Vista has launched here in Ireland, and I'm long overdue for writing about that (soon, soon)... but what better way to wrest myself away from Gears of War than to say that XNA Game Studio Express has been released , and now you can author your own games for the XBox360 in C#! So much for free time over the holidays! :)

I'm impressed by the diversity and quality of the nascent indie games featured in this XNA Video Montage , which was released on Major Nelson's blog in a format which is optimized for the Zune.* XNA Game Studio is a set of tools based on Visual C# Express 2005 that allow students and hobbyists to build games that target both Windows and the Xbox 360, using C#. XNA Game Studio is currently in Beta 2 , which targets Windows game development. However, the final version will also target the XBox 360!