Couple of day ago I complained about the absence of 'XBox Live Arcade' in Europe. In game related news I read today that 'Tink Tanks' is available for 'XBox Live Arcade' starting today, and now the interesting part - in German language! Why can you download a game in German language if you can't download a German Arcade-version?!

Not true anymore - the German Arcade version is available! Without any big announcement the European version of XBox Live Arcade was made available. Now we need a way to get the CDs without buying a magazine ...

I have to admit, I love simple computer games for a quick fix of distraction and sometimes frustration. There is a real industry for these games on the PC. Companies like RealArcade, MSN Zone, PopCap Games, et.al. make a living out of offering a combination of free and pay-for-play game services. I bought a couple of these games myself, stuff like Zuma, Bejeweled, Dynomite, or Bookworm. These games can be a big distraction and a killer for productivity - I created a few simple rules: No games in the office or on my work-computer, and no games before 6pm or on the weekend.

A collection of these games is available for the XBox with the XBox Live Arcade collection. This allows you to download some of those timewasters to your XBox and play them on your TV. For my taste the individual downloads are not cheap (between $9.99 and $19.99 per game), but I bet I would have fallen for a few of those (I paid about $20 for the above mentioned PC versions of the games also - $10 to $20 is about the trashhold I'm willing to invest quickly on a game).

The question I have is: Why is the "XBox Live Arcade" product only available in the US and Canada? How difficult can it be to 'port' them to the rest of the world? What is the problem ?? Licensing? Converting to the PAL screen resolution?

I want to wast more time senselessly in front of the XBox - get me my XBox Live Arcade collection in Europe!

A couple of weeks ago I made an extended weekend trip with my son to Munich. The weather was great and we had a really good time. We spent some time in the 'Deutsches Museum', visited Dachau, walked a lot through Munich itself, and visited several of Munichs famout 'beer garden'. I uploaded the pictures to my Flickr account. You can take a look at the Munich trip using this link.

Das 'Deutsche Museum' is a good way to spent a lot of time in Munich. A lot of stuff to see, and we took some excellent themed-tours in the museum, very educational, but also very entertaining. Still, there are areas in the museum which look just old and will not appeal to todays (younger) museums guests, some improvement was noticable on the way and probably will deserve another visit. Overall, we learned a lot in the museum and were very well entertained.

We/Microsoft-EMIC has the ability to hire, check out the details here. The location of our office is Aachen (Germany).

If you read this review (careful - it is full of spoilers) of the latest StarWars movie you will see that there are people out there which really enjoyed the movie. Whatever this guy thinks - the 'darkness' of the movie is something which is lost on me. I just don't get it - sure Skywalker is evil now, but I don't really care. Also, how can you come up with a stupid name like 'Order 66', stuff like this makes me crinche - well, I guess 'Order 666' would have been more stupid.

I stand by my verdict, people will have to see it, since the marketing machine and the peer pressure is to big to miss it, but in the end you will leave empty and unimpressed.

OK - we watched the latest StarWars movie this afternoon, which was surprinsingly long with 2.5 hours. Well, there is plenty of action, plenty of special effects, some decent attempt on character development - what else could we ask for... many of the dialogs still make you wonder who had the idea of writing them, or why they didn't get any decent actors to perform them.

BUT->The movie was better then the previous 3 StarWars movie (yes, I ment three, better then Meanace and Clones, and the thankful lack of Ewoks in this one makes it shine), but lacked some memoralable moments like the race in EpisodeI. It tries (and succeedes) in creating and finalizing the story arc, but it is still failing to convincingly motivate Skywalkers move to the dark side (at least for me). Some dialog are just aweful, empty, pathetic - overall it is an average movie at best. Something you might want to watch in the theater due to sound and visuals, but nothing which is going to keep me awake at night or heavily recommend to anyone.

Summary: Watch and forget...

Today we are going to watch the newest StarWars movie. StoreWars seems to be the right stuff to setup the mood for this movie. Check it out here.

Somehow this whole StarWars hype left me cold this time around. I didn't like the last two movies two much. Well, lets stay positive and see what is ahead of us.

Unless you are living under a rock or do not care about computer gaming you have heard about E3. With it come the announcements of by Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Microsoft's new console is called Xbox360, and some information can be found here. I was glad to here that backwards compatibility is a goal for the new console, I feel pretty convident that this is going to work great. Michaele Brundage, a former colleague of mine is working on backwards compatibility as he writes here.