Archive for the ‘Videogames’ Category

The New Stuff Chronicles #7: N5: Revolution for DS

Nintendo, The new stuff chronicles | Posted by Dr. J
May 13 2008

It’s been a long time again… Just like the last time and the time before and before and before… How am I ever going to get loyal readers if I don’t post any more often? I guess that the only way to get loyal readers is by writing stuff that they might like which brings me to today’s topic: the N5 which is a Micro SD card reader for the Nintendo DS which is made by some Chinese company. It’s homepage can be found by clicking here.

The N5 enables you to use ROMS of DS games that you download somewhere. These games van be official games which would be illegal or homebrew. The device comes packaged with a USB Micro SD card reader and a software cd. On the software CD you’ll find Moonshell which is required to be on the Micro SD card if you want the DS to boot when the card is inserted. Besides the ability to play ROMS the N5 supports MP3 playback, movie playback in some formats, textfile reading and a calculator through moonshell.

I allready had a 1GB Micro SD card, but if you don’t have one yet, you’ll have to get one seperatly or find a store that sells a bundle. I primarily use the N5 to be able to play games that I can’t get around here. It’s really annoying when a game is released, but then the only way to get it is through import, because not a single store here sells them. I think that I’m also going to use it to check a game out before I’ll actually buy it. Buying games always comes with the risk that you don’t like them. Because there are hardly any demos and if there are any demos they’re pretty much impossible to get then downloading a ROM to try the game and then buy it if you like it is quite a good way to be sure you get your money’s worth.

But for some people the most important reason to get a flash card reader for the DS would be homebrew. There are some really interesting homebrew titles available for the DS like this Quake and Quake 2 port and this OpenTTD port. And this is one that I find very interesting, Warcraf Tower Defense, but I have yet to try it.

A lot of homebrew software for the DS (and also for the PSP) can be found on homebrewwelt, but unfortunatly for those who don’t speak German, this site is in German.

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Xinput Driver for Microsoft Common Controller

PC, PC gaming | Posted by Dr. J
Sep 19 2007

This is just a quick note for anyone who is trying to get his/her xbox 360 (or compatible) controller to work on Windows XP SP1 or SP2. It doesn’t matter whether you have Home or Professional edition, or 32 or 64 bit for that matter. The driver that you can download from Microsoft.com does not work. Whatever you do, it keeps giving you a message that only says “the installation did not complete”.

There is, however, a solution for this problem. There are two of them to be exact that don’t involve any hacking or cracking or anything nearly that hard to do.

  1. Download a driver package from Microsoft Hardware
    Just choose the kind of hardware, which is “controllers” in this case, then choose the kind of controller, then your operating system (Windows, Windows, Windows or Windows) and last you choose the language of your operating system and there you go, you get a download that is considerably larger than the one you get from Microsoft.com when using a search and I guess that that has a reason.
  2. Use Windows Update to get the driver, worked for me.

I haven’t actually tried option 1, but various forums informed me that this works, but simply using Windows Update is still the easiest way to aquire Microsoft drivers.

Anyway, I hope this helps anyone who might stumble across my blog while searching for a solution to get his/her xbox 360 controller to work on Windows XP.

I’m not sure why you can also download a Vista driver from the list on Microsoft Hardware, because Vista has native support for these controllers, beit wired or wireless.

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FOJ Community Mod video

PC, PC gaming | Posted by Dr. J
Sep 02 2007

My friend Michiel “NecroDOME” Gijbels (the same guy as I made Über Zombie with, together with even another one) and I have been fooling around with the Flatout Joint (FOJ) Community Mod for Flatout 2 and all this jumping, crashing and flying around resulted in the following video which I uploaded on Youtube for you all to watch:

FOJ Community Mod video

The video is a bit long, but it contains some pretty neat crazy jumps and crashes. All footage is from 2 player sessions. I was using “DooM” as my ingame nickname and Michiel was using “1337 z0r” as his nickname.

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Über Zombie

Other, PC gaming, Videogames | Posted by Dr. J
Aug 24 2007

Über Zombie

Well, this has actually nothing to do with my previous post in which I announced an upcoming update about some stuff, but this is interesting as well.

This post is about a computer game that I made together with two friends in 48 hours and 10 minutes including sleeping hours. It is called Über Zombie and it’s all about killing as many zombies als possible without getting killed yourself. You can play the game with up to three people on one pc using the keyboard and two gamepads/joysticks. There is no story whatsoever, but who needs a story for a pointless zombie slaughtering fest anyway?

The graphics are created by me with the exception of the blood particle texture, which was made by Michiel “NecroDOME” Gijbels. All sounds were created by me and cost nothing but a few plastic bags. The programming credits go to Michiel and Frank “Mad Woody” van Gent. Here are a few screenshots as well as some video’s that were recorded using FRAPS.

It all started with the idea of creating a complete computer game in two days. It turned out that it took about 10 minutes longer than that, but that doesn’t matter, the point is that we have proven that it is very well possible to create a very fun and challenging game in just two days. Here is the first screenshot that was taken. It’s a very early graphical test:

Über Zombie early test

Now I have a video for you. This video shows an early test as well, but not as early as the first screenshot. In this version it was allready possible to shoot zombies, but not much more than that:

Über Zombie Alpha

Now come a few less early shots, but still not the final version. In this version all players look the same, and the zombies aren’t spawned properly in the map, but the basic gameplay in the same as in the final version:
Über Zombie beta Über Zombie beta

The next video is an almost final version video. The players have different colors so it’s less confusing with which one you’re playing, but the zombies aren’t spawning yet how they should be spawning:

Über Zombie beta

And last, but not least: 3 final version screenshots and a final version gameplay video:

And now some linky linky:
Download Über Zombie from Necrodome.homeftp.net
Visit the Über Zombie page on GGE

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MSN, Yahoo! and AIM messaging on the Nintendo DS

Nintendo, Other | Posted by Dr. J
Mar 16 2007

Yes, exactly, what the title says and all that without a hack. All you need for this is the Nintendo DS Browser I mentoined in my previous post. The people over at ebuddy understood that there was a need for a web based messenger solution for some of the most popular instant messengers that would work on handheld devices like cell phones, PDAs, Blackberry devices and ofcourse the NDS.

When you enter the url http://www.ebuddy.com on your NDS it will automatically bring you to the mobile page where you can choose from the 3 before mentioned IM systems. When you have picked one it’ll bring you to a login page where you enter your user name and password and off you go.
I only tried the MSN one, because I’m not on the others, but I expect them to work pretty much the same way.
The mobile messenger doesn’t work as convenient as it’s desktop counterpart, but it works quite nicely, here’s a list of the major differences it has for MSN and this probably also goes for Yahoo! and AIM;

  • only one ‘window’: you must do everything within one ‘window’ so switching from one conversation to another isn’t as quick as on the big version.
  • No custom smileys
  • No buzzers, winks, soundclips and all that jazz
  • No voice/video chat
  • Even the contact list and configuration options are in the same ONE ‘window’
  • No contact groups, only online and offline are seperated
  • Typing isn’t as convenient as on the big version

That’s about it, well, there are a lot more differences ofcourse, but these are the most noticable ones and probably the most important.

The best thing is that it works great on SSR mode, so you only have vertical scrolling instead of both horizontal and vertical.

Sometime soon I’ll post a couple of pics of this web based messenger, but I’ll need my camera for that and I can’t post those from my NDS from which I’m posting this.

I’m pretty sure that this ebuddy stuff works on other handheld devices, like a PDA or a Blackberry, as well.

Written on the NDS

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@ Tefaf 2007

Nintendo, Other | Posted by Dr. J
Mar 11 2007

I don’t know whether any of my readers are art lovers, but I thought I’d inform you of the fact that I’m at the world’s largest art fair as a crew member. Together with two classmates and a student from another group I’m doing the IT support at the Tefaf fair in Maastricht (the Netherlands). Rich people from all over the world come to Maastricht for this event and most of the exibitors, who also come all this way from all over the world, want to have a wireles connection to the internet. And that’s where we come in.

For some more info on the Tefaf fair you can click here.

It’s been pretty busy, but I was able to squeeze this post between all the calls we get.

So, what else is new? Well, I got a little accesory for my Nintendo DS. I purchased the Nintendo DS Browser by Opera Software and I must say that it’s really nice.
The NDS Browser is based on Opera 8.5, which is reflected in some minor webpage incompatibility, but even then most pages are displayed correctly in the overview mode. The SSR mode (Small Screen Rendering) only very few pages are displayed correctly. SSR mode is especially useful for webpages that were specially designed for mobile devices like cell phones.

The only drabacks I have encountered are it’s disability to save password and to the same thing to store cookies.This forces you to reenter your user name and password for sites you visit regularly over and over again.

But even writing e-mails and posting blog entries can be done really well with this program, I’m even writing this post using my NDS with the Browser.

Written on the NDS

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DoW Dark Crusade

PC gaming, Videogames | Posted by Dr. J
Dec 24 2006

As I mentioned a little while ago in this post I had purchased Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War: Dark Crusade (what a title).
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade
For those who don’t know Dawn of War (DoW), here’s a few links:

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NFS Carbon: Own the City

Nintendo, Videogames | Posted by Dr. J
Dec 01 2006

The maintainance is completed and so I can get back to normal posting again and I hope that all of the images are back and working again. So if any of you people come by any pictures that don’t work or that are obviously wrong, please inform me by leaving a comment right here.
NFSC
So, in the meantime I purchased Need for Speed Carbon: Own the City for my Nintendo DS Lite and by now I have almost finished it’s single player career mode and I must say that this game by far exceeds my expectations.
NFS Carbon
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YASP (Yet Another Shopping Spree)

Movies, PC gaming, Videogames | Posted by Dr. J
Oct 28 2006

Before I continue with today’s subject I’ll do a little clearing up on why there still aren’t any pictures in my previous post. The gallery is working and so is the rest of the webspace, but there is some trouble with uploading a large amount of images at once. The FTP denies direct access to the required folder, which is probably caused by the fact that the folder was created with the wrong permissions by the gallery script. This means that I would have to upload all 58 pictures seperately… Thanks, but no thanks. So those pictures will have to wait untill this has been resolved and since I can’t do it myself (I have no root access), an administrator of my webhost will have to fix it for me and then I’ll look at the script to see if I can change the permissions it sets on new folders.

So, on to today’s stuff, I bought 2 DVD’s and a DVD-ROM! Not actually 2 movies, but a compilation DVD and the first season of a series and the DVD-ROM isn’t really a game either… It’s an expansion pack for one of my favourite modern games.
DVD’s

DVD-ROM

  • F.E.A.R. Extraction Point

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Mashed and Project Snowblind

PC gaming, Videogames | Posted by Dr. J
Oct 13 2006

In this post I mentioned that I bought myself a copy of the game Project: Snowblind and finally I got to play it as well as the game Mashed which I got as a bonus with my videocard. The subtitle of Mashed is “drive to survive” which is a subtitle that very well describes what you’ll be doing as Project: Snowblind isn’t really a title which would make you think of a first person shooter. Both are pretty good games and well worth a try.
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