Platform games
When we saw the launch of Microsoft's new mobile phone OS - Windows Phone 7 - at MWC in Barcelona last month, one of the most innovative features appeared to be the cloud integration with Xbox Live.
Before the show, we said Microsoft had to find a way of integrating its many and diverse services into a phone in order to make WP7 a success. Microsoft can only hope to, at best, match Apple for software sexiness, but Apple doesn't own a gaming platform, nor does it have a fraction of the cloud assets Microsoft does.
In the video clip below you can see Microsoft senior veep of technical strategy - Eric Rudder - demonstrating a fairly rudimentary platform game at a recent Microsoft event. The cool thing, however, is that you can play the same game on a Windows PC, a WP7 phone and an Xbox. Furthermore, using the Xbox Live cloud service, you can save the game on one device and then pick it up where you left off on another.
This sort of thing is only viable if developers don't have to rewrite the game for each new platform, and the ultimate point of this demo seems to have been to show that, with Visual Studio, you can develop for all three at once - with 90 percent of the code common to all three platforms.
Incidentally, the Guardian reckons Microsoft is about to launch a major ad campaign for Bing in the UK. The three month campaign will feature three new TV ads based around the slogan ‘Bing and decide', stressing that other search engines (::cough:: Google ::cough::) don't do enough to help you choose.
There don't seem to be any examples of the UK version of the ad in the wild yet, but here's one from the US campaign, which launched last summer, to give you an idea of where Microsoft is coming from.
UPDATE - 14:30, 8 March 2010 - We've just received the press release concerning the Bing campaign from Microsoft.
