Having tried coding for PSP (for which I unfortunately do not have time recently), I must say that setting up unofficial PSPSDK under Linux or Cygwin was a pain in the backside, especially if I wanted to have some IDE cooperating with it. All this is annoying to the point where I have started using embedded DSL Linux (via QEMU) under Windows with Toolchain set up in the virtual environment.

Apparently I was not the only one to get this idea. Blake1 from QJ.net development forums made 'prepackaged' version of Gentoo with Toolchain and PSPSDK already installed. FOL from PSPUAE has kindly agreed to host the files.

Therefore if you want to start PSP homebrew game development the fastest way possible without too much hassle over the environment setup, download it here and start coding straight away!

Stars in Black Returns

It all started with this movie, known as Stars in Black (SiB) :

Then we had EduRom commercial (SiB II), April Fools joke, Imladris convention fan movie (SiB III). In the meantime, Stanisław Mąderek has struggled to make a full-length comedy movie, seemingly without results. In his desperation, he even made a pre-production teaser to convince people to invest in it. Just recently I have learnt that he has finally made it - there is still all post-production work to be done, but the first official teaser (find the high-res versions here) is already there :

Visit Staszek's webpage and find more information and movies there. Good luck, Staszek!

Aquaria

Just a short post to present a game the development of which I have been following for quite a long time ever since first reading about it on John Bardinelli's blog (whose slideshow with screenshots I have shamelessly stolen, see below) : Aquaria.

Aquaria is beautiful, slightly eerie and makes me recall Ecco the Dolphin. It's trancey and looks like the kind of experience that would grow on the player in a way similar to Flow. The guys behind it are Derek Yu and Alec Holowka - you can read developers' blog here. Have a look at the screenshots (thanks John!) and at the video, to see how it looks in motion :

I really can't wait to see what comes out of it!

One year of Barts' News!

Happy birthday - yes, Barts' News is already one year old!

I will confess - I started it because I was very ill. Feeling really bad, unable to go out, to move, taking painkillers all the time. I begun this project because I wanted to do anything more useful than just play computer games after work, I wanted to share my reviews and other interesting bits of information with other people and I also wanted to practice my writing. I already was toying with the idea for some time before, yet what really got me started was the fact that there wasn't much else that I was able to do in my life at that time.

One year later I must admit that it was a good idea. One of my tips got featured on Kotaku (and reached Top Story status), my slideshow on in-game advertising in Wipout Pure got featured on Destructoid (and then on GeekSpeak and Urbaer), my note about Deus Ex was hotlinked on Wojciech Orliński's blog (with error, duh), my post on recovery mode of semi-bricked PSPs helped a good number of people, who had made the mistake of not being careful enough with their firmwares, the average monthly number of visitors exceeded 1500 (which is perhaps not that much in terms of internet, but it means that over one and a half thousand people reads my stuff every month), my webpage got me into Tokyo Game Show 2007 and helped me meet folks from the industry (Kotaku crew, Jessica Chobot, guys from Ubisoft, Gearbox, Wicked Studios, Beepa, OpenOko and others). Apart from all that, it gave me something to do in the dark times when I was sick - which had a very good therapeutic value.

Being game journalist has its advantages...

It was a good year and frankly, I didn't expect all that when I was starting this journey. I am now a different person and I can't believe where my fate has taken me to and good part of it stemmed from sitting down on dark October evening and typing my first two posts. Barts' News has now somewhat lower priority in my life now than it had one year ago (because I finally am able to do other things too), but I will continue to use it as my digital soap-box. I remain a devoted gamer and technophile and I will keep posting about games, computers, linux, gadgets and other geeky stuff.

Let us hope that the next year will be equally good in terms of positive changes! And thank you kindly dear readers for putting up with me this long!

Great lightweight XML library

I am currently trying to help develop a draft version of the game for a startup studio a friend I met in Japan. Even though I am sorely tempted, I won't write any details and provide screenshots for now - because the main strength of the game is the idea and game-mechanics, and therefore I am afraid someone might steal it.

I wanted to make the draft version for testing game mechanics according to Agile Software Development practices. Yes, Agile applies to game creation as well - read these guys' blog to see where I got the inspiration from. I wanted to make the game mechanics tweakable, so that lead game designer doesn't have to touch the code at all. For that I wanted to use XML documents with game's parameters.

Now the problem was that the draft is supposed to be small, with simple easy-to-read code - so that any programmer taking over me for the serious development knows what I did and how is the logic. Also, I do not like learning to use overly complex tools - if I need to do something, I want to do it in the most effortless way possible. Yes, I am lazy. Also, I am writing code in C++ for speed - so the XML parser would need to be C++ library.

There is a lot of XML processing libraries out there, but they are usually not small (Xerces!), not simple (different SAX parsers), not very well written, not free... It took me a while, but finally I have found what I wanted to have - Kranf C++ XML Parser.

It is light-weight, small, simple, uses wchar, is configurable and I was able to use it after half an hour, with only minor problem being that the included .lib file was made for Microsoft Visual C++ and I use Dev-C++ (mingw compiler), and therefore it wouldn't link. That was solved by importing the DLL library project into Dev-C++ (namely xmlParserDLL.dsp), compiling my own .dll and .lib files and linking against them. After that it's very easy to use the library and the .dll file has a footprint of about 100kb - thus making it exactly what I have been searching for.

Since the author, Dr Frank Vanden Berghen, asks to make a link to parser's page, should the users like his library, I thought I'd bring it to your attention. Thanks, Doctor!

BTW, my new little hobby means that I will be writing more about game development and programming in near future. And sorry for lack of pictures, but honestly I didn't know what to put here that would go well with the topic.

Street Fighter II Overdose

My first contact with Street Fighter II consisted of playing it on my friend's Amiga during his birthday when I was more or less 12 years old. I played Dhalsim (reasoning that long arms and legs would help me win), and I lost (the winner chose Blanka and was just repeatedly pressing fire). It was one of the greatest computer games I have known for a long time - it had beautiful graphics, interesting characters, great gameplay (even if a little unbalanced - take Dhalsim for example...).


I had played the numerous variants of the game later on : crappy PC port, then cool PC Turbo version, some arcade machines (on one of them Ryu's fireball would fire FIVE fireballs at one, dunno what weirdo tweaked it), then Zero/Alpha series, the last one on my PSP.

I was excited when I learnt that the game is going to be redone in HD (High Definition) meaning high resolution sprites, more animation frames and essentially the same gameplay. I was even more excited that the guys doing the graphics are going to be studio Udon that I know as the creators of SFII comics and also from watching art of some of their artists on DeviantArt. But my scepticism kept me from getting my hopes up too much - it is so easy to spoil


Just recently I saw full screens and I think they look gorgeous. Of course, the final verdict can only be made based on the final product, but so far the screens look both great and surprisingly faithful to the original game.

Indeed, Street Fighter II has gone a long way...

The interesting fact is that already the whole process of converting and redrawing the characters into HD was causing quite some controversy. Capcom never replied to this and as far as I know. Personally, I like new looks and feel a little ambiguous about possible art copying. Anyhow, seeing screenshots of the new version flooded me with memories of playing it as a kid, which felt almost like re-reading a good book after years and finding out that it is still as good as before (I wanted to put some metaphor about women, but it would be risky and inaccurate, so I gave up).


On a side note, this reminds me that some time ago I have stumbled upon (probably via Kotaku) a very funny series of movies called Street Fighter : The Later Years - it's hilarious, especially if you are a fan of the series (like me).

As always, I intended to write a short note about the new HD version Street Fighter II and I ended up mentioning all sort of SFII-related stuff that came to my mind. At least I hope you could find out something interesting in it.

GTA and elections

On the occasion of parliament elections in Poland I would like to present a cool image by Śledziu that depicts Polish politicians in GTA-like fashion (you may also notice George W. Bush and Tony Blair). It actually made me chuckle when I first saw it.


"Gry polityczne" means "Political games", which sums up nicely recent standards of Polish politics, which have reached a new low. If you like the image, you can buy T-shirt with it from Mr Herring's shop, and if you are Polish, please go and vote.

PSP Rhythm

I swear I couldn't decide on which aspect of this post I should put more emphasis : great piece of retro music, making me reminiscence about my 8-bit youth, or a great piece of PSP homebrew that allowed the music to be created. Let's make it just a quick note then all of it, before I get all nostalgic and start blabbering about ZX Spectrum and good old days.

PSP Rhythm is a homebrew sequencer program that you can carry around in your PSP and use to create music on the bus. Neat, eh?


The authors, Billy and Louie Iturzaeta, not only gave us the audio tool, but also sponsored a contest in which participants had to create music with PSP Rhythm. As a result, there was quite a couple of interesting songs that were conceived.

The winner was Transforming Landscapes by Turbo Raketti and honestly, it deserved the prize. You can listen to it by clicking below :

As I wrote in the beginning - I like this song a lot. It has this subtle retro feel to it which makes the images of 80's pixelized games appear in my mind. It resonates well with the synthetic sounds of Amiga mods and the first audio renditions of ZX Spectrum that I remember so fondly.

So all in all : great program and great music!

Of Metal, Poland and Computer Games

I am a huge fan of Anime Music Videos and Game Music Videos - I am thinking about writing a bigger feature on them, but I always lack time to do it. Nevertheless, I have found a great music video by Polish metal band Vader (one of few Polish bands that are known in the world) made to promote the incoming CD-Project Red production The Witcher - a game based on the fantasy world created by one of the best recent Polish writers, Andrzej Sapkowski (buy his book here).

Although I agree that the lyrics are a little cheesy, I really like the videoclip. It is professionally done, well arranged, mixes game cinematics with cool band leader takes and music is not as hardcore as in some Vader songs. All in all, two thumbs up from me.

And as a bonus, I have found promotional video for other Polish game, Painkiller. Funnily enough, it is also heavy metal and even slightly similar, but nevertheless Vader's one beats it hands down.

Polish accent in Japanese megastore

When I was strolling through Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara in Tokyo, Japan, I accidently saw and managed to photograph this :

Now, if you're not from Poland, you probably won't get the joke, but the movie on the screen is Włatcy Móch, Polish equivalent of South Park (in my opinion nowhere near the level of its predecessor, but that's just me). However crappy that TV series might be, it is very related to Polish everyday grey reality and probably not funny to anyone not living in our Potato Country. Hence, seeing it in Japan (hey, there was even a guy watching it!) was kinda absurd.

Haptx - revolution in game interaction?

One of the most interesting things I have seen at Tokyo Game Show 2007 was weird-looking input device known under codename Haptx. What looks like a small droid with a little ball hanging out on three supports is the innovative mechanism that can be used for truly 3D navigation. The problem with a mouse is that it is in fact 2D input device, hence the need of using additional buttons and whatnot - yet in fact this only emulates three dimensions of movement. Haptx allows user to control the pointer in full 3D and also provides force feedback. How cool is that?


Haptx was originally conceived as a device used for training of surgeons, therefore at the beginning it was extremely precise, but also expensive tool. At some point someone realised that gamers don't require that amount of precision, hence the cheaper (the estimated end-user price should be about 200USD) version was born. And having spent some time with it, I can confidently say that this is at least interesting.


Firstly, I was shown a tech demo in which I could feel the textures of objects with Haptx. I could even feel pulsations of water flowing in the pipes (although in real life I was never able to do that in fact...). Still, the experience was neat. Then it was time for some real life action - Quake 4. Although at first I had some difficulties while aiming (but hey, it took me some time to get used to mouse at first as well), the overall impression was great. Not only each weapon really felt different (random recoil of machine gun versus powerful "kick" of the shotgun), but also when enemies started shooting, I could sense where I am being hit from, not to mention it also affected my accuracy. It made the game more difficult, but at the same time much more realistic. The last part of the show was demonstration of how player can interact with environment of game called Penumbra using Haptx - this part was, in my opinion, the least impressive.


Will Haptx in time revolutionize gaming input like once did joystick and mouse? I am not sure, but definitely it has a lot of potential. I'll be keeping my eye on the news and you, dear readers, should try to test it should you have the occasion, because even though it looks strange, it feels more natural after you have tried it.

Firmware differences

For a short time I had two PSPs, my own black classic one and a silver Slim, which I bought for my sensei in Poland. Putting aside the hardware differences, there was one thing which has caught my eye and which I have been unable to logically explain. Observe two instances of Lumines 2 on the photo below and you will notice that the menu font is different in each case (click on the photo for zoom) :


PSP Slim was running the latest 3.71 firmware (original Sony one), while my PSP Classic was on 3.40OE firmware. Both instances of Lumines 2 where started from the same American version UMD. I don't know why the fonts are different - because of some changes in the firmware? I can't see any other possible cause, but as far as I know the game doesn't use system fonts (and they look different, to begin with).

Truly a case for X-Files archive. If any of you has any idea as to what might be the cause, please let me know.

Status update

I would like to apologize (humbly, deeply and sincerely) about the recent lack of updates. Unfortunately, right after Tokyo Game Show I was very ill. Then I had just a couple of days to enjoy my stay in Japan, which I did to the fullest, putting everything else aside.

Then I came back to Poland and had to deal with return to work, visiting relatives, meeting a Japanese friend who came to bid a visit, preparations for incoming travel, and also finishing on time the coverage of Tokyo Game Show for CD-Action game magazine.

Only six days later, I had to wake up in the middle of the night to begin my travel to United States, where my company headquarters are. Upon arriving to Dallas, Texas, I have once again become ill. Combined with a lot of business and travel related issues, it has successfully disabled me from being able to do anything but work.

Bear with me a little longer, and there will be new updates, promise!

Barts is still fighting on!