Meeting the Press: Gaming with Katie Ledger and Steve Clayton

Yesterday, we had some prominent visitors: Katie Ledger and Steve Clayton of PTS-TV. PTS-TV is a UK project to connect with the tens of thousands of Microsoft Partners in a new way (inspired by Channel 9).

Katie and Steve interviewed both Thore and me about our work on TrueSkill for almost an hour - in the end, we even got to play a race of PGR 3 and one Slayer match of Halo 2 against each other!* Everything has been captured on video and I hope not all of this action falls victim to the eventual cutting** - Thore really showed off his amazing skill with the Plasma Pistol/Battle Rifle combination (also known as the "Noob combo") and I scored a memorable hit with the Sniper Rifle.

It was a shame that we could not get Xbox Live to work in order to demonstrate TrueSkill "in action" - we had just returned from Redmond on Saturday and completely forgot to reset the network settings of our Xbox 360 (and being filmed while trying to reset the network connections does not really help to remember).

Nevertheless, we had a really great and enjoyable time with both of them - and by the look of it, they enjoyed the time as well.

Ralf Herbrich

*The race was in Tokyo, 1 lap which I won by comfortable 11 seconds. The shoot-out was 8 minutes or first to 15 kills on Lockout - Thore won this one with a comfortable lead.

**I do hope that Steve cuts out "why" we like to play competitively on Xbox Live - if not, I am in trouble ...