That's right kids! You heard it right. My first version of Pong built on the XNA platform from Microsoft has been built. You can find it here: XNA Pong (make sure and use IE for that link. Microsoft apparently didn't have enough time for QA testing in Firefox.... )

Nothing special at all, but it made me proud none the less. I slapped together a few images for the game, built a very basic scoring system, and also added a bit random logic to force the puck to change directions on you (1 out of 5 times).

Controls:
Q and A for the left paddle
P and L for the right paddle
Esc to exit

Couple things to point out for all of you non XNA people (aka: 99% of the world). You will need to install a few things before being able to play the Pong game I created. It is possible to add these items to the installer, but since I am in tech demo mode right now, I won't be taking the time any time soon to do that. So, for now, enjoy a couple relatively small installs. Look on the bright side; once they are done, you won't have to do them again.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa731542.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2E136A1F-F187-478C-9DA5-AAEB0904782B&displaylang=en

I'm planning a couple more very simple 2D games before I move on to building a 3D game. I'm itchin' to move on to 3D so I can start to incorporate some of the work I have been doing in Maya over the past few months. Go here if you'd like to take a look at my dA gallery