Holy Hell by Genecyst is a massive shoot ’em up game for Gameboy Advance. The author has been working very hard on improving the game over the past few weeks and has published a trailer of the most recent version.

http://holyhellgba.blogspot.com/

This March piko2tech released a nice little Gameboy Advance for our entertainment. This release did not get it’s attention and was discovered quite late by Nintendomax, where the news origins from.

Thanks to http://www.nintendomax.com/viewtopic.php?t=12467&f=27 for the news.

http://www.piko2tech.com/index.html

devkitARM is a toolchain for DS, GBA and GP32.

Changes:

updated to gcc 4.5.0.
list filename in ndstool file error.
win32 arm-eabi-gdb rebuilt with xml support.

http://devkitpro.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2036

BITS #2005 by BITS

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=55391

Holy Hell is a puzzle game with shmup elements. The goal of the game is to reach the end of every level trying to chain more blocks of the same color together.

You guide a little ship powered with four different colored weapons. Every weapon can destroy only blocks of its same color, so you must switch between them to blow up everything…

Brown blocks cannot be destroyed and must be dodged…

Changes:

update with a lot of new cool stuff.

Thanks to genecyst himself for the news via MSN 🙂

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=16917

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. Author of this piece of software is Jeff Lait.

Changes:

Help menus are no longer off by one. (Patrick Don’t have one, Matt_S, Sam Spencer, Alex Marsh, Robert Barber, mattock)
Remove potential crash when zapping wand of invisibility off map.
Items are no longer revealed by hostiles searching.
Status message “Searched” when you search to make it more clear you did something by searching.
Correct lighting tests for giant mobs along with looser LOS requirements to see them.
No longer crash if a rolling boulder kills the caster and then fills a hole.
You can click-drag on display text to scroll it.
Chris Lomaka’s tiles have been updated with some nice new additional icons.
Help menus are platform specific, so GBA users should no longer be taunted with stylus help, etc.
The Akoi Meexx 10×10 and 12×12 tilesets are enabled in SDL builds. The 10×10 has had a round of manual smoothing applied to it.
Status bar on iPhone now rotates and is hidden in landscape mode.
iPhone now uses native keyboard controls.
If you start the game in a room with only secret exits, you are explicitly told that there are secret exits to search for. (Eisel Mazard)

While the highscore is kept, save games are never preserved between versions. Please wait until your current character dies before upgrading.

Thanks to http://www.nintendomax.com for the news!

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

Jinroh released a “Software Mode 5 Mode 7 Effect”.

WARNING: TURN YOUR VOLUME WAAAAAY DOWN BEFORE LOADING UP THE ROM.

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17271

Qwak for Gameboy Advance is based on the Amiga version of “Qwak”. The Amiga, GBA and iPhone version is developed by Jamie Woodhouse. Publisher for the Amiga platform was Team 17, so some of you might still remember this title from the good old times.

The game is stunning and full of action. Goal is to make lots of points and find the key to open the exit of each level. Of course enemies will make sure it wont be that easy – sometimes there is even a big boss.

Qwak is not really free, but you can donate whatever you want! – Please consider donating if you like this game, as we are sure Jamie deserves a bunch of free coffee’s for this great step!

There are also versions for PC, MAC and iPhone – but those are not free and need to be paid for.

Thanks to http://www.nintendomax.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=11862 for the news, who got it from http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17269

http://www.qwak.co.uk/pages/gba/buy.php

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. Author of this piece of software is Jeff Lait.

Changes:

Fireball and Cloudkill always explode at the end of their trajectory.
When you gain permanent intrinsics by evolving or lichifying, relevant temporary intrinsics will be cleared, preventing you from having a silver-tolerant lich. (Nathan Bogue)
Timestamps on the final character dump and the description of how long you lived will now match. (Deozaan)
You can wish for bones and corpses without them instantly dissolving. (Garron)
You can no longer fetch items that have teleport fixed. (Eris Discordia)
When a creature (un)polys into a gargantuan creature, it will now also push away monsters in addition to crushing walls. (Nathan Bogue)
Lich-form creatures that are undead no longer report it being your evil that was useless. (garron Bailey)
When you name an item, the menu defaults to naming the type rather than the specific as this is the usual scenario.
The floor of the kiwi room is now the proper floor tile.
Controled teleport onto the square you are already standing no longer reports that you are blocked, but that you decide to stay put.
Mysterious mapping of rooms fixed. Thanks to Kender and Mental Mouse for tracking this down – it has been annoying me for six years or so! (David Damerell, Eilu, Kender, Mental Mouse)
buildall.sh should work with –use-home-dir again. (garron)
The option menu no longer has Load. Instead it has Quit, which prompts you if you meant this. Loading is now only done from the main menu.
No experience for killing your pets.
Confirmation prompt if starting New Game with active saved game as one can easily accidentally overwrite it.
Some spells when mistargeted no longer waste your mana. Not all, so remain vigilant.
Cancelling your choice in the Wish menu no longer costs a turn.
Fix potential crash when you are killed by splash damage from a thrown item.

While the highscore is kept, save games are never preserved between versions. Please wait until your current character dies before upgrading.

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

devkitARM is a toolchain for DS, GBA and GP32.

Changes:

In a rather embarrassing faux pas it looks like at least some of the increased binary size in devkitARM compiled binaries came from newlib being compiled without optimisation, oops. devkitARM release 30 fixes this and is now available through the windows installer and the getting started page on the wiki. With thanks to z-g for the bug report.

devkitARM release 30
update to binutils 2.20.1
patched for arm thumb scheduler bug.
corrected default utf8 charset setup.
newlib compiled with optimisation.

http://www.devkitpro.org/devkitarm/devkitarm-release-30/