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Early Work on Homebrew StarCraft for the DS
Via Buttonmashing, news of early work on a homebrew project to port Blizzard's StarCraft to the Nintendo DS. "Since no official plans were ever announced from Blizzard, two French homebrew developers have taken it upon themselves to create a port of the popular PC game, StarCraft, for the Nintendo DS, calling it StarLite. Because they've only been working for three weeks, the game is a bit limited right now and still needs a lot of work."
Not that I don't love Starcraft and wouldn't love to see it find new life on other platforms, but isn't this a cease and desist waiting to happen?
Your only chance of beating me and like 95% of other online players is using a mouse and even then you damn well better be fast with it! I even have lost games because of using a ball mouse. You gotta play so fast, it just wouldn't work on the PSP. Even the offline stuff is kinda difficult to do if you're not able to move troops quickly.
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http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/03/04 Those who failure to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Brendan
Perhaps blizzard learned with their N64 port that RTS ports generally don't work on consoles/handhelds. Especially when the game is already so cheap, has great online play/community, and is playable on almost any computer today.
Currently, the only thing that works is the ability to spawn more overlords. It's a good thing that's the most important part of the game.
Because they've only been working on it three weeks, they haven't gotten their cease and desist yet. I remember at least one group making a SC mod of Warcraft3, and they got theirs.
from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porting):
The term is not generally applied [...] to the rewriting of source code in a different language (i.e. language conversion or translation).
This is not porting. This is reimplementation.
Like the remake of TA called TA3D (http://ta3d.darkstars.co.uk/home-en.php) and someone already mentioned FreeSynd (http://freesynd.sourceforge.net/about.php)
After I modded my original Xbox I put as many party games on it as I could, I played only on my PC but I tried to cater to guests.
It had an RTS and it was horrible, not horrible like FPS on a console but pretty bad...
Now I'm a long time FPSer, I played back before you needed a mouse (Wolf3D etc) and the mouse is the best controller for a first person perspective yet, others may pshaw fps games as simplistic but they are the closest thing to a human perspective, that being said their simplicity has been caused by complex controller systems fragmenting the market (see Deus Ex, Rainbow Six, Hitman, Descent for examples of this complexity).
Now I'm not sure that the DS will be able to bring the RTS to consoles, but I know it will improve on the Xbox RTS experience. My first time playing Metroid DS I thought it might have as good a controller set up as a PC, later I found some flaws but the DS is a remarkably flexible platform.
Hopefully this mod will bring RTS and Baldurs gate style RPG to consoles.
Fuck that. Fight that shit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are no legal grounds that prevent them from constructing code to emulate a PC on the DS system, or "port" the Starcraft executables to another system.
But even if I am wrong, fuck them anyway. I love Blizzard, they make wonderful games, but this corporate overruling of people's hobbies/freedoms to create has GOT. TO. STOP. Fight it, even if it is "illegal", the system of laws is just a man-made constriction on reality anyway. Fight it, you can change it.
On a more rational note, Blizzard is just getting a free wider audience and awareness for their products. If they want to be pansies about it, they should suck it up because it will only benefit them in the end anyway.
I played it before they started their "get tough" policies and general copyright bullshit.It was a breaking point when
they started to ban players for hacks(even harmless third party hacks),
Ruined the game with buggy patches(practically everything after 1.09)(damaged maps and third party software compatibility),removing useful glitches (the Death counter memory overwrite which allowed map manipulation on many levels,in real-time),they added spyware which downloads and executes stuff from blizzards servers,banned every chatbot and harmed binary bots compatibilities,
added a new chat flood detection which banned alot of people typing 3 lines too fast. real hacks are never patched, they are simply evolving faster then blizzards patch processes.
The exclusive WC3 clan system was designed to add value to Warcraft(and excluding any SC players from them) and annoy Starcrafters.
When a team tried to unlicensed port Chrono Trigger to the PC, they didn't last very long. Given Blizzard's history, I don't see it lasting very long.
Love my R4. I downloaded this thing last night before I saw it on slashdot. It's pretty amazing. All they have ready so far is the GUI and basic gameplay. You only have two buildings (terran command center and a barracks) and you can only build SCVs and marines. There's a few enemy marines on the map to kill, and that's about it...
But it works amazingly well. The controls are more smooth and precise than so many other official DS games I've played. Basically, you tap on a unit to select it, and tap on something else to make it do an action. It automatically selects the right action. Selecting the units is really accurate, I never actually had to tap them more than once to get them to select. You can also do a drag-select, and that works too. The GUI, even in its early stage, is also very nice and responsive. When you select a unit, you get a little menu on the right hand of the screen with some icons for the actions you can do. The game even runs at full speed, with good sound output (with sounds from the actual gome... give me somethin' to shoot) and everything. I imagine the resolution is lower, but I certainly can't tell. They're doing an amazing job with this, I'm really impressed. I hope they carry on with it, and if Blizzard gets involved, that they hire them to do an official version, because this is going to be commercial quality if they keep it up.
You have yet to give a valid point about how or why Starcraft is dead. You just complained how Blizzard patched the ability to use hacks in multiplayer games and bnet. None of the Blizzard patches ever really annoyed me, but that's probably because I don't hack.
Considering Starcraft is a decade old, and I can still hop online and easily find plenty of different games to play, it's amazing that it isn't dead yet. Starcraft is still going strong, and it's one of the most popular games for professional gaming in the world.
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are a dime a dozen, and rarely go anywhere. Projects that do go far, are often taken down with cease and desists.
From screenshots it looks like they've accomplished a lot though. I hope they don't run out of steam before the job is finished like 90% of the fan projects out there (remember freecraft?). A lot of developers become happy when a game is "playable" but still contains major bugs that insure that no one will actually bother playing it.
As a side note, one of the cooler fan projects I've seen is a rom hack for Chrono Trigger, that takes the original game engine makes it into a sequel (the chrono trigger rom format has been investigated pretty deeply, and it's possible to change pretty much everything in the game).
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Fan_Projects.html#Chrono_Trigger:_Crimson_Echoes
that project also seems to have halted, but there's already a lot of playable game.