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Homebrew Game & Watch Games Make Debut
Kojote writes "The latest PDRoms Coding Competition has just finished. The idea was to write a homebrew Game & Watch-style freeware game for handhelds or consoles, and there were a total of 24 freely downloadable submissions. In detail, there were 10 Game Boy Advance entries, 8 GP32 entries, 3 Gameboy Color entries, 1 Genesis/Megadrive entry and 1 Neo Geo Pocket Color entry. The winning entries were headed by Beer Belly Bill (GBA) by Metalvotze. If you don't have real hardware to test the entries, you can use emulators such as VisualBoy Advance (GBA/GBC) and GeePee32 (GP32). Have fun!"
When it gets right down to it, games that are made are often better than some of the other games put out, even by some retail gaming companies. I've seen some damn impressive work on handhelds done by just someone or a gorup of people who program for fun in their spare time.. If only there was a way to get some of their works published on the actual carts..
need to copy the url and paste it into a new window. i guess they dont like external referals
TIAEAE!
Here is a torrent of the 24 submissions in a single zip file (as downloadable from http://www.pdroms.de/pdrc2_5-submissions.php), just in case the site goes to a warmer place.
I think the interesting thing here is NOT that the games may or may not be as good as a "commercial" release, so much as people are not content to be passive consumers of entertainment. I taught painting for years, and though not all of my students were great painters, at least they were willing to engage in a creative act. And so it is with homebrew games. I think it is great people are writing their own games, good, bad or indifferent.
Anyway, VBA is the pwnage and I encorage anyone to get it.
We need a new mod catagory. "Icky." Although on /. the debate is open as to if that's plus or minus 1.
Yeah, I guess I'm funny like that.
but some of them look like those old Tiger handheld games.
...
... you had to collect the eggs from the dinosaur without dying, avoiding the pterodactyls, lava, and the dinosaurs feiry breath.
... maybe that wasn't a dinosaur.
That was the whole *point* of the competition! Hence the title of the article, Game & Watch Games
I remember I used to have a Tomy caveman game
Hmmm
The whole point of the compo was to see who can make a good Game & Watch-styled game and not who can make the Next Best Thing(tm). Its all about seeing what you can do with what limitations are thrown at you. Developers have been doing that for a long time.
Let he who cast the first flame try to accomplish better with said limitations.
It would probably be a big boon to linux if we could port some linux games over to the GBA. I'm thinking games like frozen bubble would catch on like wildfire.
Not only that but porting games like tux racer and armagtron to the Xbox or PS2 could help get some higher visibility for linux as well.
Who the heck modded this up? The whole point of the contest wasn't to say "look at the best homebrew games we can make on the GBA/GP32/whatever" but to create a game with the same feel as an old Game & Watch game.
If you want to find more technically impressive homegrown GBA games, check out http://www.gbadev.org/ periodically. They'll usually link to the biggest new games, and you can almost guarantee that the author will have posted some tests or early releases to the Demos section too. You'll see a lot of clones/ports of old games, but some of them are well executed, particularly the Barbarian and Nebulus ports.