For those of you who don’t know, Google will be having a developer’s gathering May 28th-29th here in San Francisco called Google I/O. A ton of sessions will be held such as ‘State of AJAX’ presented by Dion Almaer (Google) and Ben Galbraith (Ajaxian), which seems really interesting.

So if you’re in San Francisco and will be attending Google I/O, let me know!

A while back, I was having some problems with a few months old XFX 7900GT 256mb. The main problem being a lot of ‘artifacting’ on screen and sometimes just a pure black screen while booting into Windows. I finally got myself to contact XFX to get a replacement card, which went extremely well. Their support system is a ton better than Microsoft’s purely because they work on a web-based ticketing system. You just get a better interaction with your support over this because it keeps track of exactly where you are in the process.

In the end, XFX sent me a brand new 7950GT 512mb. A better card than what I sent in, and for that I am extremely grateful. It shows that there are good companies out there that know how to support their customers.

So if you’re in the market for a new graphics card, head over to XFX!

In other news, my beloved pet snake Babao passed away on Saturday. We’re not sure on the cause of death but we’re speculating it was the water. One of the snakes used it as its public restroom and thus Babao got ill and passed away. On Sunday, my girlfriend and I walked to Golden Gate park here in San Francisco to bury him. I will miss him

So one of my classes, Multi-User Authoring, entails us to create our own games and develop it into a fully working multi-player game. Now go just before having a multi-player game, add a few bugs and remove a few features, and you get BombsAway Alpha.

This little game which is obviously still in development, is a simple but fun game where you have to shoot falling mines with parachutes. So without further delay, head over to this page to play it. Give it a few minutes to load since I have no included a pre-loader.

Included features:

• [New] Updated the frame rate to 29 frames per second from 15.
• Score counter, 500 = Level 2 and 1500 = Level 3
• Level 2 and 3 introduces speed increases in falling bombs

Planned fixes and features:

• Fix lag issue after 300+ score, bullet increase decreases performance.
• Restricted bullets per second/minute
• Pre-loader and menu
• Player health decrease when hit by falling bomb(s)

As more features come to me I’ll add them to the game. Please play the Alpha version and let me know if you find bugs!

[Update]: BombsAway can now be downloaded as an Adobe AIR application. Please keep in mind that this is an Alpha Build and I cannot take any responsibility for problems you may encounter installing or running this application.

Download latest Adobe AIR Installer

Download BombsAway.air

So I picked up Super Mario Galaxy yesterday and so far I’m loving it. I’m currently sitting at about 32 stars and I haven’t even gotten sick or bored of it yet. Mario Galaxy definitely shows what the Wii can do in not only game play but graphics. The special effects when planets are created, stars are picked up and enemies are killed just shines on the Wii.

Like all Mario game the plot is simple, the Princess gets kidnapped and it’s up to you to get her back. Mario Galaxy takes place mostly in space where you have to collect stars to get a space station operational so that it can take you to the center of the universe. This is where you’ll have to save the Princess.

Now I am nowhere near on finishing the game because it requires you to visit multiple galaxies multiple times to collect all stars, the more stars the further you progress within the game. As stated above, my star count is currently at 32 and rising! each universe contains roughly 4 galaxies including the ‘main boss’ galaxy which contains the grand stars. So it takes a few hours to get to where I am, but you’ll love it!

I recommend that anyone that’s fortunate to have a Wii, or were lucky enough to find one this Christmas, to pick up Mario Galaxy.

I’ve had some luck with gaming in the past two years, many of my friends are on their 4th or even 5th Xbox 360. The main cause being the 3 Red Lights. My launch console broke down earlier this year so I got a good year and a bit of gaming on that thing. Luckily still having warranty Microsoft replaced the console with a new one. Now, after many months, the same thing happened to this one. I hope I get it back soon since I was planning on getting Guitar Hero III this weekend.

In other news, since my 360 is not working I will be purchasing Mario Galaxy tomorrow with a Best Buy gift card I got. I will definitely post my thoughts when I get a little while into the game, I am a little excited!