joshbuhler.com

Got home from MAX, and the next morning I fired up my Xbox360 to get the dashboard update. Best feature so far? The Netflix streaming. I love 30 Rock, and one of my favorite episodes is “Hard Ball”, especially the ending musical number. (Season 1, ep 15, if you’d like to watch it.) That was the first thing I watched once I got my Netflix account linked to the Xbox. Being able to stream several seasons of 30 Rock, The Office, and even The Addams Family has been great so far.

Another feature I didn’t really think I’d have too much fun with was the Avatars. I built mine last night, and think I did a fair job getting something that looks like me. Of course, if I could get a black Fender or Flex hat for the little guy, he’d look even more like me. Though, the most fun I’ve had with this guy is playing with my (almost) 2-year old daughter Brooklynn. You can use the controller to move the avatar’s head around, make them talk, etc. Once this guy appeared on the screen, Brooklynn was captivated, and we spent a fair amount of time with me controlling him like a virtual puppet, and her giggling. Good times.

So, did you guys get avatar’d, and do they look anything like you? You can share your avatars easily online by using the following URL:

http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/GAMERTAG/avatar-body.png

Just replace GAMERTAG with your own, and you’re in business.

Many Xbox gamers know of the upcoming “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) that’ll be hitting next month on the 19th. Among other new features included with this update, you’ll be able to create your very own Mii’s Avatars to represent yourself online.

It appears that some of these Avatars have begun to appear in the wild, and there’s a possibility that Microsoft may have something in the works social network-wise for these little guys. Each gamertag has a URL that can be used to load a PNG of your Avatar, which I’d imagine is for use on blogs, forum avatars, Twitter, etc. However, if you try visiting these URLs in your browser (except for IE) you’ll just receive a bunch of text, and won’t be able to view the Avatar image, unless you download and save the contents of the URL as a .png file.

I wanted to check out some of these Avatars, and since saving and loading each URL was a bit tedious, I decided to build a quick & dirty Flex app to load the various Avatar images. (Much faster, right?)

Here’s the app: http://blog.joshbuhler.com/flash/360avatars/

You can either select from a list of known Gamertags that already have Avatars, or enter in a Gamertag of your choice. Though, if the Gamertag doesn’t have an Avatar yet, the image won’t load.

(By the way, the skin for the app is the slick Undefined by Alberto Alcaraz, winner of ScaleNine’s Skin to Win Challenge.)

This week is the annual Game Developers Conference, which I love, not for game announcements like we get with the other game shows, but for all the geeky developer stuff we get to see. There’s some awesome stuff coming out of the conference so far, and one of my favorites so far is the announcement of the XNA Community Games from Microsoft.
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These are two of the best kills I’ve ever seen in a game. (Well, technically one is a suicide, but it’s still pretty awesome.) They’re both from Halo 3, using the movie editor thing, which so far, is one of the coolest features of the game.

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Since the level cap on the Call of Duty 4 beta was raised today, I took a break during lunch to play a few games, and see if I could level up a bit.

I managed to level up to 22, completing a few challenges along the way. Before I quit, I decided to check the leaderboards, and was shocked by what I saw:

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Here’s hoping they don’t screw this up - apparently Lucasarts has announced that it’s Star Wars: The Force Unleashed will be coming to the Wii.

Since day 1 of the Wii’s motion-sensing controllers having been revealed, there has been a collective sound of people making lightsaber noises, praying that the Wii would have enough midi-chlorians to be able to wield a lightsaber. Now, it sounds like that might be happening next spring.

Until then, if you’re on a Mac, and have a WiiMote - you should be able to kill some time with WiiSaber.

Anyone that’s ever played Tecmo Super Bowl knows Bo. And this is why we loved to be him, and hated to be against him.

“WHY ARE YOU HERE, SOLDIER?!!”

Super Mario War is one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. It’s essentially what you would have got, had Nintendo included a death match mode into Super Mario World.

The game has several modes, including your basic deathmatch, king of the hill, and chicken tag, where whoever stomps the chicken, becomes the chicken. The chicken moves slower than everyone else, but whoever stays chicken the longest wins.

You have access to the standard assortment of weapons, fire flowers, mushrooms, hammers, capes, etc.

The game is open-source, and works for Mac, Linux, & Windows, up to four players. I’ve found that the best way to play it with a controller pad. I’ve got a USB adapter for connecting SNES controllers to my Mac, and that’s probably the best way to play this thing. It looks, sounds, & acts just like a SNES, game, and using the controller completes the illusion.

Download Super Mario War

A while back I posted a link to a page from Opera’s Developer community that contained some info on developing Wii-Friendly web pages. However, for whatever reason Opera has decided that info is no longer worth sharing, and now you’ll receive an “Access Denied” error when visiting that page.

I’ve been working on a presentation for developing Flash games targeting the Wii browser for uFlash, and I’ve been rounding up some interesting info I figured I link into one place, at least for my own use if nothing else.

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