PAX 2007 ROCKS!!!!

Hey guy's I'm at PAX 2007.  I've been having fun checking out all the latest games and stuff, but I rather happened to stumble upon this thing by accident. Actually initially I was looking for World of Warcraft video's when I stumbled upon Jonathan Coulton's song code monkey. You can see the video below on youtube :).







I liked it so much that I stumbled across his website . Some of his other songs were also cool like Re Your Brians. You can listen to them on the site and stuff. But what happened ultimately was that I ended up looking for concerts which linked me to PAX2007. I was like hey, I like gaming and I've not been around much so I set off for PAX. It was quite entertaining, the company stalls were great, Jonathan Coultons performance rocked I even got him to sign my zombies shirt and my cast. If you're my parents please ignore the last three words of the previous line :).

I liked the video showcases about the future of gaming, designing video games, 8 bit audio[Which really is a neat thing]. People are using Gameboys to compose 8 bit audio and its actually an art form. Kohina is a great site where you get a lot of old 8 bit game music. Although its not technically the same as people are doing nowadays with their gameboy's its nevertheless equally fun in my opionion.

The atmosphere reminded me about college and stuff, the event team running around with their enforcers T shirts, chicks in dressed up  like NPC's from some MMORPG and others carrying AK-47's. Apart from the chicks, we had stuff like this at my university  back in pakistan at a much smaller scale and it was called the UGX.

All in all it was a great day and a great experience. The part when I actually got to play games was at the end where they had a demo section. They had free playable demo's of old nintendo games from ages long forgotten as well as the latest titles like Bioshock and GuitarHero. It was while playing guitar hero that I made some new friends.

In fact I liked guitar hero so much that I want to have it, but because I spent my annual gaming budget on my laptop, it didnt look like I'd be able to play it until I came across Frets On Fire, the open source version of guitar hero available on Windows, Linux and Mac. You guys can get it here. It hooks up to the actual guitar from guitar hero. And if you dont have one, you can play it via keyboard. The video below shows the code monkey demo of frets on fire:-









Although it does not have characters with guitars and stuff, it has all the basic functionality and I guess it'll work as a substitute for some. I wont think twice about buying the actual guitar hero if it comes out on the PC though.

Anyways have fun and game on.

Face Recognition in Live Search

Check this article out. It is about Face recognition in Live Search:-

http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2007/07/27/three-new-features-in-live-search-images.aspx