So I waited around for XNA 3.0 to come out, which was supposed to fix the deployment problems with some kind of package installer that would make sure people had all the goofy prerequisites to run XNA games on Windows.  Long story short, it's finally here, the installer is weird as hell, it hides your program in (I'm not making this up) a randomly named folder, and won't let you make game assets on the fly.  Getting someone to download a game you made is challenging enough, the last thing I want to do is answer questions like "WHERE THE HELL DID YOU INSTALL MY GAME" to people who aren't even paying me.

So I had a choice:  

A) Put up with XNA on windows goofery and continue to make freeware PC games 3 people appreciate

B) Buy a(nother) Mac because they don't support mine any more (jerks), and try to learn iPhone development and get a game I worked on for a year randomly delisted from their store because they are assholes

C) Learn Java and try to make Android phone games

D) Buy an Xbox 360, and use XNA to sell games on their store, where they don't randomly delist your shit because they are assholes.   

So I went with D.  That's right, I said it.  They aren't the assholes.  Apple has annoyed me more than Microsoft.  The XNA dev environment will run on any PC I own, and they don't delist user generated shit from the Xbox store at random.  Once your project is peer-reviewed for things like crashing and/or flashing goatse on the screen in alternating colors 60 times a second, it's up.  Then it's up to the community to decide whether it is worth paying $2.50-$10 for.   And if it sells, you get 70% of that.  If they market it for you, a bit less.  But they're marketing it for you, so go cry all the way to the bank.

I started to poke around with Android, but Java (or at least the Android library) confuses the hell out of me.  Even though I could slog through some of the tutorials, it just didn't get me that excited at the prospects given what all was involved.

But back to the Xbox 360.  After some Gamestop credit, the 360 Pro with a used VGA cable ran about $310. I set it up to my monitor in the office and did all the installery, which is quite a bit faster than setting up a PS3.  They have their version of the Mii avatars, which my wife did not like as much (I have to agree, she was much cuter on the Wii) along with a streaming Netflix thing, which would be cool but I'd have to pay another $50 a year for the Xbox Live Gold subscription to use it.  I passed for now.   I did sign up for the creator's club (another $99 plunked down) and called it a night, as it took about 3 hours or so for the Xbox's XNA Game Studio Connect program to figure out that I had a valid subscription.

This morning I went through the process of running my first 360 program.  Well, it wasn't really my program, it was the Xbox 360 template XNA gives you.  I ran the XNA Game Studio Connect program and switched back to the PC on the monitor.  I hit F5 to run the template program, and switched back.  The Xbox transferred the software, and displayed a blue screen.  I yelled to my wife, "It works!" and she poked her head in the room.  

"Isn't a blue screen a bad thing?"

Not today, lady!  This was a "Cornflower Blue" screen.  And just to confirm, I hit the back button on the Xbox controller to quit the template program, and smoothly went back to the XNA Game Studio Connect program. 

I have a long road ahead, but this I am excited about.  400 bucks for a game console dev kit?  Hell yes.  Oh, hell, hell, hell yes.  Nintendo?  Sony?  Are you listening?  

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