XNA: The cure for the common gamer!
I'm a self-professed gamer and MMO fanboi. I particularly love MMORPGs. I've played just about every major MMORPG that has been released upon the gaming public, many minor ones, and some that have been canceled prior to release. I, however, find myself in a slump lately. I'm bored with World of Warcraft (WoW). And while I enjoyed the game-play of Age of Conan (AoC), I found the lack of polish, bugs, and general lack-luster feel once I left the newbie island (Tortage) enough to make me want to cancel my account. What actually did make me cancel my account was that my friends (what few decided to give the game a try) were rarely playing or had already dropped their own accounts.
Unlike a lot of other players who left WoW behind to try out AoC, I have not returned to WoW. Instead, I have been playing other, non-MMO games (say it ain't so!). My current list of installed games includes Rainbow Six: Vegas, Call of Duty 4, Civilization 4 (with the Warlords and Beyond the Sword expansions), Dungeon Runners, and Exteel. These have been fun but don't really satisfy my gaming appetite like a true MMORPG.
So, while I patiently wait for Warhammer Online, I've decided to supplement my above listed games with some of my own! I've dusted off my XNA Game Studio 2.0 skills and rebooted my quest to learn XNA.
I'm currently working through Wrox's Professional XNA Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360 and Windows with XNA Game Studio 2.0. So far it's been a good learning experience and I've found myself hooked on XNA development! I originally started my XNA learning experience several months ago along with some coworkers and we had made some good progress before our workloads totally overwhelmed us and we dropped it. Well, now I'm back and I hope to get even farther along this time! As a testament to how much fun it is to develop in XNA, I was up until 1:45am last night (or is that this morning?), refactoring my XNA Pong game! /yawn
So thanks Benjamin for a great book, some addictive lessons in XNA, and keeping me up at night!