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Best of 2008: The most delicious DS homebrew
Time to face some harsh facts, people: this time next year, none of us will have two pennies to rub together, and nobody will care anyway, because we'll all be fighting to the bloody death over scrap metal, rat carcasses, and clean drinking water. The good news? You can slow your inevitable descent into abject poverty by no longer paying for your DS games, and instead download totally free homebrew. Hurray! Not that you shouldn't be selective in what you download -- after all, for every StillAliveDS or Pocket Physics, the homebrew community churns out plenty of garbage. With this in mind, we decided to compile a list of the best homebrew we personally encountered this year. Have any recommendations that we missed? Tell us in the comments! And don't forget we dedicated a whole week to homebrew earlier this year -- you can head here for more recommendations!
Confessions of A Homebrew Virgin
Write us something about homebrew, my overlords command me, and my heart skips a beat. You see, I have a dark secret that, until now, has remained private: you could write what I know about Nintendo DS homebrew on the back of a postage stamp. And not even one of those bigger special edition stamps they introduce at Christmas, but a regular tiny stamp.A lot of you, I suspect, will be in the same boat as me, and this article is addressed to all of my fellow homebrew neophytes. Rather than simply pretend to know what I'm jabbering about, I thought I would be open about my newbie status, and write something about my first tentative steps into the world of homebrew.For this exercise, I deliberately set aside three hours (spread over a few days) to learn about and download as much homebrew as possible. I had several questions I wanted to answer: Was getting into homebrew as difficult as I always imagined? What would I gain from it? How useful are current online resources to somebody who knows nothing on the subject? Is it worth the expense? Find out by heading past the break for a view of Nintendo DS homebrew through the eyes of a rookie!
ChessNET does what Nintendon't
Though homebrew competitions are always a great opportunity to see the latest games and applications coders have been working on, they also provide us a refreshing look at creative ideas and approaches that commercial developers have no interest in.ChessNET, one of 25 other entries in the NDS/GBA division of Neoflash's Spring Coding Contest, is an online chess game with an interesting feature that we've yet to see in any other online-enabled DS games -- play-by-mail-style matches. Every action is saved onto an online server, so you don't have to stay glued to your handheld all night. After your opponent moves a piece, you can wait hours or even days to deliberate over your response. Likewise, your opponent can play other games or turn their DS off while waiting for your next move. A play-by-mail option like this would have been perfect for Advance Wars: Days of Ruin and many other turn-based titles with plenty of inactive stretches. Sony Online Entertainment certainly agreed, as the developer implemented it in its Advance Wars knock-off for the PSP, Field Commander. Nintendo even neglected to provide the feature in Wii Chess, a seemingly obvious oversight.CYBER_Aeon, the programmer behind ChessNET, has plans for more features that should come standard with almost every online-enabled commercial game -- messaging, buddy lists, and account handles. [Via DCEmu]
