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Porting Aquaria To the PSP
Apple Prophet writes "Just a few short weeks after BitBlot released the source to Aquaria as part of the Humble Indie Bundle, Andrew Church hacked up an ambitious homebrew port of the game to the PSP. He wrote a detailed synopsis of the technical challenges in an article on the Wolfire Blog, and of course, contributed all of the patches back to the project so anyone with a homebrew-equipped PSP can try it out. Check out the mercurial repository for the source."
From the game's website, screenshots, and hardware requirements it seems possible that this game could be ported to the Wii. The simplistic control scheme (mouse only, keyboard can just be used for starting/exiting game) could easily have it work on pretty much any gamepad for any system. The technical hurdles the dev went through just to get it to the PSP (a platform of much less popularity than several others) suggests he possesses the resolution to get Aquaria on other systems.
The size (200MB) is within Wiiware limits, although I've become skeptical of Wiiware because of the massive price discrepancy between that store and the prices indie developers charge online. Obviously Nintendo wants a worthwhile profit, but when one can get PC versions for a tiny fraction of the Wiiware cost which are largely fixed for a long time, sometimes not going down ever...tends to make you wonder if Nintendo would even be willing to sacrifice anything at all for a much higher exposure of indie titles. But, that's expected of most corporations obviously.
Twenty years ago, games were not far off what many indie titles are today - made by between one and five people with the costs minescule compared to the development houses of today, and involving simple but entertaining and addictive concepts. The difference is that these games circa 1990 sold for $30-50, even some simpler titles that required much less work than certain more elaborate games of the day (Monkey Island, Mercenary series etc) . Considering one can pick up some of the best indie titles for under $5, and get much more hours of entertainment than if that 5 bucks went on a movie ticket or an exorbitant hour using Starbucks wifi...it's pretty damn good value.