As far back as i can remember i have always been a gamer. Years ago I played RoboKnight and Treasure Island on my Commodore 16 + 4, then upgraded to an Amstrad CPC464 and enjoyed such classics as Operation Wolf or Renegade. This was years before I had even heard of Nintendo and Bill Gates had just released his 3rd version of MSDOS. In those days games took 10 minutes to load from a magnetic tape, graphics were considered hi-tec if they had more than 4 colours on screen at one time and it would take you 4 hours to get to the evil wizard Zak in Dizzy only to die and have to start over again (there were no save points then).

Today's games have thankfully come a long way and now Microsoft has just launched version 1 of XNA Game Studio Express, which allows anyone to develop their own games for use on the PC or on the XBox 360. Microsoft XNA is a set of tools, complete with a managed runtime environment, that facilitates computer game design, and game development. XNA brings all aspects of game development into a single system. The XNA toolset will become more and more popular as the bigger game makers begin to trial and develop games with XNA. At present XNA developers tend to develop open source, free games that are as much a learning tool for the developer as they are for the reader of ther blog, but in time more and more games will appear that use XNA. There is however one drawback, XNA is supposed to be used with C# and not VB, the latter of which i prefer and have become quite good with. I started using C# and i understand the basics but i just don't like it as much as VB, also, with the exception of The Z Buffer and Microsoft's own Coding 4 Fun site there aren't too many sites out there that cater for the VB.NET Game Developer. For this reason i though i would add an XNA section to my own site