Theme of the month

So i thought after searching through the many themes available on Xbox live that it is such a huge task to find a decent looking free theme. So why not provide the community with a little help by providing a Best Free theme of the month. If you dont agree with me please post a comment or send me a mail as i am always welcome to suggestions.
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The Envey

At this point in time i am really envious of MS unless someone else can show me better stats. If there is anything i love its stats , so here goes.I so wish i could work there , even if just with the live server and nothing else.

MS Data Center Stats

Games Galore

In a turn of events that totally surprised me i bought a total of 11 games in the past week. This is split into the following categories , 4 XBLA Games and 7 normal games. While i never buy this many games at one time , this time i had to make a exception because i was really falling behind with Xbox gaming recently.Also the 7 normal Xbox games I bought were not for me but for my brother who I have been trying to get a bit more involved in gaming.

Ok so time for a quick run through the XBLA games that I have played so far and what I have enjoyed or not enjoyed. As soon as i get a chance to play the normal xbox games I will hit the blog with another post.

XBLA Games

Braid

This game really caught me off guard ,what MS usually does is when a new or heavy hitting game comes out its basically advertised all over the dashboard. While this is a nice way to advertise it usually annoys me because the games are usually not that good. When I saw that ad for braid I definitely did not want to download it.

After googling a bit more info for the game I decided to at least get the demo and see how it looks. This is where the game surprised me for the second time at +-140mb for a demo I was a hoping that the game might at least be above average. After finally downloading the game and playing the demo all I can say is wow.

Each level is beautifully painted and every puzzle is unique , while this is a bold claim after the purchasing the game i can definitely say that this is true. On top of that if you enjoy a platform puzzler then you will really enjoy these puzzles as they require a bit of thought on the players side. A very innovative thing i saw in the game was the use of paintings, these paintings are created by the player after picking up pieces of the painting through the stage. Once completed or even partially completed the player can actually use the paintings canvas and painting it self as part of the environment.

The picture above is an exapmle of how the story is told , in between each level the player find these books which explains abit more of the story as you progress. Sharp eyed players will notice that this is not the only way the story is told , the other means is through the paintings that the player collects and build.

It also pretty obvious that the roots of this game stem from the original mario games. While the creators have tried to not make it too obvious the little mario ‘gems’ found around the world complement the game to make it perfect and add a little humor to the game as well.

The image below taken from the official site describes perfectly some of the mechanics used in the game.

Also if by now you still have not bought the game , make sure that you go and get it , its worth every MS point ;) .

Geometory Wars 2

This is the second game that i bought and without a doubt one of the better games available on the XBLA.

Based on the original Geometry Wars with a whole lot of extra oomph added to give it that extra kick needed to make it survive in this competitive market.

The number of features and improvements added to the game are tremendous and it really show. For starters the game is now fully HD compliant , so when playing it at higher resolutions the graphics are not distorted at all. Quite a few new enemy ships have been added and the original enemy ship designs have been redone to complete the new look to the game.

By far the biggest change to the game is the addition of the new game modes. With 5 new modes + co-op play (versuses or co-op) there is a ton of fun to be had with this game.

Modes Include :

• Deadline : Get as much score as possible before the timer runs out.
• King : Stay in the circle to shoot the enemies and gain points.
• Pacifism : No weapons kill enemies using the new bonus bars.
  
• Waves : Waves of increasing number of ships attack survive as long as possible.
• Sequences : Enemies spawn in the same sequence’s , see how many sequences you can survive.

If you are looking for a great co-op game this is definitely it , just keep in mind this is a game for the persistent and challengers. If you give up easily you will really not enjoy this game as the difficulty at times can be quite steep. But if i could convince my siblings who hated the first geometry wars with a passion to play this version then i don’t think many people will have a problem getting hooked to this game.

If ever you are online and want to hit a game of GW2 send me a message and we can get some gaming on.

~stalkerh

Size of your world

My daily commute consists of a total of 120km’s per day based on a rough estimate i took recently , the entire journey takes roughly 3 – 4 hours out of my day. While to me this is not that much because i use a car to travel , i would assume that some who uses a similar mode of transport would feel the same.

I would like to imagine what it would seem like to some one who walks to work on a daily basis , to them it would be as if i was traveling half way around the world. On the flip side of the coin someone that has to travel regularly long distances by plane a car drive seems like nothing to them. Based on this i would like to say that your world is based on how far and how often you travel.

While the internet has made this less noticeable because we can communicate with people over great distances the feeling still persists. I have seen this effect on quite a few people that i know , because they rarely move around they end up attaching them selves to a specific location and this severely limits there perspective of the world.

Let me know what you think about this because one of my dreams is to travel the world ;).
~stalkerh

My Short URL

When we get down to programming techniques, I have tried most of them out at some time or another , that is with regards to the .Net framework. Alas the one thing I have been trying to find a use for is http handlers.

Handlers are an integral part of the ASP.net framework , but also one of the more tricky things to use since they have no general outstanding features. They allow you to write general system wide modules , so for the average person that has worked with .Net, the use of handlers is not very apparent.

Not to long ago I came across a small problem at work that was solved very nicely using an http handler and I thought I should share this. The general problem was the following: like every other business out there, we have to interface with many other systems that are not controlled by us and as such there are many changes that need to be made workable using workarounds. The particular problem revolved around the specified field being used to store an internal URL (so that it can be used at a later stage ) being too short and since they would not change the column size we were left with a system that could not function.

So I proposed the following solution to the team; create a local in-house shrinker. Due to security reasons we could not leave our URLs on an external server , so the thought of using a shrinker or any of the likes was out of the question. So all that we did was create a single fully indexed table to store the original URL and return the ID to the user as part of a clean URL using the handler.

The beauty of this setup is that it can be implemented without affecting the users. A very good example of this is ELMAH.  It is by far one of the coolest implementations of http handlers. It’s able to intercept any errors that occur in your web app and handle them as defined in your web.config .

Just remember there is aways more than one way to do something in .Net ;) .

~stalkerh

Leaky Memory

One of the things that i am not very with is my reliance on the session state. Typically this is useful when data needs to be persisted between post backs. The down side and most over looked part of this is that depending on how the server is setup a lot of undue load can be put on the server.

I faced the full wrath of this last week Friday. The previous day , the IT team moved our web server to a new server due to the fact that we had out grown the current server. Everything had been tested on face value before the move i.e. All pages opened correctly and nothing seemed to crash spectacularly. Then on Friday , one of the pages that uses the session state started crashing with object not set to a instance exception.
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