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Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:58:57 -0500

So I'm trying to update my site and blog far more often than I used to. I've said this many times and never really achieved it, but we'll try again. I'm reading alot mew news lately than what I used to, thanks to a great little program a mate introduced me to called FeedDemon for RSS Feeds. I was never a big RSS kinda guy, but upon discovering that all my favorite sites - Gamasutra, GameDev.net, Shacknews and XKCD, amongst others - all had RSS Feeds, and that I could get notified for new stuff rather than remembering to look, I was sold. SOMEONE will say 'Wraiyth you n00b RSS has been awesome for ages', but its something that I've never needed to really think about. So, with that, hopefully I'll be able to point out some cool stuff floating around the net, present some opinions and ideas as well as talking about my own work. I invested in a copy of Lost Winds a couple of days ago on WiiWare. Its a fun little game. For 1000 Wii points, you get around 2 hours of interesting gameplay that utilizes the Wiimote well. Seeing this game on any other platform wouldn't do it justice. Its gotten some very solid reviews, and for anyone with a Wii I recommend that you give it a go TIGSource (The Independent Game Source) and The Indie Games blog are two of the sites that I've hit up on my RSS Feed lately too. I've never really been big on the Indie scene, but its something I'm starting to get into and keep an eye on. Some of the stuff that comes out of the indie developers is very thought provoking, unique and can really put an interesting spin on gameplay mechanics or ideas that we take for granted. I want to point out a few titles here. Muslim Massacre is actually a hard little 2D shooter, a bit of a throwback to the days of the NES. Its pretty quick and intense, and the gameplay could easily be applied to any theme, but its one of those nice controversial ones that you'd expect the media to go up in arms about (see Super Columbine Massacre RPG). The game feature 6 levels, suicide bombers and all that kind of stuff. An interesting title that is actually a bit of fun, albeit controversial and inappropriate. Then again, what you you expect from someone from Something Awful TeeWorlds is Soldat-cross-Worms open source 2D Shooter. The key here is Open Source. The game is fun to play, and for something that could probably be sold, its great to see the dev team make it open source. I've checked the game out and its alot of fun to play. It has rocket launchers, grapping hooks and ninja swords. How can that NOT be fun!? Finally, there was a recent update from World of Goo. Anyone who paid attention to IGF last year would recognize that its the game that spawned from the physics-puzzle-construction game Tower of Goo. Take a look. I dare you. From my side of things, most people will know that I'm working on a new mod now. Entitled CANVAS (http://www.canvasmod.com/ - no, thats not blood, its paint), most people don't know what its about. And thats the way its going to stay. Theres no official announecment of the mod, or any of that stuff. A few of the guys from NightFall are part of the core team, so we don't want to make the same mistake and generate alot of hype and have to meet some level of community expectation. I've been working on various things for it, but I'm always very happy to get a major tangible change in, such as a a HUD. Yes, Alyx is looking at you. I wrote in my last post about Wiimote stuff. Well, it appears that the Wii Update 3.3 has already been cracked and the Twilight Hack used to load Homebrew stuff has been updated to work. I'm still trying to borrow a copy of Twilight Princess from someone, as I'm too poor to buy it, but I'm still looking forward to playing around with all this stuff. I'll have updates when I do! I promise.

Wii Homebrew

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:14:43 -0500

I've been enjoying messing around with the Wiimote the past week or so. Haven't really gotten into using the accelerometer and stuff much, but its been a fun little exercise, dabbling in the basics of both the Wiiuse library and Irrlicht. I said previous that I was semi-surprised that not too many big things were being done with the Wiimote & Wii in general. Well, I still stand by those comments, despite looking further into Homebrew Wii stuff today. Some of you may know about the Twilight Hack that allows you to run custom code on the Wii. Despite the most recent Wii update fixing this exploit, it looks like that a group of dedicated souls have already found a workaround for this to continue the use of Homebrew content on the Wii after the latest update. That being said, unlike the popularity of PSP Homebrew, Wii Homebrew hasn't really taken off yet. Theres still not too many good Homebrew applications/games floating around the net yet - mostly Emulators and a few simplistic games (Asteroids, card matching games, Pong etc), perhaps with the exception of a Quake port. The great thing about the Homebrew community is that they generally share all their source code and activies with each other, so most of the utilities and applications (including Quake) are all open-source, free for you to learn from, or hack the shit out of. I'm now looking very forward to trying out some Homebrew stuff on the Wii, and potentially doing some stuff of my own. Its a nice little exciting time for me at the moment, so I'll keep everyone (who cares) updated with the stuff I'm doing :)

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Wii Homebrew