The basics of it is, that it’s a phpBB3-based forum, with a ton of language packs, some small hacks to make language support even more smooth, a unique structure of governance, and the goal of attempting to bring Pokémon fans from across Europe together on one forum, to supplement national forums and make for a bridge between our nations.
The forum has national sections, currently Danish, Germany, Greek, British (English) and international forums, so that people can come and discuss things in their native language and if they feel like it, through the same site, trivially communicate across national borders.
Latin:
Est Europa nunc unita
et unita maneat;
una in diversitate
pacem mundi augeat.
Semper regnant in Europa
fides et iustitia
et libertas populorum
in maiore patria.
Cives, floreat Europa,
opus magnum vocat vos.
Stellae signa sunt in caelo
aureae, quae iungant nos.
English:
Europe is united now
United may it remain;
Our unity in diversity
May it contribute to world peace.
May there forever reign in Europe
Faith and justice
And freedom of the people
In a greater homeland
Citizens, may Europe flourish,
A great task calls on you.
Golden stars in the sky are
The symbols that shall unite us.
It would seem that the Germans and friends have done it again! At the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, on the 28th of December Michael Steil and Felix Domke (Of Xbox-Linux fame) did a presentation titled Deconstructing Xbox 360 Security, and at the end of that, a person showed running his own code on the Wii, and also briefly explained what he and some friends had done (Pretty amusing, if you’re into security stuff), so do so.
I personally think this is fantastic, because the Wii is very very efficient in terms of power consumption, so running GNU/Linux or a BSD system on it, and essentially using it as the computer that it is, would be extremely cool. Plus one could possibly write some neat games for it. With GNU/Linux on the system, one could also use to stream movies and music, show pictures a little more efficiently than you can with the officially sanctioned functionality for that.
So hopefully, GNU/Linux and *BSD plus all sorts of homebrew will becoming to the Wii in the near future. Because the Wii is largely based on the GameCube architecture, it could be possible (If I’m wrong, I’d be interested to know why, I’m just guessing here since I’m not a programmer) to reuse some of the stuff done for GNU/Linux on the GameCube.
It’s gonna be a little interesting to see what Nintendo is gonna say about this, obviously they’re not gonna be happy about people potentially being able to easily run unauthorized copies of games, or write unlicensed games (They make money by charging developers wanting to make games). Although one would hope that they don’t pull an RIAA on the hackers, because since they make a fairly hefty amount of money on the hardware, more uses for it could potentially make them some extra cash! Heck, I’d be very interested in getting more than one Wii if I could use for things such as a small web server, IRC server or something like that.
You can see the Wii part of the presentation. that I mentioned earlier, on YouTube: The state of the Wii – 24c3.
As a free software guy, I encourage you to not use Flash, but use KeepVid.com to actually download the video, and then play it using something like MPlayer. This is also a very nice way to avoid the infamous “buffering …” of streaming video.
December 27, 2007 at 09:50
· Filed under Gaming, My Life
Because he certainly wasn’t mean to me!
Yet another Christmas has passed, and yet more billions of the world’s various currencies, have been spent on presents. This year I got a good new book to read, Essential System Administration by Æleen Frisch, published by O’Reilly. It’s a huge, thick 1152-page book on UNIX system administration, covering GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Tru64, AIX and Solaris. The book is from 2002, so it’s a little old, but I figure that system administration can’t change fundamentally that quickly, you have still have to be paranoid about security and all those sorts of things. I also got a bunch of cash, which will come in handy, because I’ve been meaning to start saving up for a new computer for a while and have not gotten around to it. I also got a cool new shirt, plus three pairs of socks. Also I got small fun things like a little dark-blue, glass dolphin, and various sorts of stuff.
To anyone reading this, hopefully you got something nice for Christmas as well!
“At an event in Cannes, Ubisoft has finally confirmed what we’ve known for a long time now. Red Steel 2 is indeed in the works for the Wii. It seems as though Ubisoft will be completely reworking the sword fighting this time around, which will hopefully result in a much more engaging system. While an online mode was rumored, nothing has been confirmed just yet.” Source: Go Nintendo.
When Red Steel originally came out, a lot of people were extremely negative about the game because of the lukewarm controls and the sword fighting system. I have always thought that Red Steel definitely could have used, a couple of more months on the workbench. Now having said that, it was definitely not as bad as a lot of reviews made it out to be. I’m glad I ignored most of the reviews and went ahead and bought the game, because boy have I had a lot of fun with it, seriously I still play it quite a lot these days, shit I played it earlier today!
So as you probably have guessed, Ubisoft’s announcement of Red Steel 2 is extremely good news today. Now that there’s no “Wii launch date” to meet, I really hope they really take their time and do the sword fighting just right, and polish the graphics just a bit, because there were some parts in Red Steel that were somewhat “boxy”.
Anyway, for Red Steel 2, I really really hope that it’ll be possible to have multiplayer sword fights over the internet, that would just be amazing!
This week the Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2006 is going on in Los Angeles, this year both Sony and Nintendo will have some new stuff to show off regarding their new consoles, PlayStation 3 and Wii. Microsoft will of course also be at the show to show some new Xbox 360 stuff.
I’ve looking forward to E3 2006 like a 5 year old kid looks forward to christmas, because the thing that excites me the most is the surprises you often run into in technology and especially when all the analysts’ predictions are reversed.
So, what’s to look out for at E3 this year? Definitely Nintendo, they should have playable versions of some of the games for the Wii, so should Sony as well with games for the PlayStation 3.
All companies will have pre-E3 press conferences, if you go to www.gamespot.com/e3 you will be able to watch them live when they’re going on, big big props to GameSpot for making that publicly available!
Personally, the thing I’m looking forward to the most is Nintendo’s announcements on the Wii, maybe a price point? Launch date? Games? All these things are something they might reveal, a few months ago, Shigeru Miyamoto said that there were still some secrets to the console that we didn’t know about, maybe we’ll get to know these secrets in just about 24 hours?
Yesterday Nintendo finally reveiled the controller for their upcomming next generation console, Nintendo Revolution. And I tell ya, this is different. I’ve looked at A LOT of fan mock-ups of the controller and nothing I’ve seen comes close to what Nintendo showed at Tokyo Game Show yesterday.
Main Controller Features
3D Pointing. Sensors understand up, down, left, right, forward and backward.
Tilt Sensitive. Controller can be rotated or rolled from side-to-side.
Buttons Included. Has a trigger on its backside, face buttons, and a D-Pad.
Multifunctional. Has an expansion port which can be used with different types of controller peripherals. Analog stick with two trigger buttons planned for left hand.
Wireless. Totally wire-free. Currently there are no details on the max distance, source or power, or otherwise.
Rumble Built-in. Included as a standard in all the controllers.
On the DS, Nintendo split the screen in two, with Revolution they’re splitting the controller in two!
You may think “What the fuck are you gonna use this thing for?”, well, imagine a first person shooter game, you could control the player with the left-hand D-pad and aim your gun with the right-hand remote-like controller, you could also use the remote for a flash light.
Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, also said, during his keynote at TGS, that the Revolution controller is very expandable, in the back end of the remote you will find a little plug for add-ons. During E3 Iwata said that it will be possible to download old Nintendo games off the web and play them on Revolution, for this, Nintendo will be designing a classic-style controller so that those older games will feel more like playing it on the actual older Nintendo console.
Personally I’m really excited about this new controller, when it comes to real innovation, no one beats Nintendo, after all, they has over 20 years of experience with video games!
IGN has some very good in-depth articles about this new controller, go check ‘em out!
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Mario, happy birthday to you”
Today, the 13th of September 2005, it’s been 20 years since Nintendo released the first Mario videogame, which was called Super Mario Bros.
Oh boy, so much has happend since then! And many things are about to be “revolutionized”
Mario is probably the best known video character ever, I first heard of Super Mario when I was three years old, damn those were the days… Oh, day dreaming again!
“According to Amazon, the U.K. release date is set for 25 November, with the U.S. getting the game slightly earlier on the 14th.”
This is so exciting, one of the Zelda developer team’s goals with Twilight Princess, was to surpass Ocarina of Time. That is one big goal, but judging from the screenshots and gameplay videos I’ve seen so far, I don’t think they will be too far off!
