POWDER is a roguelike game. It is not a port of an existing roguelike. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning. It uses actual graphic tiles (16×16) rather than the traditional characters. You may wish it didn’t as I drew the tiles and am not an artist.

Changes:

* Accruements is spelled properly (David Damerell)
* Dove into the tile cache code to try and cleanup various tile errors people have been reporting.
o Double lock fixed that would keep inventory tiles allocated
o Minimap releases its tiles after displaying and has had its maximum cache size unbounded.
o Void and Notile tiles have been special cased to never be freed as if we keep them around damage is mitigated.
o When a tile lock failed I still updated the map with the tile, meaning that if a later alloc succeeded, that tile would be double freed.
o The avatar tile was relocked on every new game, resulting in a slow tile leak. This showed up after over 65,000 continuous games so I really hope no one out there encountered it.
* New intrinsic, Amnesia, stolen from the recent Vanilla Angband implementation. You lose access to all your skills and spells while it is in effect.
* New spell: Soul Suck.
* New monster: The soul sucker. No points for guessing what its spell is.
* New mode: Tutorial. Selecting this from the main screen starts a special tutorial level for training people in basic POWDER gameplay.
* No longer use profanity in the death message if you spent more than a year playing the game.
* You can breathe again has the second e in breathe. (Clare Boothby)
* Blizzard was missing its second round of physical damage
* Sleeping while tired will lead to a deeper sleep. It also will have a chance to clear the tired flag.
* Monsters will not walk onto lava or acid if it will damage them. (hotpoo)
* Monsters will not be generated on squares that harm them
* New flag to prevent monster generation on squares. Also stops it being a target of holes, a target of tele, etc.
* Text for dual wield explains that off weapon must be smaller than main weapon (hotpoo)
* Some groups of monsters now have a leader which they are tame followers of. While following their leader, do not expect them to fight amongst themselves.
* Monsters will cast Force Wall if they know it.

Thanks to http://www.dev-fr.org for the screenshot 🙂

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

PuzzleManiak is a partial port of the Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection on Nintendo DS. 11 games are ported on NDS now: Tents, Dominosa, Mines, Bridges, Light Up aka Akari), Pattern (aka Picross), Net (aka Netwalk), Untangle (aka Planarity), Sudoku (aka Solo), Galaxies and Slitherlink (Loopy).

Changes:

* DLDI patching is now mandatory.
* Some bugs in game saving have been fixed.
* Bridges bug has been fixed.
* Double buffering has been implemented in Untangle, so that gameplay is really better now.
* Dutch language has been integrated
* In Net game, it’s now possible to lock a tile when you think it’s in the right position (this is done in the ‘right click’ mode).
* Pressing “start” button while playing will exit any game in progress (useful in Untangle, as the menus are not available while playing, due to the double buffering implementation).
* Addition of new levels in Net game (with a Wall wrap around mode)
* 2 new games have been integrated: Mastermind and Blackbox
* Graphic themes are now available. Switching from one theme to another is possible from the game, and this choice is saved locally. 4 themes are available in the release. You can easily modify them (especially the background). We’re looking forward to seeing your best creations.

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

mpdDS is an open-source mpd client developed for the Nintendo DS console.

Release notes:

I have uploaded a new build, compiled against dswifi 0.3.3. So MPDDS should now work fine on all Nintendo DS, even the latest Nintendo DS Lite models with the new firmware, and work with all router setups too.

http://www.beermex.com/mpdDS-dswifi0.3.3.tgz

Chris28 has released an application which is useful for small children to learn the (french) alphabet.

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

http://www.dev-fr.org/index.php/topic,1295.msg10384/topicseen.html#new

Chain Reaction v0.2 is a skill/reaction game for NDS and has been updated to v0.2.

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

http://virtuapeanuts.dev-fr.org/p3690/2007-09-05-chain-reaction-v0-2-wip.html

Chorded is a guitar chord lookup app for the DS.

Author release notes:

dinner hour running out.. new version ready… download below… “v0.06 – you can now use the L+R buttons to set your base fret”

http://www.suspectsoftware.co.uk/

DSLibris is an Ebook reader for Nintendo DS.

Features:

* last book and page viewed are restored on restart.
* all files in the program’s folder ending in .xht or .xhtml are added into the book library.
* support for Latin-1 in XHTML encoded in UTF-8 or iso-8859-1 numeric attribute format. This means some international support (see the included Czech book example).
* page number displayed on right page, positioned according to overall position in book
* reads XHTML (via expat) and reflows text
* saves each book location in .bkm file
* antialiased, proportional text

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

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14068

KnifeOshon is based on the japanese game “Azarashi”. The goal is to throw a knife on the falling spiffy monster as soon as you see it falling… the faster you are, the more points you get.

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

http://www.gba-nds.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=247

kiswa is in need of motivation and has posted information about his new game “Jack Turtle” which is currently in development.

Story:
Without giving away too much… there is a scientist who runs an aquarium and he’s been messing with the animals. His dolphins turned out really well, so he starting genetic modification on some others. Well, the others took over and the worst of them is a whale. The whale has had all the sea turtle eggs stolen from the nearby beach so he can modify them genetically and create an army. One of the dolphins escaped and is helping the sea turtles get their eggs back. The turtles chose Jack Turtle to rescue them, and the dolphin gave him a weapon. Then butt-kicking will begin….

Game Stages:
Stage 1 – Beach to City
The first four levels will take Jack Turtle from the beach to the outskirts of the city.

Stage 2 – City to Aquarium
The next four levels will be Jack’s adventures on his way to the aquarium.

Stage 3 – Aquarium Outdoors
These four levels will be the parking lot and outdoor areas of the Aquarium as Jack nears his goal.

Stage 4 – Aquarium Indoors
Jack will have to travel through the interior of the aquarium on his way to face the evil whale that stole his family’s eggs.

Give him a hand so he gets enough motivation to bring us a new neat NDS homebrew game!

http://palib.info/forum/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?viewmode=flat&type=&topic_id=3531&forum=9

Mental Games is a collection of game for the NDS including:

* Mental Pong
* Chain Reaction
* Yin Yang, and
* Danger Zone

More games to come and all games need your “mental” alertness more or less.

http://www.dev-fr.org/index.php/topic,1256.msg10283.html#msg10283