Slashdot Mirror
The State of the Homebrew Games Scene In 2009
Craig writes "DCEmu has released an article detailing the current state of the homebrew scene on all game consoles, from the Sega Dreamcast to the Nintendo DS to the Nintendo Wii. It even covers unreleased consoles such as Pandora and GP2xWiz. The article explains what is needed to run emulators and games, and whether or not it's worth bothering for each console."
There was no mention of the Genesis, which has been getting some impressive indie games. There's a brand new RPG being released this spring, and there was one released last December.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
From the AtariAge Homebrew forum I see Ballblazer, K.O. Cruiser, KITE!, Jack and the Beanstalk and others in progress.
The AtariAge Store currently has 61 homebrews available for purchase in cartridge form so you can play them on a real console.
There's no home brew better than PC home brew
PC homebrew can't easily run on a big screen. The PC and TV need to be in the same room, and either the TV needs to be an HDTV or there needs to be a $50 scan converter between the PC's VGA out and the SDTV's composite in. This difficulty is why your 17" laptop doesn't have a lot of party-style games (like Mario Party, Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart Wii, etc.) for it, even though PC operating systems support four gamepads through a USB hub.
The most accurate true to life simulation - eg. flight simulation - compared to arcade games on most consoles
But some people want arcade-style games. If I want to develop party games, and my business isn't yet big enough to have a detached office, which platform should I be on?
While the article is good information, the article is poorly written. There are a lot of run-on sentences, and multiple typos in every paragraph. The most glaring example is that each time the author means "you're", he writes "your" without fail.
I don't understand how they define homebrew and what they mean when they say that XNA is not free at all.
XNA isn't free in almost exactly the same sense that iPhone SDK isn't free. XNA Game Studio's documentation states that it requires Windows, a DirectX 9-class video card, and a PC capable of running Visual Studio 2008 (recommend >2.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM). Mac owners, Ubuntu PC owners, and low-end laptop owners need not apply. In addition, you need an active XNA Creators Club subscription to test your software on an Xbox 360. The price of an XNA Creators Club subscription ($99 per console per year) can add up if you're trying to develop games that work over a LAN or the Internet.
I agree, I was hoping for a list of quality games. Here's some of my favorites for GBA and DS:
GBA:
DS:
Now I just need to see if I can find my list of quality homebrew NES and Dreamcast games....