Darren Straight's Blog

Dragon Quest IX launches on Nintendo DS

The phenomenon which has gripped a whole nation in Japan is heading for the UK with a major launch this week.

Queues a mile long formed for the launch of Dragon Quest IX in Tokyo with sales of 2.4 million in the first weekend – a world record launch in a single country.

And huge crowds are expected at the official UK launch of the game, in association with GAME, this Friday when Britain’s Got Talent winners Diversity will perform at the launch in the Westfield Shopping Centre, London. Already the game is attracting outstanding reviews from the UK press.

Such is the impact of Dragon Quest in its native Japan, the latest launch was even held on a Saturday morning, when games previously always launched on a Wednesday, in order to stop mass truancy by children and adults missing work in the race to get their hands on this immersive role-playing game.  

In one district of Tokyo the local authorities have roped off special zones for Dragon Quest players so they don’t wander off the pavements or collide with other pedestrians while immersed in the handheld game on their Nintendo DS.

The nine games in the Dragon Quest series have sold a total of 53 million games in Japan alone, beaten only by gaming icons Mario and Pokemon for sales. And in Tokyo there is even a restaurant devoted to Dragon Quest where diners eat off screens showing the game. The first eight games were aimed almost exclusively at a domestic audience, but with Dragon Quest IX it has been aimed at a more global audience. 

James Honeywell from Nintendo UK said: “Britain is one of the biggest gaming markets in the world and after the phenomenal success of this franchise in Japan, it looks like the Dragon Quest craze is really set to take off over here.”

“Reviewers in the UK have already given Dragon Quest IX some of the highest ratings we’ve ever seen for such a game, reflecting the focus this time on getting European gamers into this Japanese phenomenon.”

Neil Ashurst Head of UK PR at GAME added: “We’re delighted to be hosting the UK launch of Dragon Quest IX and with Diversity performing as well, we’re sure that there will be crowds of our customers and shoppers at Westfield wanting to try out this great game.”

Already the Guardian has described Dragon Quest IX as “A massive and rewarding undertaking that will keep your DS busy for much of the summer” while The Independent called it “a handheld marvel”.

Dragon Quest IX: ‘Sentinels of the Starry Skies’ allows players to put themselves in the role of the game’s hero or heroine, a guardian angel fallen to Earth who must embark on an epic adventure in the mortal world where they must protect the mortals, battle many foes and ultimately complete a Quest which will return them to the Kingdom of Angels.

Diversity will be performing at the launch event at Westfield Shopping Centre at 1pm on Friday July 23rd. The launch is being staged in association with GAME, Westfield.

250 Hard Drive, Built In Wi-Fi & Ready for KINECT. Here Today, Ready for Tomorrow.

As promised Karen Cheng a Program Manager on the Excel team has posted a blog post on how the Microsoft Excel 2010 Missle Command Game was made. You can find it here. Don’t forget to download the game here.

In today’s post, we’ll show you how the classic arcade game Missile Command was created in an Excel spreadsheet. We also explain how it’s made in this video. In this game, missiles drop from the sky, attacking the city. You must click on the missiles to destroy them….

Got to love this video song on youtube of Excel program managers, Karen and Manpratap, singing a song about Excel and Excel Services.

Saw this post on the Microsoft Excel 2010 Blog and at first I thought WOW have they brought back easter eggs in Microsoft Office! :p Well it wasn’t an Easter Egg but still cool.

It’s official, Office 2010 is out! To celebrate, we’ve created two games that are playable in Excel for you to download.

• Missile Command
• Tower Defense

To play, you’ll need -

• Download games here
• To install Excel 2010, hot off the press last week. You can get a free trial here. The games use features that are new to Excel 2010, so they won’t work in older versions.

When you open the files to play, don’t forget to enable the macros.

Here’s a video of the two games in action:

In the next two blog posts, we’ll explain how we made these games.

And one more thing – for a look at the people behind Excel on the job, check out this video of Excel program managers, Karen and Manpratap, singing a song about Excel and Excel Services.

UK Tech Days is a series of events for developers and IT professionals celebrating the latest Microsoft technologies.

Microsoft has announced the worldwide availability of Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010. Consumers can now purchase Office 2010 at more than 35,000 retail stores across the globe, such as Best Buy, Fnac, Harvey Norman and PC World; through online retailers, including Amazon.com; and direct from Microsoft at Office.com.

Office 2010 can also be purchased with the most popular desktops and laptops from leading PC makers including Acer Inc., Asus, Dell Inc., HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Sony Corp. In the next year, more than 100 million PCs will ship with Office 2010 preloaded, which can easily be activated with the purchase of any one of the three versions of Office 2010, including Office Home and Student 2010, Office Home and Business 2010, or Office Professional 2010.

“Working with major retail partners and PC makers, we’ve made dramatic changes in the way we deliver Office 2010 to give consumers more buying choice, making it easier than ever to unlock the power of Office on new and existing PCs,” said Stephen Elop, president, Microsoft Business Division. “For the first time, people can purchase a Product Key Card at retail to activate Office 2010 preloaded on new PCs. For those who want to download Office 2010 direct from Office.com for an existing PC, the new Click-to-Run technology will have them up and running in a matter of minutes.”

Office 2010 Represents a Great Growth Opportunity for Microsoft and Its Partners “Recent comScore Tech Metrix™ data confirms that more than 1 billion PCs worldwide have Office software installed, making it the most widely used productivity suite in the world,” said Mike Hurt, senior vice president of comScore. “This milestone helps illustrate the importance that software products like Microsoft Office have played in shaping the digital world to date.”

Considering there are approximately 1.8 billion Internet users worldwide, Microsoft and its channel partners see an incredible opportunity to deliver Office 2010 to existing and new Office customers around the world.

From a survey of Office 2010 beta users, Microsoft found that 75 percent say they plan to buy Office 2010 within six months. The Office 2010 beta program had more than 9 million downloads — more than six times the size of the 2007 Microsoft Office beta program — indicating strong consumer interest in Office 2010.

“Following the great response to the Office 2010 beta and the success of Windows 7, we predict this will be the biggest consumer release of Office, ever,” Elop said.

Productivity Solutions Across the PC, Phone and Browser
Throughout its development cycle, customer feedback has been critical to the improvements found in Office 2010. Based on this valuable input, Microsoft has made considerable enhancements to help users do the following:

• Create great-looking documents and presentations. Express creativity in PowerPoint 2010 presentations with new video and photo editing features. Add extensive text effects and table formatting options in Word 2010. Reveal important trends in data with Sparklines in Excel 2010. OneNote 2010 makes everything you need simple to find, organize and share.
• Connect and work together more simply. Advanced e-mail management and calendaring capabilities in Outlook 2010 and the new Outlook Social Connector help people stay productive and in touch with personal and business networks. Work with others more efficiently using new co-authoring in Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010. Deliver presentations over the Web with new PowerPoint Broadcast Slideshow.
• Get things done from virtually anywhere. With Office 2010 and the Office Web Apps — the online companions to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — people have the freedom to save documents directly from Office 2010 to Windows Live SkyDrive, then view, edit and share those documents in the cloud. The Office Web Apps preserve the look and feel of Office documents, so valuable content and formatting are not compromised while moving between the PC, phone and browser*

Office Mobile 2010 also is available from Windows® Phone Marketplace for all Windows Mobile 6.5 phones. People using Office Mobile 2010 can perform lightweight editing of Office documents and take notes on the go, or work on Office documents stored on their phone or attached to an e-mail. Today, Office 2010 is available in 10 languages and will expand to 94 languages.
“For information workers the lines between home and office are becoming blurred; in return for flexible working practices that fit better with lifestyle employees are prepared to spread their working hours. Facilitating this involves accessing documents and information from a range of devices, so providing a consistent experience is necessary. With Office 2010 Microsoft has done a lot to help this.

First, being free, Microsoft Office Starter will ensure that basic productivity tools, that are familiar to many from their work place experience, are freely available on many consumer PCs. Second, Office Web Apps makes the basic office capabilities freely available to anyone with an internet connection and facilitates that sharing of documents. With the Office 2010 announcement Microsoft is taking both OpenOffice and Google Apps head-on. This release should ensure Microsoft remains the dominant vendor in the productivity tools space for the foreseeable future”. Bob Tarzey, Analyst & Director, Quo Circa

The Microsoft Desktop player allows IT professionals to access technical content (videos, webcasts, podcasts, white papers, and more) and links to resources (such as IT evangelists, local training opportunities, and local user groups) in your area. You can either view it online or download the WPF application to view offline.

You can now check out the Cross-browser Test Results Summary for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 here. Or why now take the IE 9 Test Drive if you dont want to see the data, and then have a nice read on Solutions for Virtualizing Internet Explorer to learn how to create a virtual operating environment in which you can run earlier versions of IE.

This website contains several collections of new test pages that we developed in conjunction with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working groups. These 192 test pages have been updated based on feedback and now include some new HTML5 test pages.

We respect how challenging it is to build one page that works the same in every browser as the technology advances and customer expectations rise. We have created these tests (and welcome your feedback!) to help web developers see if a browser supports what they are trying to do before they depend on it. Because there are ambiguities and options in any specification, there may be cases where some browsers behave differently. The Internet Explorer team remains committed to making the same standards-based markup work across browsers. This is why we are contributing these new test cases to the appropriate web standards working groups at the W3C.

There are two tables below. The first table is a summary of the test results with the May 2010 IE Platform Preview and each of the major shipping browsers running on Windows. The table at the bottom of this page provides details and links to each of the new test cases we submitted to each appropriate W3C working group to help the web become more interoperable.

I want to thank the members in the W3C working groups that helped us develop these tests, the community members for providing valuable feedback on the tests, as well as the engineers on the IE team that made these possible.

Swedish startup Anyfi Networks today came out of stealth mode to present Anyfi.net, a Wi-Fi roaming technology they hope will shake up the mobile broadband industry. This new technology lets an Internet service provider offer the same Wi-Fi user experience both at home and on the go.

“Until now Wi-Fi hotspots have been difficult to use and inherently insecure. Our solution works with any Wi-Fi device out of the box and provides fully automatic WPA security” said Björn Smedman, CEO.

The trick is combining Wi-Fi with IP, Internet Protocol, to break the tie between logical network and physical infrastructure, much in the same way as Voice over IP separates your phone service from the physical line.

“You can think of it as Wi-Fi over IP” explained Björn Smedman. “Our cloud based matchmaking service keeps track of each device’s favorite network and makes sure it is available from the closest access point. By forwarding the raw Wi-Fi radio traffic over the Internet we can ensure security, even if an attacker is in control of the access point.”

According to the company this high level of security is one of the key features making the technology suitable for integration in modems of various types, and this is what makes it potentially disruptive, effectively turning Wi-Fi into a full-blown 4G technology.

“Today only about 1-2% of residential broadband capacity is actually used. The rest just goes to waste. At the same time we are seeing mobile networks brought to their knees under the load of data-hungry devices like the iPhone. If you can guarantee that there is no negative impact whatsoever to the subscriber, why not use some of that spare capacity to offload mobile?” asked Björn Smedman.

Using this reasoning a broadband connection with a Wi-Fi router at the end can be thought of as a building block of sorts and Anyfi.net is the mortar. By combining them, existing infrastructure can be transformed into a radio access network, license-exempt and Wi-Fi compatible. A fixed-line operator with a high density of broadband subscribers in an urban area could become a mobile operator over night by simply upgrading the modem software, something that can be done remotely. But smaller operators could also join together to collectively provide mobile Internet access, with worldwide roaming.