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I have a half written post doing a comparison of the various social gaming platforms on the iPhone, and then Apply goes and announced (link via Engadget) Game Center today during their show-and-tell for iPhone OS 4.0 and essentially sounds the death knell for all of them. Because let’s face it, when Apple joins the fray (for good or ill), especially on their own device, everyone else is shit out of luck. With a friends list, leaderboards, achievements and even multiplayer matchmaking they have all of the ingredients that draw users to social gaming networks. Xbox Live is the gold standard in the console space and I can say with relative certainty that Apple will quickly take that crown in the mobile space. OpenFient, Plus+ and Scoreloop will need to do something aboslutely amazing to beat was is essentially going to be built in functionality on all future iPhones.

My advice: quit now, and go sell knit hats or something.

Gowalla by Austin, TX based Alamofire and Foursquare are two new location based mobile apps that were release this year and both have been getting an lot of attention. Location based apps and games are gaining quite a bit of popularity as GPS becomes almost ubiquitous in our handheld devices. The raise of Geocaching is a great example of how a techy hobby has gone mainstream with the increase of GPS aware devices; just do a search for geocaches near you and you’ll know what I mean.

In concept Gowalla and Foursquare are rather similar. You create an account, get connected with friends, and then you start “checking-in” to various establishments as you go about your daily or nightly travels. I’ve decided to write up what’s turned into a rather lengthy comparison of the two and which one I prefer. So without further ado, here goes:

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I did a presentation at my office recently about the basics of XNA 3.0 and what’s possible with it. During that presentation someone asked me if XNA was being used by any major developers to create games. At the time I didn’t have any specific examples but I did say that I believed the platform had the capability to do so. Yesterday I found an article that talks about the new Rock Band Network a joint venture between MTV (which owns Harmonix, the company that developed Rock Band) and Microsoft to create a community driven platform for adding content to Rock Band.

This is pretty much what I’ve been expecting from one of the two music games from the beginning. Some way for emerging artists and bands to throw their master tracks up and have something spit out the appropriate colored buttons on virtual fret board. I actually think the Rock Band Network is an even better solution than some sort of algorithm. Now, there’s a way for labels, bands, or studios to put a track on the Network and have a dedicated community help create the virtual track.

Now, being that this Network is actually a subset of XNA Creators Club it’s unsurprising that the tracks created through this network will only be available on the Xbox 360. Bummer for those PS3 owners, but in the grand scheme of things a venture like this is only going to improve the music game genre which, in my opinion, has become incredibly stale and over-saturated. Maybe I’ll even dig my plastic instruments out of the garage and turn the game on again.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The Rock Band Network is the result of a 16-month development process with a number of partners. Most important was Microsoft. Tracks released through the Rock Band Network will only be available at first to Xbox 360 users, as it relies on Microsoft’s XNA game development platform and its Creators Club online community of developers.

The Creators Club allows freelance developers or hobbyists to make their own games and sell them on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Games created through this process must first be submitted to the Creators Club community for game-play and content review before they are added to the marketplace.

The Rock Band Network marks the first time that XNA and the Creators Club have been used to outsource the development of expansions to an existing game, according to Dave Mitchell, the Microsoft product unit manager in charge of overseeing the two programs.

The Creators Club reviews about 30-50 games per month. Because MTV and Microsoft expect the number of “Rock Band” submissions to quickly dwarf these totals, the software giant took the unprecedented step of creating a custom version of the Creators Club for Harmonix, complete with a customized set of review procedures specific to music games-including checking for copyright infringement-which Harmonix will host separate from the existing Microsoft site.

I’ve wanted to tinker around with creating videogames for years. I’ve been a “gamer” for most of my life. We had an Atari 2600 when I was very young because my dad thought it was cool. The Nintendo Entertainment System was the first games system that I could really call my own and I’ve owned just about every system released since then. I’ve built my own MAME joystick layout (that’ll be coming in a future post) but I’ve never been able to break into the creation realm. The price for entry was just too high. The level of programming knowledge, or the tools necessary were always a little out of reach for the amount of time and effort I had to spare. However, with Microsoft’s XNA offering the whole prospect seems to finally be within reach. Read more…