The free hosting place I’m currently with is a bit slow and more importantly has a TON of downtime so I’m going to give up the extra freedom and just move over to wordpress.com.
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Its far from done and along with other missing functionality it doesn’t even have audio but here is the beginnings of my Wii homebrew DDR clone. Its intended to be played with a GameCube/Wii dance mat but will work fine with a regular GC controller d-pad or a wiimote d-pad. Just hit the corresponding directional button to match the arrows as they reach the top. You get either a perfect or good rating based on how well you time it or you will get a booed if you totally miss an arrow. The game is completely frame rate independent so even if the currently great frame rate starts to go down or becomes inconsistent the game will always stay in sync with the soon to be added music. Also well the game currently “randomly” generates the arrow placement its setup in a way that will make it incredibly easy to have it save and load the placement from an external file once I create the editor. Another thing is that well the randomly placed arrows are placed at a consistent rate (there is 140 of them per minute and there all evenly separated) Theres nothing that about the way its setup that necessitates that so songs with inconsistent speeds will be more then possible. The top bars distance from the top of the screen, the arrow scroll speed, and what distance good and perfect fall into should all be considered temporary and will be tweaked.
There is a thread over at WiiBrew’s forum asking if the once news worthy flood of interesting Wii homebrew has dried up. I’ve got to agree with the OP (robmcp1888). I’ve been thinking the same thing. I’ve haven’t been paying much attention to the Wii homebrew scene for a while until recently and during the gap of time not much has really happened. Well there is still new homebrew and updates to pre existing stuff getting released fairly frequently there isnt really anything worth paying much attention to. The thing is that pretty much everything has been done already.
Regardless of how some of you uptight copyright defenders might feel about it the main focus for most people for opening up closed platforms like Wii is to enable piracy and that has already been done. You can play copies of Game Cube or Wii disc based games or even install pirated channels. You can even play once disc based games off of USB external hard drives. There is nothing interesting left to be accomplished for that type of thing.
All of the usual stuff has already been ported. There is a kind of unofficial but well established list of games that ALWAYS get ported to any platform that homebrew is possible on. Stuff like Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake and SuperTux. You can play them on anything from a GP2X or Dingoo to just about any kind of cellphone and you can already play them on Wii.
There is already an emulator for just about every console and the few that dont have emulators are ones that there will likely never will be usable ones for on Wii (for example sure nobody has made a PS2 emulator but its unrealistic to think that there will ever be one let alone one that runs at more then 1 frame per hour or any other tolerable rate).
I think the last frontier is original 3D games. For the most part there STILL hasn’t been anybody who has really done 3D yet. There are a few things like ProjectGMC but as visually amazing as it is its not really doing anything that couldn’t have been done with sprite based 2 graphics and it isn’t really doing anything with the Wii remote either. I’m surprised that there still hasn’t been a good (scratch that it doesn’t even need to be good) original homebrew FPS or 3d platformer for Wii.
Not that I’m any exception to the rule. I’m at least at the moment working strictly in 2D making low quality games that I’m sure nobody cares about. But in the off chance that you do happen to care then you might be happy to hear that I’ll probable have a really early version of a DDR clone up sometime tomorrow. Hopefully it will help to compensate for Wii’s sad lack of a StepMania port.
http://forum.wiibrew.org/read.php?14,40725,42540#msg-42540
I got Platinum in Uncharted 2 a little bit ago (yay). I love that game so hard. I also got around to playing and completing Modern Warfare 2. I feel no loving connection to that other game though and in fact I feel unquenchable and admittedly exaggerated hatred towards those who do. You Call of Duty people annoy me.
Modern Warfare 2 isn’t the second coming of jebus or the flying spaghetti monster and the perpetual hype is excessive and annoying. Personally I prefer Uncharted 2 over it and especially in terms of its multiplayer. I dont really get the appeal of Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer. It just seems dull and generic to me like a remake of Combat Arms with a $60 price tag. The campaign is is a short 4 hours and its plot is in my opinion disjointed and poorly designed complete with nonsensical or completely unbelievable occurrences along with a frack ton of repetition. The airport massacre didn’t offend but I did rage from the implausibility of it, what caused and lead up to it and the events that followed it. Its like an even stupider version of every stupid over budget action film you have ever seen and it doesn’t seem to realize it. Its completely un self aware. It thinks its serious. Well not completely serious. Some of the peripheral stuff like naming of trophies and multiplayer logos and things like that try to be funny at times. Unfortunately it seems to be the comedic styling of that kinda slow 14 year old you sorta knew in school who just found out about pot and porn. Sadly I think that comedy styling seems to jibe really well with the games hardcore fanbase…
The thing it though that well its not on nowhere near as high up the awesomeness scale as David Lapham’s completely unrelated comic book series Young Liars or even in my opinion as high up as the comparatively highly related Uncharted 2 it is still a really good game in a “OMG so much cool shit just happened and I had a total nerdgasm during that last button mashing cutscene and you should/need/MUST rent it but maybe not so much buy it” kinda way. That dull multiplayer seems to be really well liked by people who aren’t me and that short single player campaign has a reason for being so stupid. For realzies. At first I was like “campaign mode, why are you so stupid?” and it was like “I fried my brain with my awesomeness” and then later I was like “it may have indeed been a worthy exchange of brains for awesome, my poorly conceived friend”. The rage inducing plot justifies so many moments that are so very cool and its all made even more epic and moving by the move style unmemorable but at the moment completely amazing soundtrack.
But the coolness of that is very much countered by how at some point between the mistreatment of PC gamers and the adds encouraging homophobic speech by gamers and all the other duchbagery surrounding and contained within this game it occurred to me that Infinity Ward is plausible comprised solely of or more probably consists of a few complete metaphorical assholes.
So whatever. Rent it, Pirate it, borrow it or maybe just maybe buy it but whatever you do can we all agree to shut up about it now? I suppose I’m a little late to the party on this now that the hype actually has died down since the release but even so I feel the need to say that anyone who types or speaks about it beyond this point will be attacked by a velociraptor like a bad programmer who used a goto command.
Ok for you Wii homebrew ignorant the way you run homebrew is by taking advantage of one of the many exploits to run a tiny little but of unsigned code that will in turn launch a full blown homebrew app. Back in the real olden days pretty much all you could do was use the Twilight Princess exploit to launch a port of tetris. What happened really quickly though was that installable homebrew launchers where made like the homebrew channel and a few others like it that I dont think absolutely anybody uses. Once you had the homebrew channel installed you would never need to use another game save exploit again and you could use it to way more easily brows multiple apps stored on your SD card which majorly streamlined the whole process of running homebrew which in turn streamlined the process of developing it (I dunno how other people work but I tend to recompile and retest things a lot even when I’m confidant that what I’m doing wont cause problems). For the end user though its still a bit of a hassle going about using new homebrew. To find out about and get apps that you dont have yet requires motivation which in my opinion somewhat clashes with the laziness that plagues gaming. That is where the Homebrew Browser comes into the equation. Its a homebrew app which you can conveniently launch from your homebrew channel and what it does is provide you with a constantly updatting list of all homebrew games, emulators, media players, demos and everything else and lets you download them with your Wii directly to your SD card so there ready to be played as soon as you back out to your homebrew launcher.
I’ve always known about it but I never actually tried the Homebrew Browser but I have now so let me tell you about it: its so very cool in concept and just a little flawed in execution.
It starts up with a simple white text on black background screen as it reads out what its doing well loading up and connecting to the server and downloading updates and images. Once its done the screen seizures and briefly sits at some random garbage image. It doesn’t take too long for the app to get ready for use but even so that start up doesn’t scream quality presentation and that first time it does have a considerable wait time well it downloads the thumbnail title images for games. The fact that it failed extract all of the images from the rar file that first time also didn’t fill me with confidence about the apps quality. Once you get started there are other problems and shortcomings. Scrolling through the lists using the d-pad painfully slow and well you can hold down the b button and tilt the wiimote to scroll I would still think that its speed for even that method should be ramped up. Switching from category to category (especially with once with a lot of entries like games to emulators and vise versa) causes it to freeze up for a little bit well it presumably loads up the list and associated images. There are lots of little things like that. It also completely crashed and gave me a code dump well I was using it the first time.
But the thing is that once you get past those little gripes it really is an amazing app. That start up may look weak but the visual presentation of the actual app is great. It has a really nice GUI. Aside from the very short pause when loading up a different category to browse it runs increasingly smoothly and is generally just very responsive. You cant comment on homebrew but you can give em a 1-5 star rating and you can also see how many times its been downloaded. You continue browsing well something is download or extracting/installing in the background which I really was expecting to be able to do and it even continues to run really smoothly even then.
Its got room for improvement as any program does but overall its just great quality and lives up to its concept which despite its obviousness I dont think any one else has tried to do on Wii. I downloaded a bunch of games with it to try out which I wouldn’t have bothered to do if I had to involve my computer in the process so that alone justifies downloading.
The real reason I ended up getting around to trying it though is that The person/people (presumably the apps author teknecal) are crazy dedicated and fast when it comes to adding newly released homebrew. Since I finished up the Wii port of Pineapple Apocalypse yesterday and posted it here I decided to make an account over at WiiBrew (aka the god of all Wii homebrew wikis) and after writing up my user page I created a page about my game and stuck a link to it in another page in the wiki with all the other role playing homebrew games. This morning I went back to the wiki and checked the list of recent changes to see if anything I posted had in any way caused people to rage (I’m addicted to reading wikipedia and wiibrew but aside from reporting my results with wiigators backup loader over at the gbatemp’s wiki back when the loader had more compatibility issues I’ve never actually contributed anything to a wiki so I dunno if I’m doing any thing wrong) and what I noticed was that along with awesome helpful people fixing the way a link as done in my user page and adding spaces between the words in the title of the game what else had happened was that it had been added to the Homebrew Browser. I didn’t tell anybody about it on the forum or request that it be added to the browser or do anything like that but it still got added within 24 hours of my posting it on the wiki. That some serious dedication.
Anyways check it out:
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_Browser
And be sure to download and rate Pineapple Apocalypse and all my future stuff with it once you’ve got it 
