Handheld Game Competition Winners Announced

Kojote writes "The results have just been announced for the PDRoms Coding Competition, a 'homebrew' demo/game challenge for handhelds. The 19 freely downloadable submissions were created for GameBoy Classic, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance and GP32, and the maximum allowed filesize for the binary was 256k, which added some challenge into the competition." Highlights include Battle Picross (screenshot) for GameBoy Advance and ToyToy (screenshot) for GameBoy Color.

Re:Legality?

[NiceGeek]

Where the hell do you get that from? (I know....I shouldn't feed the troll). Unless Nintendo somehow outlawed making your own games, I don't see the problem. I don't see any copyrights or licenses being "subverted"

Re:Legality?

[hiroshi912681]

these games are entirely legal, they were developed without using the official development kits (esp without pirated devkits). there are no lockouts for homebrew carts on any gameboy system (as far as I know). there should be no problem with making your own carts and selling them. I know of a few trackers that ppl sell on the net for making gb music... homemade carts and everything... no legal probs.

some homebrew games eventually get published... esp for gameboy systems. Genetic Fantasia's PD version of Yar's Revenge (an updated clone/remake of the 2600 classic) was later revamped and got published by Telegames. Maybe Genetic Fantasia = Digital Eclipse? not sure...

Check this [1000klub.com] guy's story out:
"In the spring of 2000 I released a freeware Gameboy Color ROM, that was an identical clone of the old Q*bert arcade game. You can read the story behind its creation and obtain the game below. Shortly after I put the ROM on my website something amazing happened...someone in the Gameboy developer community came across my version of the game and passed it on to Majesco Sales. Majesco had the rights to do the Gameboy Color version of Q*bert, and they contacted me to see if I'd be interested in enhancing what I'd done and making it a commercial product."

And the guy [rr.com] who cloned Ultima 3 by reverse engineering the original talked a bit with the original company. But they said it wasn't commercially viable =(

All of those instances DID violate copyright tho, so they're not good examples. BUT, they didn't get into legal trouble.

Drymouth [parodius.com] ALMOST got published... clone of Picross... no legal probs there.

I'm sure the list could go on.

Sega v Accolade

[Random832]

if the trademarked stuff is required for the system to boot, it doesn't count as a trademark violation.

Re:Legality?

[hiroshi912681]

it may be just me, but, I believe I have run into a couple of games that change the logo on a regular gb. it's probably impossible to change the logo on gba, tho but in those cases (like dreamcast, genesis), usually the unlicensed games say, "ignore the screen before.. not supported by X"

Anyone think theres a future...

[MachDelta]

...in user-only generated content? Developers could just create (or license) and engine, toss in some templates and whatnot, then release it to the public and have a good half dozen marketable games within a year or two.
And then... PROFIT!!
Ok, not really. :P

But seriously, it's an interesting idea. That Second Life (www.secondlife.com) game is pretty damn close to making that formula a reality. Who woulda thunk that the 'infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typwriters' idea would really work

Re:Anyone think theres a future...

[bunsonh]

I vaguely recall this model failing miserably with Sony and their NetYaroze.

Re:Anyone think theres a future...

[Quobobo]

Apparently the NetYaroze was quite crippled compared to the professional PS1 development tools..

Re:Anyone think theres a future...

[oman_]

Not when the user community is still making picross games.

Re:Anyone think theres a future...

[MachDelta]

Yeah, but these are very, very limited games. 256k isn't exactly room for an epic RPG, after all. I think this is just a good, if small, example of the power of user created content. Lets not forget that there are bigger fish out there too. Do I even need to say the words?
Counter Strike.
Day of Defeat.
Tactical Ops.
Three mods that have gone retail quite successfully. And there are more on the horizon (We'll see at least one, if not more, mods turn retail from Epics "Make something Unreal" contest. Guaran

Re:This is pretty cool, new technology

[LennyDotCom]

don't know

Re:This is pretty cool, new technology

[LennyDotCom]

really

Picross?

[Kris_J]

Everyone knows that Battle Picross is a rip-off of Mario no Picross [vgmuseum.com] right? I'm assuming that the games didn't need to be original, but Mario's Picross was released for the original Gameboy way back when, so I doubt the 256k limit was too much of a problem.

Rule limitations

[Aelfy]

The rules they laid out were pretty overly harsh IMO. Rules [pdroms.de] No copyrighted material _at all_, no ports, remakes or updates of existing work. They should have allowed it, but marked up people for originality instead. Its not exactly encouraging to the newer coders. Maybe thats why they only got 19 submissions. One of them even got disqualified for using a music track from some obscure dance artist.