I gotta give it up to MS, Windows Phone 7 just made them a player in the smart phone war with Apple and Google.

Check out this demo vid

I was messing around and looking at the XBL Indie Games and I found a pretty cool one. It's called Solar for 240 Microsoft Points. It's a top down game Basically you play as a Star moving through the Universe. There are asteroids and planets floating around as well. When you float up to a planet it's starts to orbit you and then the asteroids will start to orbit the planet and become it's moon. There are also other stars floating around as well and they will steal your planets or throw your planets' orbit off and sling shot out into space. You can of coarse start ramming the other stars and destroy them if you want. It's a kick back and whine down at the end of a intense night of Modern Warefare 2 or Left 4 Dead 2. So for 240 Points you can either buy this game or a goldfish for your avatar.

The other sweet Indie game that I discover is Gratuitous Space Battles on Steam for $19.99. Again it's a top down view. It's another kick back and watch the game play itself. You contol a fleet of ships; kind of. There is no direct control or even ordering one ship to attack another. You are giving the number of ships you can use and a set amount of money per battle. There are 4 different races in which you can play. Each with their own style of ships. There are three different types of ships; Fighters, Frigates, and Cruisers. Each race has 4 different hull designs for each type. Each ship as a set number of slots; hexagons and squares. Hexagons are weapon slots and they can be anything from pulse lasers to EMP missiles to Self-Defense lasers that shoot down incoming missiles to Decoy missiles that trick the Self-Defense lasers. The squares are for engines, shields, power, crew modules, armor, repiar equipment, etc. Everything has stats, and it goes deep into the stats for example with the weapons you see the max and min. range, damage, how much power it uses, how many crew members it takes to run it, how many hits points it adds, how much the price is going to go up, and much much more. You can save each load out of a ship so you can have 3 ships of the same hull design and each one has different weapons, armor, and engines. Before the battle you have to buy all the ships and load outs you want to use for the battle. You can also get each ship some orders, and I don't mean order to attack that enemy ship. I mean orders like fire on ships with the lowest HP, or if that ships HP drops below a certain percent that ship will retreat, or protect this ship, and on. After all that is done you press the fight button and from then until the end of the battle the only control you have is over the camera. If you win the battle you get honor points which you use to buy weapon upgrades, power upgrades, engine upgrades, new hull designs, and unlock the other races. Sometimes the battles can last a while so you can have this game run in the background while you do other stuff on the computer.

Both of these games are great and tons of fun. If you don't buy either of these at least try out the trail of Solar.

So all day today, you won't be able to frag opponents on Halo, get destroyed by a helicopter in COD:4, or have a fun Xbox Live Picture Party with your friends. No, today, Xbox LIVE will be down all day. I know, take a moment of silence.

Now many of you are probably thinking, "Man Holy Hitman, what ever can I do to make my day worth while now that Xbox LIVE isn't working?" Well, fear not faithful gamers, for I am about to bestow ten things that you can do today to occupy your precious time. Thank me after the jump.

Whats going on everyone I wanted to inform yall that I wanted to set up an XBOX LIVE party with the community on E3 and the announcements and who they think won and what excited them. I'll be using some of the questions brought up in an upcoming podcast.

Hit my gamertag up Phoenix410 and we will be starting at 9pm (est)

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." - some famous guy

A couple of weeks ago while playing Left 4 Dead with a group from TaG someone asked the inevitable question - "Do you prefer to be called Deschain or JackSawyer?" The reason for the question is the while I'm Deschain around here, my XBox gamertag is JackSawyer. My first preference for an online ID, at least for gaming related activities, is Deschain (the family name of Roland the Gunslinger from Stephen King's Dark Tower series of books).  As online gaming (and The Dark Tower) has become more popular, the likelihood of my being able to secure Deschain as an ID has dropped significantly.

So, when I signed up for XBox Live years ago, I found that someone else was already using Deschain. With my first choice not available to me on XBL I choose JackSawyer as an ID (Jack being the main character from The Talisman and Black House, two books written by King in conjunction with Peter Straub and with ties to The Dark Tower). At the time I wasn't overly concerned as I really didn't see any reason the XBL gamertag would ever have reason to be confused with other online ID's I was using, like being Deschain on Steam. 

 I realize now that was a bit naive. While I don't recall sites like TaG existing at the time, it was safe to assume that over time there would be something that would cross platform boundaries. Therefore having multiple ID's or gamertags would get confusing. For me, it just got worse. (How after the jump) 

As we move closer to the yearly Electronic Entertainment Expo people have begun to speculate about what the future holds for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Whether its excitement over what Sony has already revealed, questions about why people don't talk about the Wii, or demands for Microsoft to have a strong E3 conference people are anxious about what the future may hold for gaming.

I don't know. The economy is not stable and every sign of recovery is followed by more bad news. Even in the best of times long term predictions were not much better than gaging wind speed with your finger. But like everyone I've been thinking about it and the factors that are likely to be the difference between running with the pack and running on empty. (factors after the jump)

If, as appears to be the case, online coop play is the new rage in gaming then XBox Live is still Microsoft's trump card over Sony. If Sony doesn't have something in the works to improve the operability of the Play Station Network Microsoft will dominate in games that have a significant online component. Online cooperative play is increasingly important to people who want to game with friends in a less competitive environment.

Microsoft's other big advantage over Sony (noted by Parris in the link to excitement for Sony) is the 360's install base. To date Sony has continued to lose ground in the US and not been able to eat away at the 360's lead. Sony's game line-up for 2009 looks more impressive but the last year has seen the release of MGS4, Little Big Planet, Resistance Fall of Man 2,  and Killzone 2 and with the exception of a few months in the summer last year the 360 has outsold the PS3 consistently. At this point I'm not sure why we should suppose any of the upcoming titles to make difference if these titles did not.

Sony and their supporters will point to two advantages for the PS3; higher performance and Blu-Ray. In many ways Sony bet the farm on Blu-Ray. While that decision may have helped them to win the format war it may have cost them the console war. HD-DVD held on long enough that the price fell on stand alone players to below the PS3 cost. Versions at the PS3 price point (and some below) offer better audio conversion options than the PS3, so it is no longer the premier Blu-Ray player. But that doesn't mean having Blu-Ray is a disadvantage.

So I, like many of you, have purchased many Xbox Live Arcade Games. Like any retail game, there good games and there are bad games. But what is the future of these games?

Find out what I mean after the jump.

I sit down with Lorin, founder of Furious Gamer Radio to talk about the application and the ideas leading up to its creation.

The Furious Gamer APP can be found on the Apple App Store for .99 cents.

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