My 360 died!

The good old (one year old to be exact) Xbox 360 at my home died on my birthday over the weekend. While munching on my cereal, I turned on the 360 and was greeted with a frozen screen after trying to log on to Xbox Live. Cycling the power gave me the dreaded Red Ring of Death.

It wasn't apparent at first, as I found out that the RROD was a misnomer. It's 3 red lights around the power switch, less one quadrant on the top right corner.

It's quite ironic, since I got it as a birthday gift exactly a year ago from my wife. The good news is that Microsoft has been very prompt on their responses and support. I got an email reply on evening of the 12th, apologising for the "inconvenience".

Since their hotlines were closed on weekends, I called in this morning and was greeted by a friendly operator, and after verifying that it was indeed "unfortunate" that my Xbox 360 has passed on due to hardware fault, they will be providing me with a "new Xbox 360 taken off the factory, in an unmarked box".

I'll be exchanging it a week later, so it's a belated birthday gift from MS to me! :)

SP Student Blogs List

If you look to the right of the page, you'll notice a new addition of bloglist that shows student blogs. If you've got a blog related to Game Development or generally your life as a GD student in SP, let me know, and I'll add it to the list.

Keep clean and polite in your blog though! Vulgarities, personal attacks and general bad behavior will not be tolerated. :)

CONTRAST Game Design and Development Workshops

The IGDA Singapore Student Chapter and the NUS Games Development Group are organising a series of workshops on computer game design and game development; we will be covering game art, creating games in Flash and Game Maker, and rapid game design.

The workshops are conducted by professionals in their field and are at an affordable rate ($4 per workshop) so I think it's an excellent chance for students to pick up the skills.

For more information, please refer to this url.

Singapore Game Dev on Gamasutra

With all the big boys coming to play in Singapore, it looks like we're making a big blip on the radar. Gamasutra's got an article analysing why we (Singapore) want a bite of that pie called Game Development.

In other news, the July 2008 issue of Edge contains a good whole section on Singapore in their new "Region Specific" section.

Happy 4th of July by the way! :)

Bluesky Enterprise Day 2008 Company Visits

This came in the mail today:

"On behalf of ACE, I would like to invite your students to sign up for the special Company Visits organised on BlueSky Enterprise Day, 18th July 2008 , at Hwa Chong Institution, from 11am onwards.

The Action Community for Entrepreneurship, ACE, will be organising the BlueSky Festival 2008, from 17 to 18 July 08. As part of this event, we'll be organizing BlueSky Enterprise Day , a half-day of entrepreneurship related programmes for youths.

We will be organizing a visit to the following companies which includes:
- Alpha Synovate (Design and Development Engineering Company on Biofuels)
- Microsoft Innovation Centre (The Software Giant of today's world)
- Mikoishi (Game Development Studio and Publisher)
- Stikfas (Global Brand of Collectors' Figurines and Models)

The company visits are scheduled from 11:30am to about 1.45pm."

A visit to Microsoft and Mikoishi (one of the most successful Singapore game dev companies) sounds most interesting. Unfortunately that I've graduated many years ago.

Check out their site for more details on registration. Scroll to the bottom for the electronic flyer.