This is a really interesting exercise in terms of pushing the hardware boundaries of the Nintendo DS. The fans at Drunken Coders have at long-last gotten a complete homebrew version of Quake II's single-player to run on the Nintendo DS. The catch is that running it basically requires a very particular selection of flash carts, since the sheer size and complexity of the software is way beyond anything the DS was designed to be able to do.
Unlike Quake 1, there is simply no way of fitting Quake II into the memory configuration of a stock DS. To play the game you must have a supported slot-2 flash card that contains a minimum of 16 megabytes of RAM.
Supported cards: 'Proper' SuperCards, eg the Lite, SD, MiniSD, and CF. The SuperCard Rumble and SuperCard One are not compatible. 'Perfect' M3s, eg the Lite Perfect, the Mini SD Perfect, and the SD Perfect. The Mini SD Pro, SD Pro, and Lite Pro are not compatible.EZ-Flash cards which have a slot-2 component and can play GBA games over 32MBit, eg EZ 3-in-1, EZ 4, EZ 5. G6 Flash.
I love the modding community, I really do. Only a guy like Cyberpyrot at the great Acidmods website could come up with something like this: a way to play Wii light gun games using an original, modified NES Zapper. Full instructions for doing the mod yourself are here, but be warned that this isn't for the faint of heart. You can easily destroy both a Wii Remote and a Zapper if you botch it. Anyway, check out this video of the Wii Remote Hack in action, complete with inexplicable R&B soundtrack!
Okay. First, watch this video, which is by itself an impressive vid of a run through the first level of the famous Kaizo Mario World hack. It introduces some new tools for recording all of the attempts that go into the creation of a tool-assisted speedrun and having them play out simultaneously.
It's when you get into the creator's discussion of quantum physics that things get kind of freaky.
At each moment of the playthrough theres a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulators save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.
You know a game has managed a real interface breakthrough when engineers are cracking it open to see what it can do. Some engineering students in France, for example, have figured out a way to use a Nintendo DS to control this adorable off-the-shelf Pekee robot. (DS Fanboy has a translation of some of the info up, for those of us who don't speak French.)
When Gizmodo ran this story, they mused on the possibility of a DS controlled R.O.B. 2. Hey, he's making a big comeback with Smash Bros. Brawl, so why not? A R.O.B. who did more than play Gyromite would be the absolute perfect way to scare my cats.
Both Brain Age titles have sold millions of units worldwide and feature Dr. Kawashima's digitized floating head, so you'd think he was turning a pretty penny off of software sales, right? Well, wrong. According to a recent AFP article, Dr. Kawashima is absolutely uninterested in taking even a single yen from Nintendo.
Asked whether he ever thought of taking the royalty money and moving to a tropical island, Kawashima simply said: "I wouldn't know what to do there. If I had such time to spare, I want to do my research."
Indeed, it seems like nothing gets in the way of work. When for instance he decided last year to lose 20 kilogrammes (44 pounds), he just cut down on food, he says, adding: "If there is time for physical exercise, I want to use it for research."
Kawashima became interested in brains when he was a teenager, saying that he "wanted to put my brain in a computer so it would be around to see the last day of humanity".
You know, if a character acted exactly like this in some anime or manga story I was following, I would find him a little implausible.
Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day
Once a system gets popular, there's a mad rush to break it open. Importers want to be able to play their games without keeping two machines in the house, pirates want to steal, and hobbyists want to play with homebrew software. Well, only a few days ago, a group of hobbyist hackers have gotten all three groups closer to their goals with the Wii.
Atomic MPC covers the hack and how it works in detail, and it's really an elegant approach. The same hackers who got modified code to boot on a Wii via a disc-swap method found out that you can use Twilight Princess's savegame data to basically trick the console into running potentially anything off of an SD card.
If this hack took off, it could be big enough to really kick-start a Wii grey market that has, up to now, mostly just allowed for slightly doctored, pirated game images to be played on a machine. Atomic MPC also has an interview up with the hacker, Bushing, although it's pretty brief.
Well, it's official. We live in the future now. Cynergy Labs has built on Johnny Chung Lee's Wii head-tracking hack to create a hack that uses the Wii Remote and special gloves to allow for gesture-based interaction with a program. Ah, the next generation of games is going to be freaking fantastic.
It's easy to fall into thinking that the Wii is some sort of miracle tool that invigorates the elderly, heals brain damage, and helps you recover from a broken wrist. The therapists in the Metro Detroit health system, however, think that's so much empty hype.
Instead, the facility decided to invest an estimated $7,000 in another interactive virtual reality video game, the Cybex Trazer, because it tracks movement in the entire body, said Sharon Angeline, assistant director of the Troy Beaumont rehab services who works out of the Macomb Township office.
"(The Wii) is a good, fun way to do some initial exercises with the upper extremities," Angeline said. "The concern is it doesn't simulate the whole sports exercise, and we're concerned that there is overuse of the arm. In therapy, we want more functional movement."
When fans decide to hack ROMs to make their own Mario games, the results are usually pretty painful. Occasionally you get a gem like Super Kaizo Mario that push gameplay to the limit, but more often than not you get something with terrible stage design and crappy physics, if indeed physics are there at all.
This makes Super Mario Fusion all the more remarkable. Superficially it has every hallmark of a terrible ROM hack, featuring Mario fighting the Covenant, fighting of Cyberdemons with a rocket launcher, and even mixing it up with Mega Man 2's Bubble Man. Where it isn't terrible is the tremendous care going into the level designs and the game's sense of physics.
Levels in Super Mario Fusion are tough but fair and feel "right" in how they blend platforming and shooting. I find the most impressive level to be the Bubble Man fight; since it uses most of the original stage layout from MM2, you clearly see how different the new gameplay options make it feel. The actual Bubble Man fight is really nothing short of brilliant.
Check behind the cut for videos of the game's three demo levels, and you can also download the demo to try for yourself.
The fact that Kororinpa: Marble Mania didn't make more of a splash in the US has always kind of bummed me out. This is a fantastic game that gets everything just so: not too long, not too short, not too easy, not too hard... it's something anyone can play and enjoy on many levels.
Shallow bastard that I am, my response to this scientific news was not "Wow! Surgeons perform better after playing Wii games!" but "All glory to Kororinpa!" That aside, the article's explanation for why this tilt-intensive Wii title helps a surgeon more than, say, Wii Sports is pretty interesting
Certain games, such as Marble Mania, in which players guide a marble through a 3D obstacle course, were found to be particularly good because they involved small, precise movements of the controller.
Others were less useful. Dr Kohel told New Scientist magazine: "The whole point about surgery is to execute small, finely controlled movements with your hands, and that is exactly what you get playing.
"But you don't gain a lot from swinging an imaginary tennis racket."
