XNA: Demo Scene Revisited!

Ok, so this is cool. Want to develop your own games for the Xbox? Well, in this Autumn, you can, thanks to XNA. See? All that time coding in C# for the Window Mobile-based Pocket PC hasn't been wasted! ;-)

Now, I'm old, so when I was really into computers I was editing an Amiga magazine and talking about the "demo scene" and stuff like that. Hey, I was young, I didn't know any better. What I do know was that the Amiga demo scene unleashed an amazing flood of creativity that I've never seen since in the computing world. The internet wave came, the Amiga died (I know, some people still think it's on a life-support system, but I'm happy to let it go) and all the cool kids jumped to that meme*.

When the Sony Playstation's dev kit was released years ago - consisting of a Playstation with a icky Linux dev kit and a weird fuzzy coating - I tried it out, but it was a bit.. I don't know.. it just didn't do it for me.

But now I'm excited again. Developing in managed code is such fun, that this looks like it's going to re-ignite those Demo Scene days all over again. This is enough to encourage me to buy an XBox 360. (I'd been holding out!)

(*Meme is the word of the year. I'm not sure what it means, but I thought I would use it.)