Four Island

On the first day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: An extremely weird rant on what Starla did last weekend.

Hi peoples, and welcome to the first day of Kirby Week. I'm sure you're all super-spectacularly excited for the upcoming holiday, yes? Well, today, I'm rewinding a bit to the weekend when Advent 2 ended and Kirby Week started. Some weirdly cool things happened that I fell like talking about.

First, on Saturday, I was bored. I didn't know why I was bored because I had plenty of things to do: work on Pillowcase, work on FourSearch, implement many of the pending renovations currently required around Four Island, work on the HKRPG site, work on one of my games, or anything else listed in The Bet. But, instead, I continued to be the queen of procrastination, and did nothing.

So, it was with boredom that I opened Google Reader. Oh yes, that's right, it's Saturday, none of my usual humor blogs had updated. I did notice, however, that TimTam's feed had over a hundred unread items in it. I decided to work that number down to a reasonable (0) amount.

That totally didn't work. The first post I read was a list of Lifehacker's best posts during 2009. Among that list was an article on how to install the Homebrew Channel on the Wii without needing the Twilight Princess hack. I had previously found out about the Homebrew Channel (it was The Daily WTF, actually) but was always annoyed because I didn't have, nor had any intention of getting, Twilight Prinecss.

Excitedly, I fetched my SD card from my broken camera and followed the instructions. Amazingly (because cool things that I want to do never work), it worked perfectly. The Homebrew Channel sat peacefully in the Wii system menu and I was ecstatically excited.

If you know me, you may not know that, among my normal programming, I also like to indulge in some homebrew programming. I've written for the GBA and the DS (both required special cartridges to put the homebrew games on and both have been lost by my evil siblings) but now I could possibly write something for the Wii! And as I was pondering this, the perfect training exercise that would get me into programming for the Wii popped into my head: I would port Maze Of Life to the Wii!

For now, however, I just wanted to play something fun. I ran back to my computer and looked through the list of homebrew applications to find something cool to play. As I was scrolling through the list of games, one caught my eye. POWDER. I sort of freaked out at that. POWDER is an extremely fun roguelike that I (during my DS homebrew days) had previously playing on my DS. I remember it to be an extremely fun game. I don't, however, remember being any good at it. :P

So I downloaded it (and a few other games including a super-cool looking port of SuperTux) and loaded it onto the Wii. I immediately became hooked. Yes, obsessively so. I played that game for two hours straight today, and many more not in succession. I even found the Linux version of POWDER and started compulsively playing it on my computer. I was even.... doing well, occasionally! :P If you've never played POWDER, you must do so. Seriously.

One other cool thing I did on the Wii was downloading the port of Visual Boy Advance (a GBA emulator). I had this emulator on my computer and (during my GBA homebrew days) used it to test my GBA games. However, it was difficult to play actual games on it because the keyboard isn't the intended controller for these games. So, I couldn't enjoy my Kirby Amazing Mirror ROM (I had lost the physical copy of this game years ago and really wanted to enjoy its amazing funness again). So, my grand idea was to use the Wii, VBA and the Classic Controller to play the game in its full greatness. And what do you know, it totally worked. Yippie for me. :)

So, I hope you've enjoyed this randomly long post. I'm off to play POWDER now.