wanted to share this.

Every once in a while, I am convinced that I have heard the absolute stupidest comment made online, and as if someone is trying to disprove evolution, a few days later that gets topped.

The new favorite comes from the comments for a news item on WiiWare World, a site dedicated to Nintendo's ridiculous half-assed effort to be part of the independent game movement. To sum it up as quickly as I can, Microsoft and Sony have not only built services for smaller downloadable games on their consoles, but they also are making strides to open those services up to indie game developers with initiatives like the ever awesome XNA. Nintendo came rolling in on their chariots of money and announced that they too have deigned to allow a download service for their Wii. Immediately, heads cocked to the side like a kennel of terriers, given that my camera phone has a good deal more storage space than a Nintendo Wii, but Reggie and the crew laughed off any objections and said "Don't you worry yourself about that! We are opening up the cutting edge of Wii development to the little guy! Good job, little guy!"

Turns out, the "little guy" has to be an established developer who can illustrate a history of performing to the exacting standards of Nintendo products, who has an address for their company at an address zoned as business property, and can scrape together a couple thousand bucks for the SDK. And then they have to fit their game into a tiny toenail of storage space so people will actually be able to store it on their Wii.

This, of course, means that Penny-Arcade Adventures by HotHead is not going on the Wii, because given the amount of art, content and 3D models in the game, it's over 200MB, which is like four times the limit for WiiWare.

This lead to a comment by a particularly dim fan under the handle "Peznaze", who said

"Meh, if they can't write efficient code, then I don't want their game on the Wii. Learn to program, then try to sell your wares."

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the reigning champion.

Hopefully I'll have a big announcement up here in the next day or two.

For those of us still running DX9, and I assume that's most people, one of the spots we are hit the most in comparison to DX10 is water quality.

The FSX default water is nice, but I loved the way that DX10 water looks.

Well, some help is on the way:
FS Water Configurator has been released and it looks great. You might have noticed that Phil blogged about this a while back, citing the "amazing visuals" that FSX is capable of with a push in the right direction. I'm guessing that it's just a configurable shader generator, essentially a better looking version of the water slider with a ton of more features.

FSWC is available for download right now, and the price is right. There's a download link at AVSIM as well and if you like it, make sure you donate so we can keep good developers making good products.

This isn't the post I've been sitting on, but I had to comment on this...

Two emails have popped up in my inbox today about a company headhunting for video game programmer. Normally I skip right over these, but this one mentioned Boston, and I believe Harmonix is in the area, so I took a look. This is what I saw:

Qualifications:

• PC casual gaming MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) a major plus
• Mid to senior level developers, pc/windows game development experience. others is fine but must have windows
• A plus to have online server side experience, Linux, etc, the other is client side work.
• Flash exp. and/or Java exp.
• This is going to be a sports game, so you should like sports
• PC Gaming exp. a must

Gamespy just pretty much wrote the same review.

They also reviewed MLB08:The Show for the PS3, saying it looks prettier than last year, runs more seamlessly, has loads of statistics, and as a godsend, has the ability to save mid-game.

That kind of sucks.  Anyone got a PS3 I can borrow?