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I would just like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas 2009!

I’m going to be eating mince pies, drinking beer and wine, responsibly recycling wrapping paper and maybe getting a bit of gaming in too.

Just a very quick late night post to tell you that Steam has another sale on at http://store.steampowered.com

At the time of writing they are flogging Grand Theft Auto IV for only £4.99 which is a bit of a bargain if you have a PC that can handle it.

Keep that page bookmarked too as the offers are changing every day.

It’s not often that Microsoft gives you the opportunity to earn cold, hard gamerscore for nowt. But if you don’t mind installing the Games for Windows LIVE client from http://www.microsoft.com/games/en-us/live/Pages/livejoin.aspx you can also get Tinker for absolutely nothing which includes 200 points worth of achievements.

Tinker is an isometric 3D style puzzle game which you’ve probably seem a hundred clones of previously but it’s polished, good fun and worth a download.

By the way, the system requirements for Tinker imply that it needs a 3GHz processor and a Geforce 6600/ATI 1300 graphics card… My own system is substantially below that specification and it runs fine!

…I thought I would post a link to a youtube video of Jack Bauer interrogating Santa Claus! :p

Because it certainly seems like it. For example:

• Steam are selling some really good games at stupidly low prices here: http://store.steampowered.com/early-holiday. The THQ complete pack for £26.49 is very tempting but I’d never get around to playing all the games.
• XBox Live is allowing Silver accounts to play online for free all weekend as part of Xtival at http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/xtival09winter/.
• Sony are giving us some free Uncharted 2 downloadable content as confirmed by C&VG
• To celebrate Killzone’s fifth birthday it’s a Double XP weekend for Killzone 2 on the PS3 and there is the possibility of some free DLC at killzone.com

Not bad eh!

Well, the Modern Warfare 2 release didn’t go too badly eh! Launch party in London’s Leicester Square and it sold 1.23 million copies on the first day in the UK alone (according to gamesindustry.biz).

I wasn’t planning on buying it but I couldn’t walk past it in Morrisons when it was priced at only £25.99. (So much for the £55 everyone was expecting to pay!)

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get it online at all tonight. I’m hoping this is just a temporary glitch and Infinity Ward haven’t underestimated the amount of people trying to get online. (Surely they’d have to be completely stupid if that were the case though?)

Well, there have been far too many games to play this month!

A decent chunk of it has been spent on Uncharted 2. Amazing game and, you’ve heard it all before, but it definately sets a few new benchmarks on the PS3.

If that wasn’t enough I grabbed the Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City disc (had a few GAME points stored up so managed to get it for only £20!).

I was pleasantly surprised by “The Ballad of Gay Tony” as it pushes GTA back into the sort of complete madness last seen in San Andreas… Base jumping, drug wars, stealing trains carriages with helicopters and even a gold SMG! If you thought GTA IV took itself too seriously this might be worth another look for you.

It’s Modern Warfare 2 day tomorrow but I think I’m going to hold off on that one as I’ve still only barely started COD4! Too many games, not enough hours in a day

Anyone else looking forward to Uncharted 2 coming out this week on the PlayStation 3?

In anticipation I’ve dug out the original Uncharted and have been attempting to go through it again on Hard which is a damn sight less forgiving than Normal, unsurprisingly!

Also been keeping an eye on the Metacritic score and it’s currently showing a metascore of 97, signifying Universal Acclaim.

Well, I’m supposed to be broke but I’ll just have to find some spare cash from somewhere for Friday!u

More good news for those of us stuck in the UK and still gaming in a recession. The price of Crash Commando is being reduced for a couple of weeks on the Playstation Store.

I vaguely recall playing the demo when it was first released but it might be worth a second look now.

Here’s the official announcement from Sony:

From August 27, 2009 until September 10, 2009, Crash Commando will be reduced to half price, dropping from £7.99 to £3.99. If you’ve not grabbed the chance to blast your friends into oblivion, then there’s never been a better time to set your sights on the PSN game and arm yourself with its goodness.

Source: http://uk.playstation.com/games-media/news/articles/detail/item228090/Crash-Commandos-price-gets-shot-in-half/

This blog has been a bit all play and no work so far. Unfortunately I don’t get to play games all the time.

At work we’re currently evaluating a new shiny development environment called Silverlight 3. If you aren’t familiar with Silverlight (and there’s a good chance you won’t be) it’s Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. In short you can code .NET Framework applications and run them in a browser with the Silverlight plug-in.

The main hurdle at the moment is that because it is so new, Microsoft have only just got it out of beta and haven’t actually got around to releasing any official books and documentation on how to develop applications in it.

So, although it’s always fun to learn, it’s very much a trial and error process at the moment. Anyone else trying to get their head around Silverlight 3 has my sympathies. Here’s a tip: Ibuprofen is great for headaches!

I think we may have jumped right in the deep end though. This is what we are trying to simultaneously comprehend at the moment:

We are creating a WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) web service in C#. This is consumed by a Silverlight application developed in VB.NET (we should have coded it in C# as well, hindsight and all that). The “pages” in the Silverlight application are created using a subset of XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) which is part of Microsoft’s new XML-based application design framework called Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF for short).

Confused? So were we and we still are to a certain extent. But we’re getting there.

It’s hard work.

[If you are currently starting out developing in Silverlight please beware when googling. Most of the information out there is related to Silverlight 2 and the Silverlight 3 beta. The final Silverlight 3 release code is radically different in many ways so careful what you read online. If you are faced with a method or property in your code that just won't compile, double-check it actually exists in the version of Silverlight you have installed.

Until something official is published, the best help and advice I've come across so far is from the blog's of the Silverlight developers themselves. One of the most useful resources is Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer at http://timheuer.com/blog/.]