From Shaders to Singstar via Mario

We started the day bright and early. At 9:00 we were learning how to use shaders at an XNA lab.

Plenty of nice monitors for the XNA lab..

It has to be said that I'm not actually a great video game programmer. But after today I'm a lot happier writing shader code. Even if it looks a lot like C++. Once we'd got our flashy music player working I bailed out of the lab and headed for the next keynote. I really wanted to see the next man speak.

Building Mr Miyamoto

Shigeru Miyamoto is a true video gaming legend. The man behind Mario and a host of other Nintendo classics last came to GDC 8 years ago, and today he was back to give another presentation. The slant was broadly similar to the Sony pitch yesterday. Community is good. Games which are fun are good. And we now have games which can bring in people who up until now have never played games. Including Mrs. Miyamoto. The presentation ended with some mouth watering footage of Super Mario Galaxy.

Coming to a Wii near you soon

At lunchtime I took a bunch of pictures.

Reflections on a city square

Flowers

Another nice day

Later on there was another community themed talk, this time by the brains behind EyeToy, SingStar and Buzz. It seems to me that games are getting more and more mainstream, and soon they will be part of life for pretty much everyone. Later we went for another wander.

567 Pine

Grant

More nice lumpy streets