Games

747 Articles

Old CRT Television playing Luigi's Mansion on a rusted out bike (Original Photo by Anete Lusina)

Luigi’s Mansion First Person Mod Brings Spooky New Perspective

October 28, 2022 by 2 Comments

The Nintendo GameCube in many ways defied expectations. It was purple, it had buttons shaped like beans, and it didn’t launch with a Mario game. What we got instead was the horror-adjacent ghost adventure game starring Mario’s brother — Luigi’s Mansion. The game was a graphical showpiece for the time, however, the camera angles were all fixed like an early Resident Evil game. Not satisfied with playing within those bounds, modder [Sky Bluigi] created a first person camera patch for the game that finally let players see why Luigi was so freaked out all the time.

The patch dubbed Luigi’s Mansion FPO (First Person Optimized) does a lot to drive home the game’s child-friendly, spooky aesthetic. Along with the ability to explore environments with a new lens, it provides the ability to turn the flashlight on and off manually if you want. Though the most impressive part of Luigi’s Mansion FPO is that it runs on real hardware. All that’s needed to play the mod is clean image of the North American release of Luigi’s Mansion and a .xdelta patching utility like Delta Patcher. GameCube games can be ripped directly to a USB thumb drive using a soft-modded Nintendo Wii console running Clean Rip or similar backup tool.

Luigi’s Mansion FPO actually provides a collection of patches that offer revised controls and increased field of view depending on which patch is used. The original game had inverted controls for aiming Luigi’s ghost vacuum, so the “Invert C-Stick Controls” patch will install a more modern aiming scheme where up on the right stick will aim upwards and vice versa. The “Better FOV” pulls the camera a little further back from where Luigi’s head would be while the original aiming scheme is retained. Though no matter which patch you decide to go with, a mod like this is always a good excuse to revisit a cult classic.

For another fresh GameCube mod check out this post about a Raspberry Pi Pico based modchip for the system.

Continue reading “Luigi’s Mansion First Person Mod Brings Spooky New Perspective” →

Dylan showing off his giant tractor video game controller

Real Tractor Moonlights As Farming Simulator Controller

October 28, 2022 by 9 Comments

Around October, amid all the pumpkin spiced food and beverages, folks make their yearly pilgrimage to a local farm. They load themselves onto hay-filled tractor trailers and ride out in search of the perfect pumpkin to put on the front porch, and let it slowly decompose. The “closest” a video game has come to replicating this seasonal event is the annual Farming Simulator series. One modder, [Dylan], decided to add an extra level of authenticity to the Farming Simulator experience by controlling the game with an actual tractor.

The opportunity for the project presented itself thanks to a local Kiwi farmer (Kiwi as in New Zealand, not the fruit) who provided [Dylan] with access to a Case IH 310 Magnum CVT tractor. [Dylan] built a custom USB controller that mirrored the actual layout of the tractor’s control pad. Tilt sensors were wrapped around the tractor’s steering wheel and throttle to provide analog input for steering and speed control. After a number of hours tweaking the setup on site, [Dylan] live-streamed his Farming Simulator PC play session (video below) with the tractor itself left off for obvious reasons. Without tractor motor engaged there was no power steering, so he deserves a bit of extra credit for making it through multiple hours.

This certainly isn’t the first ridiculous controller project [Dylan] has taken on. He’s created a trombone controller to just to play Trombone Champ, a Nerf bow controller for Overwatch, and he even played through Hades using a literal pomegranate. You can watch more of [Dylan’s] custom controller projects on his Rudeism Twitch channel.

Continue reading “Real Tractor Moonlights As Farming Simulator Controller” →

Catch The Stick Game Is A Tidy Build

October 20, 2022 by 10 Comments

There are many different ways to test one’s reaction times; a simple way is to simply drop a ruler and see how far it falls before you can catch it. Take that same concept to a greater level, and you get this impressive “Catch The Stick” game.

The creation of one [Romain Labbe], the build has a wooden frame that holds up several sticks roughly seven feet off the ground. When the game is triggered, a beeper counts down, and then sticks start dropping. Each stick is held in place with a small solenoid-controlled latch, and the game simply energizes the solenoids in turn to drop the sticks randomly. On easier modes, the sticks are released gently, one at a time. On higher difficulty levels, they’re released in a near-continuous stream that would tax even a team of several players.

It’s not a complicated build, but it is very nicely executed. It certainly looks to be good fun to play with friends. Alternatively, you could try out this more distributed-style build. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Catch The Stick Game Is A Tidy Build” →

Researching Factorio…For Science

October 19, 2022 by 15 Comments

Science has affirmatively answered a lot of questions that, looking back, could be seen as bizarre to have asked in the first place. Questions like “can this moldy cheese cure disease” or “can this rock perform math if we give it some electricity.”  Among the more recent of this list is the question of whether or not the video game Factorio, in which the player constructs an elaborate factory, can be used as the basis for other academic work. As [Kenneth Reid] discusses in this talk, it most certainly can.

If you haven’t played the game, it’s a sort of real-time strategy (RTS) game where the player gathers materials to construct a factory while defending it from enemies. On the surface it might seem similar to Age of Empires or Starcraft, but its complexity is taken to extremes not found in other RTS games. The complexity hides nuance, and [Kenneth] points out that it’s an excellent simulator to study real-world problems such as vehicle routing problems, decision making, artificial intelligence, bin packing problems, and production planning, among a whole slew of other interesting areas of potential research.

[Kenneth] and his partners on this project also developed some software tools with interacting with a Factorio game without having to actually play it directly. The game includes an API which the team used to develop tools so that other researchers can use it as a basis for simulations and studies. There was a research paper published as well for more in-depth reading on the topic. We shouldn’t be too surprised that a game can be used in incredibly productive ways like this, either. Here’s another example of a toy being used to train engineers working in industrial automation.

Continue reading “Researching Factorio…For Science” →

Playdate Handheld Turned Typewriter

October 18, 2022 by 6 Comments

The Playdate is an interesting gaming system. It’s a handheld, has a black and white screen, and superficially reminds us a little bit of the original Game Boy, right down to the button layout. But the fact that it has a second controller that pops out of the side, that this controller is a crank, and that the whole system was made by the same people that made Untitled Goose Game, makes us quite intrigued. Apparently it has made an impact on others, too, because this project turns the gaming system into a typewriter.

The Playdate doesn’t have native support for USB accessories unless it’s plugged into this custom 3D printed dock. Inside of the dock is a Teensy 4.1 which handles some translation between the keyboard and the console. Once the dock is taken care of the text editor needs to be side-loaded to the device as well. The word processor has the ability to move the cursor around, insert and delete text, and the project’s creator, [t0mg], plans to add more features in future versions like support for multiple files, changing the font, and a few other things as well.

For anyone interested in recreating this project, all of the printable files, the text editor, and the schematics are all available in the GitHub repo. It’s an impressive project for a less well-known console that we haven’t seen many other hacks for, unless you count this one-off Arduboy project which took some major inspiration from the Playdate’s crank controller.

Electric Guitar Shocks You For Missing A Note

October 6, 2022 by 6 Comments

Rocksmith is a popular video game that works like Guitar Hero, but with a real guitar. You have to play well and hit the right notes, or the game penalizes your score. [Lightwing] took the stakes up a notch, though, adding a system that shocks the player every time they fail.

To achieve this, it was necessary to detect when the player missed a note. Initial attempts involved using Tensor Flow AI to detect the game state from the screen, but it was unreliable. Instead, the game’s memory was read to achieve detection. When the player misses a note, a certain section of memory changes, and a script reads the change in game state. It then sends a signal to an Arduino which triggers the stun gun’s fire button, which shocks the player holding the guitar.

As you might expect, the documentation for this project includes a video which involves plenty of gratuitous electric shocks when [Lightwing] makes mistakes. Fair warning — there’s plenty of colorful language when the stun gun fires. Generally, a powerful shock ends with screams a dropped guitar, and too much fear to continue.

It’s painful enough that it’s probably not a useful teaching tool for learning the guitar. We’ve seen similar shocking builds before, too, like this simple wire game.

Continue reading “Electric Guitar Shocks You For Missing A Note” →

Mouse Finds New Home In Pinball Machine

October 3, 2022 by 14 Comments

Restoring pinball machines is an excellent hobby, and can even be more than that as we see businesses like bars and museums focusing on them as a main attraction. There’s all kinds of intrigue to be found, from esoteric mechanical systems to classic electronics and unique artwork. For those building new pinball machines, though, one way to bypass a lot of the hassle of finding antiquated parts is to build a digital machine with an analog feel, like this machine which repurposes a computer mouse in an interesting way.

One of the important design considerations with a more modern system like this is to preserve the mechanical components that the player interacts with, in this case the plunger. This pinball machine is really just a large screen driven by a computer, but the plunger is a spring-loaded one from an old analog machine. Attached to the end of the plunger inside the cabinet is a cloth strap which passes underneath an old optical mouse. When the plunger is pulled and released, the mouse registers the position of the plunger and sends that information to the computer controlling the pinball display.

We really appreciate a KISS-style design like this in general. Mice are a proven, reliable technology and the metal components of the plunger are unlikely to ever wear out, which means that at least this part of the new pinball machine is unlikely to need much maintenance over the lifespan of the cabinet itself. For other ways of preserving the original feel of old machines, take a look at this build which incorporates all kinds of tricks within a MAME cabinet.