Fun & Games

Here’s a LED pong game played right on the breadboard. The LED dot matrix is driven with time multiplexing. The columns are displayed one by one in rapid succession, giving the illusion that they are all lit at the same time. Source code and some photos to get your started. Link.

GBADev has an annual competition to create home brewed GameBoy games. Instead of giving out cash and flash cartridges the aim is to manufacture a batch of 500 cartridges with the top entries (a “multi-cart”) complete with cart sticker, manual and box. The cartridges will be manufactured by an “independent party” (not Nintendo). The cartridges are in, you can order them now. The games look great. Link.

Lots of things to put on your PSP. Here are official PSP versions of comics formatted for the PSP from Variance press (High and Lonesome, Last Orders and Semantics). Next up- Star Charts resized just for the PSP from the Mag-7 Star Atlas project, love this! And lastly, pimp out your PSP case- I hope someone makes a template and kit to do this. Link. Thanks Eric!

GameSpy has a great article about Spore and the new way to think about games. Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims talks about his latest game where you become a cosmic creator. Here’s a great quote…“At the same time, what he calls the “value to gamers” levels off after a while. A game with 22,000 animations isn’t twice as good as a game with 11,000 animations. But fortunately, Wright learned another lesson from The Sims: People love to make their own content. They love to customize their experience…Putting two and two together, Wright concluded that there had to be some way where users could create content, instead of armies of developers, and a way to make a game craft itself around the user’s contribution”. I need this game.