Yes, I missed blogging for two weeks. First was due to being focused and second was because of E3. Status has not changed a whole lot. I have mostly settled on a technology, but unfortunately one of the dependent tools upgraded versions. The framework I want to use (MonoGame), has not yet been updated to that newer version of Xamarin. Being that it is open source, it may be on the verge of being abandoned. MonoGame is a clone of XNA for other platforms. Microsoft abandoned XNA four years ago. Microsoft did buy Zamarin which does promote the use of MonoGame. I am still evaluating if MonoGame can do what I need it to. Having it be completely broken right now does not make it look good.
E3 was very underwhelming. It was borderline bad. It makes me question whether I am going next year. As a comparison, last year I had about 40 games that I took pictures or videos of. This year, I took 3. Three.
This year Sony decided to make a mobile app to register for their most popular properties instead of having lines. They released slots when the show opened and by Thrusday, they were gone in minutes. I think this is a major fail for Sony. First the miss out because people did not know they needed an app to see or play demos. Second because those people were not standing in line inside Sony's booth, they were in other companies' booths instead. Given a choice between not playing a demo and waiting in line to play a demo, waiting in line wins as long as it is not hours in one line. Those that did have lines in Sony were so long they were mostly outside the booth and hours long. I would have liked to have demoed Farpoint, Sea of Thieves, and Recore. Sony did not even show up with any new hardware other than VR that they showed last year I did see a play through of Days Gone By, as they apparently couldn't fill up the theater from the app and were begging people in the area to come see it. I did not see anything that makes it stand out from the 101 other zombie shooters out there now.
Nintendo: why did you bother showing up? You thought it was appropriate to show up with only ONE title and no new hardware. Not even VR? No open booth. One long line that was closed the eight times I tried to get in it. I even sat near the end of the line to see how fast it moved. 10 people every 15 minutes is pretty slow. And looking inside your booth from the portals had it being mostly empty. Your convention people looked tired and harassed. Good luck getting people to work your booth next year. Tell you what, there was a tiny company in a booth next to yours that was doing ultra cheap VR. Perhaps you could gobble them up. At least they didn't have a line and had more people per square foot in their booth than you did. I would have like to have played the Zelda demo.
As much as this scares me, Microsoft was the closest to being a winner this year. Yes, they did cancel Fable Legends mere weeks before the show. They did show the new slim Xbox. It is not any more functional that the existing Xbox One, but it is smaller and does not have a brick. I did play a couple games on them. Comparing the heat output from the regular Xbox Ones to the Xbox One S had the S being much cooler, as in cool to the touch. Microsoft also came loaded with games to show off. They had to make up for Fable some how.
Lastly, I have stopped reading Facebook. Even after significantly trimming three times, the amount of time I was spending kept growing to more than two hours a day. Most of that time was scrolling past posts I had no interest in seeing. I do not need to see every post someone else likes or comments on. I still play a couple games there. I wish there was an easier way to see what I want to see. I need life, not Facebook Lice.
