Tom Russel is writing a quarterly magazine about video games. The first issue, available here, is 74 pages long, 28 of which are about M.C.Kids.

I can't claim to be unbiased since I made the game but I really enjoyed reading his reviews, deconstruction and thoughts.

I'm not familiar with more than a few debuggers, but, the ones I use generally have an issue with single line member functions.

What's your experience? Lots of management books etc say that private offices are super important for software engineers. The basic argument usually goes that engineers need to concentrate and be uninterrupted. That it takes them 30-45 minutes to get "in the zone". If they are interrupted for anything (phone call, conversation, question, distraction from the cube next to them, someone else's cell phone ringing) they don't just lose the 5 to 10 minutes for the interruption, they instead need another 30-45 minutes to get back into "the zone". To get their mind back around the problem they were solving. So, if they are constantly or even often interrupted they will never get in the zone and never really get any real work done.

So I went crazy and picked up RockBand, special edition for 360 with the guitar, drums and mic AND... I went and got Guitar Hero 3 and the XPlorer Guitar. This was all mostly for a thanksgiving party. In total that's like $340 basically just for 1 game!

But, I gotta say Rockband is some of the most fun I've ever had playing a video game. We had a blast playing all afternoon and late into the night.

A lotta issues came up though.

So, I went to Best Buy today to pick up Super Mario Galaxy and they claimed it wasn't coming out till tomorrow 11/13. So I called Gamestop. They have it. I checked Nintendo's website it says 11/12. So I give this info to the robots at Best Buy hoping I don't have to drive across town to get it. Nope, their computer says 11/13 so they are not putting them out on 11/12 even though they have them. I'm curious what the story behind that is. Stupid mix up at Best Buy HQ or some other reason they are not allowed to put it out on release day. Oh well, Best Buy loses my sale. Worse for them, I was going to buy COD4 and the Ratatouille blu-ray but I'll get them all somewhere else.