Older gaming experts might remeber this genoius game called “Ports of Call”. Ports of Call is a trading simulation developed in 1987 originally made by Aegis Interactive Software. In the beginning you buy a ship, which you will need to transport goods and gain money. With the earned money you can buy better ships and the whole game adds up more and more.

Here are a few more details from the author:

Progress is going quiet well with Ports of Call DS. So good even that i descided to put a little teaser online of the progress.

The game mechanics are in place and the basic elements such as trade and travel can be done. What is still left open is banking and map events. When i am finished with those parts i know how much memory is still available for sound effects and music.

http://85.150.216.22/blog/

A major release of Patater’s DS programming manual is here!

This manual now covers additional aspects of Nintendo DS Programming including multiple sprites, multiple backgrounds, multiple palettes, the touch screen, Slot-1 devices, and more. The manual’s case study has undergone a significant rewrite and covers more ground than ever before.

Thanks to dovoto / http://www.drunkencoders.com for the news.

http://patater.com/manual

Birslip presents us Uummarmiut today. It’s a fully featured 3D game, where you are a little guy who needs to find his christmas present. Download and good luck on your journey!

http://www.dev-fr.org/projets/(ndsjeu)-uummarmiut-le-jeu/

POWDER is a roguelike game, which is not a port of an existing roguelike. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning.

Changes:

Golden tridude is reflective as intended.
Soul suckers now have encyclopedia entry. (Richard Quirk)
I had forgotten to update the non-classic tilesets with some approximations of the new tiles. This has now been done.
Creatures blown into something that kills them will no longer cause a crash.
Fire elementals boiling water, falling in the resulting pit, and dying, will no longer crash.
New ring: polymorph control; along with the required intrinsic. If you have polycontrol, you can chose the form of any creature you have slain.
Creatures with polycontrol will try first to become their most evolved form. If they are already that, they’ll stay the same, unless they figure they are close enough to death a polymorph might be worth a shot.
Wand users that are almost dead may decide to zap themselves with polymorph in hopes of a better roll.
Mini icons are flipped when moved to the off-hand. Most notably, the bow will point away from the character in all cases. The handle for the off hand has also been made symmetrical to the main hand so a symmetrical mini-me will work as expected. This required a two pixel change to the mini-me icon. (Akoi Meexx)
Restarting the game would not delete any of the items in creature’s inventory, leaking memory. This was very apparent during stress tests causing the DS and GBA to quickly run out of memory and PC based systems to eventually run out of MOB ids.
Killing yourself with Acid Splash will no longer crash.
Creatures who revert to normal form after teleportitis, auto-searching, being blown by the wind, boiling water they stand on, will no longer crash.
Creatures reverting to their normal form from their own fireball will no longer crash.
When in look mode, clicking will scroll to that tile and give a brief description. Clicking the current tile will end look mode and give the long form description. (Richard Quirk)
Three more maps.

Thanks to cid2mizard / http://www.dev-fr.org for the news.

http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release

PuzzleManiak is a port of the marvelous Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection on Nintendo DS. All 27 games are ported on NDS: Tents, Dominosa, Mines, Bridges, Light Up (aka Akari), Pattern (aka Picross), Net (aka Netwalk), Untangle (aka Planarity), Sudoku (aka Solo), Galaxies, Slitherlink (aka Loopy), Blackbox, Mastermind (aka Guess), Map, Filling, Solitaire (aka Pegs), Sixteen, Fifteen, Slant, Rectangles, Netslide, Samegame, Unequal, Flip, Inertia, Twiddle and Pyramid (adaptation of Cube).

Changes:

– Fix bug in Mastermind (thanks stephen for having found it)
– Fix bug in Again/Undo button detection
– Fix bug in themes management => a maximum of 7 seven graphic themes are managed now, if you’ve more themes installed, they won’t be accessible in the game’s theme management.

http://www.puzzlemaniak.com/blog/index.php

Regular as usual in these days, here comes an other udpate of Sephiroth_FF7’s Ghost Busters remake for Nintendo DS. Grab the download from it’s release thread.

http://www.dev-fr.org/projets/(ndsjeu)-ghostbustersds/

NightFox released another beta of his puzzle game Colors.

Release notes:

Here’s a beta from my new game

http://www.mediafire.com/?agzoi592sbi

I just added pause, bg music and some sound effects.

Hope you enjoy it.

Regards

Fox

Controls

Move Left: Left, L
Move Right: Right, R
Drop: Down, B
Change color: Up, A
Pause: Start, X, Close LID

Need to patch with DLDI

http://palib.info/forum/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4028&forum=9

The goal of this project is to create a port of NetHack for the DS utilizing the unique features of the DS to create an easy-to-use NetHacking experience.

Changes:

Allow users to bind commands to individual chordkey presses (note, you can’t bind combination presses, and commands are activated when the key is released).
Added support for binding run and fight movements (movements prefixed with ‘g’ and ‘F’, respectively).
Added the ‘cmdkey’ option, which lets the user define the key used to open the command window.
Added ‘keyhelp’ option which controls whether the bindings are shown on the screen (default is now off).
Added HELPLINE1 and HELPLINE2 directives. These take key lists, which determine which keys appear in the key help, and in what order.
Moved minimap colours into a palette file (minimap.pal).
Properly ignore all input when in sleep mode.
Various commands which didn’t show a prompt now do (eg, wear, take off, eat, etc).
Fixed a bug in the default X keymapping. ie, it actually works now (the default was mistakenly set to “o,” instead of just “o”).
Fixed a bug where dismissing the “Toggle Option” key binding submenu without selecting anything would cause a crash.
Fixed a bug where responding to the “Press A…” prompt would result in the action bound to A getting executed.
Fixed keyboard colours, and changed the palette to plain text.

http://frodo.dyn.gno.org/~brettk/NetHackDS

Here comes a new Nintendo DS game by Kukulcan with graphics from Lobo.

Play and enjoy!

http://kukulcan.palib.info/index.php?page=detail&num=65

Pocket Physics v0.2 is out! Main new feature: Pins!

You can design scenes freely by drawing things with the stylus. Things can be solid, like ramps and floors, or dynamic, like balls or boxes. Like in The Incredible Machine, you can reset the scene, change it, and start the simulation again. It’s even more fun if you have a DS Motion, which can be used to control gravity!

http://blog.dev-scene.com/0xtob/2008/01/03/pocket-physics-v02-now-with-pins/