Game days at Salford University

I've been lucky this week. The opportunity to coordinate a gaming event has came up as part of a university wide "Student Experience Week". In coordination with Usman Ali (the university's union president) we've devised a two day gaming event. The event will be the opportunity for students from my course to share their love for video games with all Salford students. We have agreed on having tournaments open to students/ staff for the following games on the xbox 360 (hopefully with £50 prize money and trophies for each winner).

• Halo 3
• Street Fighter IV
• Fifa 09
• Pro Evolution Soccer 09

The two day event is going to happen on the 22nd & 24th of April (first week back after easter break) between 1pm & 5pm each day. As well as the games event other fun events will be taking place over the entire week. We'll also have a Nintendo Wii set up on a huge projector. I'll add more info on the event as it gets closer. More info on the whole week can be found here...

http://www.salfordstudents.com

P.S this weekend I have the joys of Next, we have a sale on and its pretty crazy mad as usual! + I have a group for my final years studies at Salford - GOOD TIMES!.

Project Management 4 Presentation

Today I presented a business proposal with two fellow students Steven Matthews & Louie Mitchell. The business proposal detailed a small company attempting to gain funding for Nintendo Wii development. If anyone wants to take a look I've uploaded the presentation onto gigashare, just follow the link below (requires powerpoint 2007 for PC or 2008 for Mac), I'm also meeting the president of Salford's student union to talk about the proposed games week today.

www.gigasize.com/get.php?d=2cdgx0x1fnc

(P.S search for a font on google named "babelfish" & install before opening)

Bargain bin video games & me

Above: Beyond Good and Evil a bargain? obviously!

So I've been kinda busy at university over the past weeks. Finally nailed down a group for my 3rd year project which is awesome to get sorted. Anyway, I'm not sure what most gamers are like by do you find yourself buying too many games? Here in the UK the second hand market makes buying several games at once quite appealing because they are cheap as chips. I've found that I used to falling into the "buy a game for cheap play it for a few hours and I'm done". The most recent example came when I found Ubisoft's 2003 classic Beyond Good & Evil for £2.50, yes a bargain! I played for several hours and felt like I completely got my moneys worth. Another game was Dragon Quest on the PS2. Finding the game for £1.99 brand new (I must just be lucky) I put almost 20 hours in. I guess the moral on this blog post before I head of to my high flying sunday job (joke) is, don't buy so many £40 games! Price as always is so so important because most cheaper games are better experiences than the "new releases" on your local stores shelves. Another game I got cheap (£5) that lasted me forever was Level 5's JRPG Rogue Galaxy, If anyones not played it and your a fan of JRPG's its a must!

Have a great Sunday, I have work till six, then I'm gonna watch the Battlestar Galactica grand finale on TV :)

Google Maps are really fun! Part One!

Above: Ha the place where I live, good old Daisy Bank Road! Now lets go to Japan!

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Above: One of the many Club Sega's in Tokyo! Ha are the waiting to play Street Fighter IV?

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Above: An empty main road in Kyoto, ha its Nintendo HQ! I wonder if they serve caviar at lunch now?

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Got a spare five minutes? Google Maps has an amazing new feature that allows user to see street views of most major cities around the globe! Had loads of fun with this new feature!

History & Analysis 4 - Symposium Paper

Last thursday at 10-am I presented a paper to my class for History & Analysis on teens and gaming. The title for this symposium paper was "The Halo Generation: Teenagers & Video Games". Overall the paper covers the following key topics.

• The teenager game, a history
• Halo: More than boys and their toys?
• What about the girls?

Heres a link to download a .pdf version of the paper if anyones interested in taking a look. I used the whole twenty minutes but 15 minutes in my lecturer gave me a five minute warning, ha i though I was on 5 minutes, guess that means I thought it was going well!

The Halo Generation: Teenagers & Video Games - Link

http://www.gigasize.com/get.php?d=sjnwmdmb2xd

Enjoy

Game Tournaments didn't work out, then it went a bit serendipity :)

So the Street Fighter IV & Halo 3 stuff at university didn't take off but a new cause has came to my attention. Speaking with the University student union president Usman Ali, a few CVG students are going to help on a university wide gaming event. The idea so far is having three afternoon's in a row the week back after the easter break. The event will have Street Fighter IV & Halo 3 so its gonna be great. I have to talk more with Usman. I'll keep my blog updated with more info as it happens :).

Game Tournaments At My University

Heres two posters for some game tournaments I'm arranging for CVG students over the coming weeks. One will be for Capcom's newest brawler Street Fighter IV (xbox 360 version as they have one at university) and xbox 360 fanboys favorite Halo 3.

I Kissed a Wii and I liked it!

Ok, so I bought into the Wii when it launched, I stood outside Gamestation alone in Manchester at Midnight at launch talking about how awesome the controls looked with complete strangers (I was more excited for Twilight Princess than Wii Sports like half the queue to be honest). My experience of Wii has been mixed, coming from being loyal to Nintendo during their "troubles" i.e. Gamecube and Nintendo 64 being trashed by the competition (I still believe Pokemon saved Nintendo from going the way of Sega) the Wii continues to surprise me. Its easy to complain about what it doesn't do, or that most games look worse than Gamecube titles but my being able to smell a bad game at 100 ft has saved me from the tons of bad/ broken Wii titles. So back to the point of this post. 

The last Wii game that grabbed me was Super Mario Galaxy because it was FUN! Yesterday I went back to the system and even tho its clearly far from superior to the competition (xbox 360 with its 3 core blah blah and the Playstation 3 and the cell, P.S. I own them both so I feel i can make a non fanboy analysis of Wii). Super Mario Galaxy just works and its still the one game I can't imagine using any other control interface, its almost a perfect example of how to make a Wii game that is a Gamecube game with waggle or worse. 

My friends think I hate Wii, sure I moan occasionally about what I doesn't do, forgetting what it gets right. Thinking about the system over the past week Its clear I think it has a place under my television because it offers something the other systems just can't. Sure some games like Dead Rising have no place on a Wii but some like Galaxy deserve to be in any gamers collection next to "hardcore" games like Fallout 3 and Killzone 2.