#gaming

I’ve gone through a few sets of Joy-Cons since buying my Switch back in 2018. Every pair has ended up with stick drift, and at this point my Switch is running Android full time, so spending £60 on first-party replacements felt like a waste. I picked up the LinYuvo KS42 from AliExpress for around £18 instead.

I’ve spent countless hours playing Balatro, and I’ve always wanted to create my own game with similar mechanics. When TrinketOS announced a game jam, it was the perfect excuse to make it happen.

I sold my HTC Vive back in 2020 and bought an Oculus Quest. Was it an impulsive lockdown treat? Perhaps; but it was time for an upgrade. I went for the 128GB model, and had to order from the German Amazon store as nowhere in the UK had stock at the time. I was impressed with Amazon Prime in this case, and then in awe of their logistics network. I ordered at around midday, and then received the Oculus Quest 24 hours later from Germany at no extra cost.

I finally got around to assembling this little Peanut kit that I bought from Tindie a couple of months ago. The kit comes with everything you need (except a battery) to build a tiny (50 x 35mm) Arduboy-compatible handheld game. The specs are as follows: Arduino Pro Micro 0.96” OLED screen Piezo speaker The build instructions were very simple to follow, requiring only basic soldering skills (and a tiny SMD resistor to change out). Uploading games to the Peanut is pretty straight-forward. On Windows there are a couple of applications available. On Linux the process is a little more involved but it works great once you’ve got it set up. The only thing to note – in my experience – the ATTRS{idProduct} for the udev rules is slightly different with the Arduino Pro Micro provided in the Peanut kit, but you can easily find the correct value by checking the output of lsusb. There’s a bunch of games available on the Arduboy forum and also a nice curated list of games that can be automatically uploaded with the desktop app.

I bought an HTC Vive last November (a week before the Black Friday sales, doh!) and have spent the time since trying to get the most out of it. So here are some highlights, thoughts and other musings about the HTC Vive.

As part of the JS Oxford-organised Summer of Hacks, I co-organised the “Game Dev Day” hack day in Oxford. This is the second time I’ve held an event during the Summer of Hacks (the previous event being SusHack #3 last year!).

A different sort of review today, the Mars G01 Game Pad from Tronsmart. Geekbuying provided me with this G01 to review, so first of all a thanks to them for that. I’ll mention where you can purchase the G01 at the end of the review.

Today my Pacman Moleskine arrived - I’m pretty excited, but I won’t be using it until I fill my regular lined Moleskine. I’ve been learning Objective-C along with @tmayr, so far covering just basic things such as processing user input and displaying output, using Cocoa/Interface Builder. Most recently we’ve been looking at filesystem things. I’ll probably post some of the haphazard things I’ve put together here eventually. Some pictures of the Pacman Moleskine… Unable to recover the image :(

i’ve been playing half-life 2 a lot this weekend, it’s an amazing game, kudos goes out to valve for their amazing work on the game

i’m bored.. you wouldn’t think i could be, considering i have my new pc and all, but i am… played any and all games i installed (halo, q3, cs, dflw, etc..) and now i am at a loss for things to do… work on the site is slow.. i have a lot of free time, but not enough time to sit down and work on the site.. although, today i added a new 404 page hmm, i’ll have to see what i can get done saturday, inbetween sleep and going to my sisters partay…