Choose your own adventure on DS while PSP owners message each other
Our homebrew round-up straddles both the 1980s and the present
Another week begins and another truckload of 'bru bits and bobs arrives in the homebrew holding area. This time we have something a little different for you on the DS: reading adventures.
The LoneWolfDS project on the Nintendo handheld started some time back as a creative way to read a book on Nintendo's handheld. The project has kept the vertical book style interface but now sports a whole play mechanic of its own. You may recall the Fighting Fantasy 'choose your own adventure' books from the '80s. Well, this is the same in electronic form.
The LoneWolfDS team had hoped to port some existing game books across, but soon found copyright issues prevented it. Not wanting to step on intellectual property rights of others, it decided to use Project Aon's award-winning Lone Wolf open source game-book series.
As the team says: "The philosophy behind the port of the Lone Wolf books to the DS is to let the console handle all the rules related to combats, stats and so on, so the player can be really immersed in the story and doesn't need to bother with the game play elements."
To get started with your adventure simply download LoneWolfDS, pausing to make a donation to the team's charity, and copy the .nds file to the root of your homebrew cart. Easy.
Over on the PSP this week is a great little chat tool to help you keep up with all those IM buddies. Homebrew developer Zx-81 has just released a great little update to Danzel's multi-protocol instant messaging client AFKIM. Now this resolves graphical issues on PSP Slim units more of us can enjoy it – great teamwork, men!
Away From the Keyboard Instant Messenger (AFKIM) supports an impressive number of IM clients including AIM, ICQ, MSN, GTalk, and Yahoo! Messenger. Once you've copied the AFKIM folder to your Memory Stick, you can use this great getting started guide to get chatting. The homebrew uses a PDA style text interface that by use of the D-pad and a button can enable surprisingly fast typing. The whole package is all wrapped up in a great user interface that not only functions well but also looks the business.
There we have it for another week. Two great pieces of homebrew software to get that old grey matter churning again. I particularly like LoneWolfDS taking the high ground in terms of copyright. Combined with the good old fashioned teamwork that brings us AFKIM, it really does speak volumes about the spirit of homebrew.
Join me next week for more top tips as I get them.