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'We'll also be telling them how they can hook up their PCs to a television set.'

Does this mean that indie developers will finally have the tools to develop multiplayer video games that run on one PC, as opposed to a separate PC per player?

Not to start a flame war, but this is one of the reasons I prefer PC games. They typically allow for quicksave and/or a sane autosave.

That's fine for single player. But what do you do when you have friends over, and they don't have their own PCs to bring? Consoles have more titles that support single-monitor multiplayer.

unskippable cutscenes:
They're acceptable once, but not every time I want to replay the game. And ANNOYING AS HELL when they occur after before a big fight and must be replayed after dieing.

Some games, such as Super Mario Galaxy and We <3 Katamari, use tasteful, short, but unskippable cutscenes to cover loading. Would you rather have the screen be black?

button mashing:
Press a button as fast as you can to save your character.

What better control solution do you have for something like building up power ("Test Your Might" in Mortal Kombat) or resisting torture (scene with Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid) or quickly eating a fruit (several scenes in WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$)?

Landmines:
Any situation relying on the player being telepathic to survive (it's an old example, but still a formla devs use)

Let me guess: You got frustrated at Minesweeper. Perhaps you could try playing Luminesweeper, which includes a cooperative buddy that automatically marks obvious mines.

There is already a competitive market for creative works - if you don't want to play Spore you're welcome to play another game instead

As I understand it, you mean something like playing Lockjaw instead of Tetris, or some off-brand ludo board game if I don't want Hasbro's Trouble, Sorry!, Aggravation, or Parcheesi. I'll take you up on that offer if you can answer one question: Which Free game with similar rules to Spore would you recommend?

Use a modern NES emulator, like Nestopia. Nesticle is old as hell

Old as hell doesn't mean it sucks.

But in this case, it does suck. It takes a mere four lines of 6502 asm code for an NES program to detect whether it's running on Nesticle or a more accurate emulator:

nestc_detect:
lda $2002
bpl nestc_detect
lda $2002
bmi nesticle

And it sucks because it's old; the NES behavior that this code depends on wasn't discovered until Nesticle was no longer maintained. If you're going to be playing homebrew games such as Tetramino or anything on pdroms.de, I'd recommend using Nestopia or one of the FCE Ultra forks.

Next you'll be wishing people used a modern OS like Vista. Windows XP is old as hell, right?

No, it's more like recommending Windows XP over MS-DOS.

Random? That isn't random. It comes right after you block off the slot you were saving for it.

You mean like in this game?

That link doesn't implement Tetris properly (even ignoring the dimensions issue). When I was playing wisely, it gave me 27 Z pieces in a row (since Z pieces can't fit into each other and form lines, this is a guaranteed game-over); the only way out is to place one in a worse place and form a hole. As a link below points out, modern Tetris implementations limit the number of repeat blocks and ensure a good distribution within the random selection; you're guaranteed a straight piece at least once every thirteen pieces and no more than two of the same piece in a row.

Also, my Firefox on Linux fails to show my score; I had to count lines. I keep getting better, but I'm losing interest now that I've hit 17 lines (and I'm forced to place pieces sub-optimally to get out of loops of the same piece).

I think a better choice is the more famous one, as mentioned a few years ago here on Slashdot, Bastard Tetris Hates You. Downside: You can't play it online.

Yes, I played waaaaay too much Tetris back in the day.

waiting for that blasted straight piece in Tetris

Random? That isn't random. It comes right after you block off the slot you were saving for it.

Then why didn't you use the hold box to save an I tetromino? And why aren't you exploiting the fact that pieces come in groups of seven, one of each shape? You must be thinking of Bastet.

Now there just needs to be an alt-tab equivalent so you can flip over to the ebook and pause playing tetris long enough to convince them that you're reading.

Or you can try to build an e-book reader into the pause screen of Lockjaw.

[Plenty of decisions] And that's just for frigging tetris, one of the simplest games imaginable.

Tell me about it.

You're wasting your time. If instead of playing games you were to spend the time writing free software, the world would be a better place and you'd feel good about yourself more.

Troll much?

But without playing games, how would we be able to document how they work in order to write free games implementing the same rules?

@tepples: that woosh you just heard was the worlds most obvious joke going right over your head

Woosh? What do you mean - I didn't hear a woosh.

--
How to save PC gaming: More TV out

But some games require a firmware update before you can play.

As I understand what I read on WiiBrew, the countermeasure against Twilight Hack was applied in Wii Menu 3.3. But the "system updates" on Game Discs are not updates to the Wii Menu. They are extra versions of the "IOS" kernel that runs on Starlet, the I/O processor on the GPU die. (Starlet is roughly comparable to the ARM7 core on the DS.) Each game requires a specific IOS version, and the discs come with the IOS version that the game uses and all the versions before it. Out of roughly six games that my cousins or I have tried, including Brawl and Mario Kart, I haven't seen any game that requires a Wii Menu upgrade. If Animal Crossing requires an upgrade past the 3.2 on my Wii, sparks will fly, and it will become time for some double crossing.

Hell, said indie developer (I'm assuming you) could do up a page in a half-hour to explain it.

I started one a couple days ago. But at this point, I'd almost replace "buy a new video card" with "buy an HDTV" or "buy a $100 scan converter". As I see it, the median home user is more likely to splurge on a new TV than to open a PC's case, especially with the United States' analog broadcast switchoff less than half a year away.

Of course Nintendo will probably not like it, since you know... piracy.

One stance: "Homebrew is piracy. Every download of Lockjaw is a lost sale of Tetris." But who would agree with that stance?

Now, if you can create and release something (even if it's yet another Tetris clone), you are far more likely to be taken seriously.

Tetris clone? Check. I've made one of the most configurable tetromino games on the Internet. My next idea is a party game that uses two buttons per player, and I plan to prototype it on Windows and Linux. Once it's done, which publishers should I contact in order to get it onto a platform that's conducive to party games?

Why would you consider this a "ripoff"? Patents are granted for 20 years, with the express intention that after that period, the invention can be freely used by others.

Because it isn't just the patents. Looking at the Picasa album, I see that the computer appears to be bundled with a multicart containing unauthorized copies of several copyrighted Nintendo games. I'd bet it even has proprietary Tetris instead of GPL'd Tetramino.

Blowing can actually damage edge connectors of NES Game Paks and other PCBs by depositing humidity, which attracts more dust and more corrosion. I've made an illustrated guide to cleaning cartridges.

I have a DS and I can say there are no usable browsers for it really. The browser on the Wii is nice, but the one on the DS just isn't usable.

Yes, Nintendo DS Browser is a hassle; I've tried it. (Actually, I bought it mostly to test support for its RAM pak in memtestARM and other programs using Lick's RAM API.) But DSOrganize 3.1129 is pretty nice for what it does. It satisfies my desire for handheld web browsing until the iPod Touch or iPhone might become more appealing.

I doubt there is a single person out there making a bona fide attempt at a full NES homebrew game right now.

I developed Tetramino, a falling block game for people who care about falling block games. And I'm single.

I guess most people who don't work for The Tetris Company would call playing Lockjaw "playing Tetris", for the same reason they call a Kyocera copier a "Xerox machine" and Puffs tissues "Kleenex" and sweeping a floor with a Dyson vacuum cleaner "Hoovering". But the real question is: Since the inception of the Guideline, with mandatory infinite spin, has Tetris itself become not-Tetris?

Was it the infinite spin[1], the T-spin triples[2], or the piece randomizer that lets you keep playing forever[3]? In fact, all three of those "features" have been mandatory in new versions of Tetris for the past half decade, including Tetris DS, Tetris Zone, and Tetris Evolution.

For me, it was the control lag that killed the joy in Tetris Worlds for GBA. It bothered me so much that I learned how to program for the GBA and made TOD.

[1] Infinity
[2] Super Rotation System
[3] Random Generator and Playing forever

If Linux is a copy of Unix, does that make Lockjaw a copy of Tetris?

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I have coded something that I think is better than Tetris® in some ways. It's called LOCKJAW Tetromino Game. It starts with the standard rules of everyone's favorite tetromino game, and then it layers on 30 different ways that the player can customize its behavior. For example, if you don't like infinite spin, T-spin triples, and a piece randomizer that allows playing forever, all of which are mandatory in newer Tetris products, you can turn them off. It even comes with built-in scenarios to simulate various Tetris products, from the 8-bit games to the modern western games to the Japanese arcade game in those ridiculously fast videos.

• infinite spin (explained),
• spin triples (explained), and
• a randomizer that lets you play forever (explained part 1 and part 2).