
Artist/designer David Stubbs and two partners are launching an ambitious site on November 19th, to coincide with the arrival of the Wii, called WiiCade.
The site features Flash games that you can play on the Wii through the Opera browser, and also access via your PC to upload new games or try your hand at designing your own. They should have 15 Flash games up at launch, including two exclusives that feature unique use the Wiimote. Games will auto-fit on all TV screens and are vector based, which should mean no jaggies.
This is one of the first homebrew efforts we've seen for the Wii, and we hope to see a lot more in the coming months. The Opera browser and the Wiimote will hopefully make this an attractive target for homebrewers, and hackers as well.
So bring on the Wiimote FlyS.W.A.T. Flash game, already.


















(Page 1) Reader Comments
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"This is one of the first homebrew efforts we've seen for the Wiil"
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I guess we'll see tomorrow
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In exchange, please make a game involving nukes.
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NO, they stole MY idea! Actually, no, I have a better one now. Go to newgrounds and ask Tom to make a Wii collection. Then, more people will submit work there, because it's a site that's already known about!
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I must add that I was sad when I learned that Wii News, Wii Forecast and Wii Opera are all delayed.
I also came up with some sort of issue;
You Wii card will come with 2000wii points and 1 N64 game is 1000wii points meaning that with a Wii card you can buy up to two N64 games max.
Now, those Wii Points have all of a sudden become very precious since we can not really foresee what will come out on the Wii Shop Channel so I will retain myself from buying "cool" old titles only to buy the "awesome" old titles for fear or wasting my points only to find out the week after that an even cooler game came out which will leave me to buy more points. Bottom line is, it would be nice to have some sort of channel which would list what is coming soon.
VC Soon:
Week of XX December 2006
-Game 1 | System
-Game 2 | System
etc.
That way you can plan ahead with your points or buy more points for the coming week...
I truly hope this feature will be integrated or is already present for it would generate alot more profit.
I am pretty sure I am speaking for everyone when I say we just can't wait until GoldenEye, Perfect Dark and Ocarina of Time come out on the VC. Well wouldn't it be nice to get a date 3 weeks in advance?
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Nintendo has taken a very iPod approach to the Wii and I think that will include ALOT of stern letters to those sites trampling on property rights to the name and look.
BTW...I mentioned this type of thing earlier too when question why you would buy games at VC when you can just get very good flash emulation of old Nintendo games....
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And yes, give us Flyswat. In fact, give us all of Mario Paint with the flyswatting game.
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Us old farts remember why Ballblazer was so remarkable when it first appeared on the Atari 800 and imposible to properly port to other systems of the era that had far more limited color palettes. It was the first serious use of real-time anti-aliasing in a consumer app. Back then, the guys producing the first Lucas games were the same crew producing animation like the Genesis Sequence from Star Trek II. (The other early Lucas game, Rescue on Fractalus, was title in early versions as Behind Jaggi Lines.)
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If someone was to make Wii homebrew, they would have to write the game using the same (or extremely close to the same) APIs that real developers use. That means programming in C++. That also means dealing with PowerPC's flipped endians. Then you have the problem of running the code on the Wii. If someone finds a hole that allows unsigned code to be run, Nintendo will patch it rather swiftly and silently using WiiConnect24.
Unless Nintendo is planning to take the same route Microsoft is, and create a special SDK for independent developers, it's going to be tough to get REAL homebrew running on the Wii.
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Yes it is. They are in flash, but they are designed with the Wii in mind. Yeah, they work on a PC too. That doesn't mean they aren't homebrew.
"APIs that real developers use. That means programming in C++."
Flash programmers aren't "real" developers because they don't use C++? What if I use C# or Java, I'm not a real developer?
"That also means dealing with PowerPC's flipped endians."
Looks like you have no idea what you are talking about and are just tossing in a buzzword to make yourself look authoritative. If you are using C++ then "flipped" (whatever that means) endians do not matter, as C/C++ encapsulates the data types. Endians would only matter if you are programming in assembly (and they would'nt still wouldn't be a constraint).
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To be fair, endianness also impacts reading and writing data - to disk, to network packets, etc. So it's something multiplatform developers (typically just at the C-level and below) sometimes need to keep in mind. To also be fair, it's not exactly a superhuge issue anyways and doesn't really bear any relevance to the topics of "real programmers" or "homebrew".
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