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Those little indy puzzle games don't replace boxed games, they supplement them.

Except after reading about the broken mess that is modern Tetris (try ridin' spinners), wouldn't a lot of people prefer, say, Lockjaw?

Kind of like Geometry Wars for the Xbox360, or Nintendo's Virtual console.

Except Microsoft gets a cut of every game sold through Xbox Live Arcade, and likewise Nintendo with Virtual Console.

What's strange is that even if it's completely proprietary and locked-out, there was no advance solicitation of developers to produce titles.

Apple might have contacted developers of established franchises (notice it's Tetris(tm) and Bejeweled(tm), not Lockjaw and some Bejeweled clone)

There's this 'alt=' tag that I can use to caption graphics.

<sarcasm> If you can't think of a good alt attribute value for a page's most important images, just set it to "(Security Code)", and you'll be set. </sarcasm>

(Nit: alt is an attribute not a tag or element, and its value is a replacement not a caption.)

while emulators haven't received a lot of legal attention in the past, IP holders

I am an IP holder; my IP is 69.246.213.81, leased from my ISP. If you are referring to copyright, say "copyright". And yes, I am a copyright owner as well.

may also start attacking them as "adjuncts to piracy".

Could Microsoft reasonably attack Bochs, claiming that it "enables" the use of unauthorized copies of MS-DOS? No, because FreeDOS (which recently turned 1.0) works on Bochs. Likewise, when I use VisualBoyAdvance to run my own programs and others', whose copyright am I infringing?

Cue Tepples posting a link to Luminesweeper in 3... 2... 1...

luminesweeper isn't quite as good.

imho, the things that make lumines so damned addicting are the awesome visual effects and the goddamned catchy music. without that, the game doesn't rub the brain the same way and my neurons' stimulation isn't quite as invigorating as it should be. With that said, one could say "maybe lumines isn't that good of a game, then!"

well, my response to that is the ol' meth-amphetamine metaphor; bastards who do too much meth eventually over stimulate their brains and become no longer able to enjoy life in the normal way. Unfortunately, for the most part, so many games nowadays utilize this over-stimulation to get you sold which makes it difficult for other games (read: independent/single developer) to break into the market. I used to love tetris on the gameboy, but now, it's just not really that enjoyable. I really dont' get the same adrenaline rush that I used to when I was 8 or 9. One could argue that I've just gotten bored of it, but I like to think that it's just not stimulating enough anymore. I need something stronger.

although, at the same time, the original Zelda (and countless other NES and other classic console games) are still completely satisfying to me... although my theory on that is the ol' masturbation metaphor. It may be the simple fact that it brings back memories of my youth, or it may be that those gameplay mechanics never get old and no matter what, it still feels good to play.

wow, that was a long response to such a short reply. ;)

They made it more difficult to run homebrew code on the iQue DS and the DS Lite. (And more difficult to flash the DS Lite's firmware without causing some hard-to-reverse damage)

Yesterday I installed FlashMe on a DS Lite using a Datel MAX Media Launcher (a NoPass card) and a GBA Movie Player. It's actually easier than PassMe used to be, as NoPass is NoBigger than a standard DS Game Card. A couple paperclips plus some Scotch cellopane tape make a handy tool for shorting SL1. What you see is what you need.

And how exactly do you prove your credentials on-line, especially if they are not academic credentials (work experience, hobbyist, enthusiast, etc)?

Link to work that you have made using those credentials. For example: Proving my credentials in Game Boy Advance programming

and Tetris clones!

Google "actually breaks Tetris" or "such wonderful bullshit" to see what people think of the latest Tetris® brand games, and you'll see why some people would rather play a clone.

Read up on Undiluted Platinum(mod chip).

I wasn't aware of that. Thanks. But this mod chip requires soldering, which (from an end user's perspective) costs a lot of money for labor. The DS hacks have never required soldering, and they require a screwdriver (and a very simple procedure) only if you don't want to carry the NoPass card with you. Bottom line: While a SuperCard+NoPass costs about 60 USD, the PSP mod chip costs 90 USD plus soldering labor.

When the DS Lite came out, I sold the PSP and picked up a DS Lite with Metroid and Tetris. I've been playing those any many other games online and offline and haven't looked back.

Nice decision; let me suggest something to add to your enjoyment. Have you considered buying the DS memory card so that you can put your own music into a Lumines clone?

For games (why else do you buy a gaming device) you can play Lumines, Katamari, or any of a half-dozen racing games.

With a PSP, you can't put your own songs into Lumines. With a GBA (or DS) and a $50 memory card, you can.

Lumines

Was out for the GBA before the PSP was out in Europe and Down Under.

$249 on a PSP for my Lumines needs

Or $40 on a SuperCard adapter for your DS for your open-source Luminesweeper needs, right?

Lumines for PSP doesn't have a story to speak of either. Neither does a free software clone of Lumines .

What's your game called?

[tries to think of the least smart-aleck response]
If you're curious, my other game is called Tetanus On Drugs.

I am the author of the Luminesweeper game that the article mentions. If you have any questions about that game, ask away :-)

No don't! He might put on a dress

I wish a console version of TGM somehow came over to western shores.

Tetanus On Drugs gets that frantic.

If you made it to a high level of Lumines (DS) or Tetris (PSP)

Looks like you've been playing a lot of homebrew. Officially, Tetris is on DS and Lumines is on PSP, but unofficially, Lumines is on GBA and Tetris is emulated on PSP.

Well playing some DS/GBA games I am forced to ask myself when Nintendo will finally pull their games into 1990 and add some bloody speech. It is really a nice change to be able to just listen to your handheld rather then having to read slowly scrolling text.

It's not a technology problem, as even the GBA is perfectly capable of decoding GSM audio at 30 kbps. It's a content production problem. It costs Nintendo money to pay Charles Martinet to speak all of Mario's lines.

Frankly we hear this same discussion about graphics being less important then gameplay every console generation and everytime a new vidcard comes out. So far it doesn't seem to stop people buy the latest console or vidcard.

That's because the console makers stop making the older consoles and stop authorizing titles for them. There are no new NES, Super NES, N64, or Game Boy Color games being produced commercially, and among the three handhelds that Nintendo sells that can play Game Boy Advance games (GBA SPv2, Game Boy micro, Nintendo DS), only one can also play Game Boy Color games.

This is the same reason I don't purchase used games if I Can help it.

However, Lumines Plus (for PS2), Lumines 2 (for PSP), and Lumines Mobile (for mobile phones) are distributed by a unit of The Walt Disney Company, which (unlike most other software publishers) has lobbied Congress for copyright term extensions. If I want Lumines Plus (and not some homebrew clone), I have to either buy from Disney or buy used. I'd rather buy used, so as not to support Disney.

I log on, select a game, buy it legally, and play it. Simple.

Either that, or you find that your favorite titles are not available on the service.

The common myth in the US stems from USC 117 Section 17. It allows for owners of software to make a single backup copy. The purpose of this dates back to the 70s or 80s when software was distributed mostly on volatile magnetic storage mediums. People like to pretend that it extends to ROMs too, but in fact, not only is it not true, but case law (See Atari vs JS&A or google it) contradicts it.

Atari v. JS&A covers backups from carts onto carts. It does not cover backups or "adaptations" from carts onto another medium using a copier, which are both explicitly permitted (17 USC 117(a)(1)) and implicitly permitted (Sony v. Universal, interpreting 17 USC 107).

I develop and publish independant games for fun.

So do I, but I want to move out of my parents' basement.

How about putting "CHECK OUT MY NeW GAME!" link in your sig on slashdot and posting in every single videogame discussion. You get traffic, trust me.

I've tried that, but then people started foeing me for being "that guy who talks about Luminesweeper in every freakin' thread that mentions the DS or PSP".

One can easily buy a $500 computer that will play every PC game currently sold.

How many same-screen multiplayer PC games are currently sold? I want to build a set-top PC, connect it to my big-screen TV, buy four PC joypads, plug them into a USB hub, and have one control each player on a shared view. But why aren't there enough PC titles to do this? Most PC games require the purchase of a separate computer and monitor per player, even if the game wouldn't need a split screen (e.g. Smash Bros. or Bomberman).

You can specify image sizes in em by using CSS. See this tutorial. This allows browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer to scale them.

Until this page no longer looks blocky, it won't be workable. Go fix bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 98971 if you want something done about it.

I didn't realize anyone out there still played with consoles

Show me several good single-head real-time multiplayer titles for PC, and I'll believe you. I want to plug multiple joypads into a PC and have a game recognize them all and assign one to each character on the screen, without having to buy a separate PC for each player in the same room.

back in my day, tetris stressed the hell outta those darned XT's.

What is more powerful: an IBM XT with a 4.77 MHz 8086 CPU in a 40x24 cell text mode or an NES with a 1.79 MHz 6502 CPU running in almost the same text mode? If a two-player Tetris clone doesn't particularly stress the NES, then why would it stress an XT? Tetanus On Drugs, on the other hand...

back in my day, tetris stressed the hell outta those darned XT's.

What is more powerful: an IBM XT with a 4.77 MHz 8086 CPU in a 40x24 cell text mode or an NES with a 1.79 MHz 6502 CPU running in almost the same text mode? If a two-player Tetris clone doesn't particularly stress the NES, then why would it stress an XT? Tetanus On Drugs, on the other hand...

Game piracy is rampant everywhere. There are clearly more games downloaded and played than purchased legally.

But what exactly is piracy? If somebody downloads and plays a GPL'd clone of Bandai's Lumines instead of buying a PSP and a Lumines disc, is that piracy?

Yet PC (and console) games distribution is not a monopoly proposition

Try to get your independent game ported and distributed on any set-top console or any handheld system, and tell me it's not a collusive oligopoly. Got any hints?

That rotation crap is now part of the official Tetris rulebook that all licensees have to follow.

Is that so? I guess that gives me an incentive to stick to playing homebrew clones, right? I would have at least put in a timer so that if a tetrimino has landed and hasn't moved downward by at least one net row over the past second, it locks into place as if the player had hard-dropped it by pressing Up on the +Control Pad. (Compare the rule in Chess with no pawn moves in 25 rounds ending the game, and compare the behavior of the Puyo games.) Either that or put a picture of an Elorg lawyer on the other screen once the player starts to abuse infinite rotation a given number of times.

The other consoles doesn't support Nintendo-made games.

Neither does any Nintendo system support Katamari Damacy or Amplitude or Lumines (except through homebrew for the last one).

Pass.

Me.

But once I played [Tetris DS], first I was amazed by the controls. The speed of playing just couldn't happen the same way on the original game boy... the feel of the d-pad and buttons just feels right.

In Tetris or a clone thereof, speed of play has nothing to do with the console and everything to do with how autorepeat is set up. The autorepeat in the official NES, Game Boy, Super NES, and GBA versions of Tetris and Dr. Mario (excluding Tetris Blast for the original Game Boy) was just way too slow for advanced players. A faster autorepeat could have been done even on less powerful systems, as has been demonstrated in homebrew games such as Tetramino (NES) or Tetanus On Drugs (GBA) or Luminesweeper (GBA), all of which model their control feel on Tetris Blast for Game Boy.

Of course, if you really want "speed of play" in your Tetris, you'll have to head for the arcade.

But once I played [Tetris DS], first I was amazed by the controls. The speed of playing just couldn't happen the same way on the original game boy... the feel of the d-pad and buttons just feels right.

In Tetris or a clone thereof, speed of play has nothing to do with the console and everything to do with how autorepeat is set up. The autorepeat in the official NES, Game Boy, Super NES, and GBA versions of Tetris and Dr. Mario (excluding Tetris Blast for the original Game Boy) was just way too slow for advanced players. A faster autorepeat could have been done even on less powerful systems, as has been demonstrated in homebrew games such as Tetramino (NES) or Tetanus On Drugs (GBA) or Luminesweeper (GBA), all of which model their control feel on Tetris Blast for Game Boy.

Of course, if you really want "speed of play" in your Tetris, you'll have to head for the arcade.

But once I played [Tetris DS], first I was amazed by the controls. The speed of playing just couldn't happen the same way on the original game boy... the feel of the d-pad and buttons just feels right.

In Tetris or a clone thereof, speed of play has nothing to do with the console and everything to do with how autorepeat is set up. The autorepeat in the official NES, Game Boy, Super NES, and GBA versions of Tetris and Dr. Mario (excluding Tetris Blast for the original Game Boy) was just way too slow for advanced players. A faster autorepeat could have been done even on less powerful systems, as has been demonstrated in homebrew games such as Tetramino (NES) or Tetanus On Drugs (GBA) or Luminesweeper (GBA), all of which model their control feel on Tetris Blast for Game Boy.

Of course, if you really want "speed of play" in your Tetris, you'll have to head for the arcade.

Do they have screenies of Solitaire and Minesweeper?

Solitaire has been ditched in favor of Lumines, and both games have been rewritten using VBA.

A major problem in the accessibility of the World Wide Web lately is CAPTCHA systems that distinguish sighted humans on the one hand from bots and blind humans on the other. For instance, Slashdot itself uses a CAPTCHA. Has anybody had success in getting a Slashdot account created through the e-mail method specified in the Slashdot CAPTCHA's alt text?

The big advantages of using a PC for gaming have always been threefold:

1. Keyboard/Mouse input allowed for more complex input, especially in the realm of FPS and RTS games
2. Graphics were usually better (except for perhaps in the first year or two of a new console generation.
3. Network gaming.

OK, so where are the single-head multiplayer games for the PC? If I have multiple people in the house who want to play video games, I don't want to have to buy a separate PC and a separate monitor for each player. Why don't more commercial PC games allow plugging in multiple gamepads and having each control one player's character? (Read More...)

I have yet to see a major web host that offers Python Server Pages support

Possibly because the abbreviation is already overloaded. As the developer of Luminesweeper, a clone of a PlayStation Portable flagship title, puts it: "Where I come from, PSP is still Corel Paint Shop Pro."

On the other hand, "Nihon Keizai Shinbun" quite literally translates into "Japan Business Newspaper."

Any better than "US News and World Report" or "Newsweek" or "BusinessWeek"?

Do you call Germany "Bundesrepublik Deutschland"?

No, but sometimes I call former East Germany "der DDR" when I want to make bad jokes about 4-arrow stepping games.

Ever notice that the open-source is always the clone rather than the commercial game being the clone of the open source?

Always? I seem to recall that Spacewar for PDP-1 was a free or at least semi-free program developed at MIT, and the first commercial video game Computer Space was a clone of Spacewar.

That might have something to do with the competition, too.

Yes, it is competition. As the rules of casual video games are still seldom patented (even if patentable in a given jurisdiction), the threat of Free or otherwise cheap knockoffs forces the commercial game developers to up their production values. The free market ensures that players are free to choose between games with Freedom and games with production values, at least on lockout-free platforms such as Windows XP, Windows Mobile, Mac OS X, X11/Linux, X11/BSD, Palm OS, GP2X, and GBA Movie Player.

with worse production values.

Not always. Do you think Tetanus On Drugs for GBA has worse production values than THQ's Tetris Worlds, the "official" tetromino game for GBA? And if so, how?

Are Kirby: Rainbow Run, or Advance Wars: Dual Strike or Trauma Center all about the graphics? How about lumines?

Lumines®, published by Bandai, is all about graphics. If it weren't, we'd have more people just downloading open-source Lumines clones or other puzzle games in the spirit of Columns and playing them on a PC or GBA.

I don't find it very intelligent to choose a OS platform based on the availability of one game.

Tell that to anybody who bought an original Game Boy just to play Tetris, a Nintendo DS just to play Nintendogs, or a PSP just to play GTA. But you're right in one way: the people who bought a PSP to play Lumines are screwed.

This is how I remember tetris ;-)

By homebrew, it usually actually means emualtors, and most of the software people actually run on those emulators is copyright infringing as well.

That's a big "usually". Take Tetanus On Drugs or anything else in the GBA section of pdroms.de. What copyright does it infringe?

As far as I could tell, it was the only Tetris to feature the challenge of creating 4x4 blocks, as explained here, which completely changed the strategy of the game.

THQ's Tetris Worlds includes The New Tetris as one of its modes, but it's awful for other reasons; Google search for "actually breaks Tetris" to see why. I believe Tetanus On Drugs, a homebrew GBA game, implements the same 4x4 block scoring rule, along with the additional challenge of vertigo-inducing playfield display distortions.

If someone was to copy/redo that, I'd just die!

Of a drug overdose?

Considering that it is a DS, it will probably be able to run DSLinux.

DSLinux is a homebrew program. Given that Nintendo has updated the DS lockout once already during the DS life cycle, expect an even bigger lockout upgrade when the internals are redesigned for the DS Lite. Then users and developers of homebrew are going to have to develop and start using brand-new passthrough methods reminiscent of the save injection method that the Xbox Linux installer uses.

although, the PSP has lumines which had kept my attention far more than the DS. I also had an NES emulator on there with more ROMs than I could ever play.

Lumines and PSP emulation are available on GBA (and by extension Nintendo DS) as well; see Luminesweeper and PocketNES.

Lumines is the only shining star

And it's shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin', better stop before the lameness filter kicks in...

Have you been to a video arcade lately? They are still around and are full of games you can't play easily at home. Most of them have hardware that is specialized for the game

I assume that by this you mean custom controllers. Apart from redemption games (those that spit tickets), the most popular game by far at arcades I've been to is Dance Dance Revolution and other games using the same cabinet. That form factor is so old that controllers for Konami's DDR brand console games and for PC-based clones are anywhere from $20 to $200 depending on quality. Which games were you talking about?

or have large systems linked together so a number of people can all play together interactively.

You've never been to a LAN party?

You can see the movie now, not in six months when it comes out on DVD and all your friends have already seen it.

Tell that to people in Europe, who had to wait nine months for their PSP, and by then, the system's killer app had already been cloned for another system.

The GP is (IMHO) just pointing out that this company shows a general pattern of disregard for copyrights [by marketing the emulation capabilities of its device]

Disregard for whose copyrights? What's so infringing about taking a GPL'd NES ROM such as Pin Eight Tetramino (or anything else on pdroms.de) and running it in an NES emulator?