WotR #69 - "Home Brew Barrymore"

Diary of a Bedroom Coder.
Keeping it painfully real.

Homebrew Arcade.
Intended for amusement only.

The Making of Llamatron.
Diary of a classic.

This Gaming Life.
Deggstoid.

MAME.
Opening Pandora's Box.

Too Much Research.
How Manic Miner made Ely Mainly, err, Mental.

Fancy a Brew?
But in a PSP not a kettle. Umm.

Llamasoft History Part 7.
Pre-History & Beginning.

Xbox Live Arcade Preview.
Who ordered the spicy PomPoms?

Nintendogs.
Smack my bitch up.

Ragdoll Kung Fu
Wipe on. Wipe off. Eat mushrooms.

Ultimate Spiderman.
Web stinker.

Civilisation IV.
Kharma-civilian.

Homebrew.
Hammers and bailing twine.

Commodore C64 Direct to TV.
What's not to love?

Rodent Ware.
Twisted and touched.

Amiga Day Out.
Treat her like a lady.

Lost.
Reward.

Dreamcast Holiday.
Hope and tragedy.

Image of the Month.
Love them like you know you should.

Teamonkey
"I've put my name down for the office PES5 championships, something entirely to peer pressure. Yes, I know it's football, but apparently they've managed to make it interesting by turning it into a computer game.

Seeing as the last time I played a football game (not Sensi, that doesn't count) was FIFA '94 on the Megadrive, does anyone have any tips? I gather I 'win' by being arrested for rape, is there a special button combination I need to use for that?"

Russ
"Hmmm...a passport, some money, an underwater camera and a Dreamcast.

Now dream could mean your dream holiday and certainly an underwater camera could be a clue to perhaps a scuba diving holiday. But let's not be so hasty. Sometimes dreams don't come true and sometimes they become nightmares. A passport to your dreams perhaps? Or maybe to pass the port? A wine hamper then? However, if you were to pass some money in the street while carrying an underwater camera and a dreamcast would you hand it in to your local police station or would you thrown it all in the bin?

That's right! Oh, I'm so sorry....it's Dusty Bin ladies and gentlemen..."

Koworld
On jumping puzzles in Half Life 2: "Oh fuck did that make me angry. That and the rubbish ending. I mean - for fucksake: I've just spent hours, and hours, and hours getting to this point and all you're giving me is a brief lecture and a wave goodbye? You can fuck right off: I want an M. Night, Shamylan twist, I want a fucking movie, I want something that gamers will talk about in hushed fucking tones for months before somebody lets it slip. I want to be treated to half-an-hour mopping-up in a Stryder I want a fucking certificate. I want a voice over talking me through the subsequent 20 years and explaining how I became the most important man in the world and setting-up dozens, fucking dozens, of tantilising glimpses at future possible directions for HL3. And I want pinball tables that pay-out in real edible spangles like the one we found on a caravan park in 1980."

We present Rodent's world famous bid to list the top 5 of everything in the world.

Rodents'
Top five brews.

Strange.

Northern tea.

Barrymore.

Witches.

Special.

Rodent's
Featured favourite indie game.

Dave's Day Out
Found by: oddbob0
"Reminded me why, all that time back, I wasted two years of my life glued to a black and white screen playing Jet Set Willy till my mum kicked me off to bed. It shouldn't work, its an arcade adventure in the ye olde literal sense. Rucks of rooms, loads of objects and just *so* playable. So much so, its still one of the best things I've played all year."
Get it here.

Complete set of back issues here

#69 Homebrew

Our Hungarian Editor is taking a break this month to concentrate on the bumper Christmas issue. Which leaves me in charge of this, our 69th go at a magazine – dedicated to all that is homebrew. I’ve already sacked the tea boy and sat the work experience girl inappropriately on my knee.

Homebrew is ace. And rubbish. Its euphoria inducing and yet it’s able to reduce a man to tears of frustration in the early hours of the morning. It’s something to get us involved and something to remind us to leave it to the experts. It’s all of the above and we love it.

Most of our Rodent team have had a crack with varying degrees of success. This month you can boil along with Bog as he attempts to do something useful with his PSP. Have yourself a marvel at Tim Hunkin’s bonkers arcade while you’re at it, have a read about one of the worlds best shareware successes, Llamatron, and share in the highs and lows of Ely’s and Ahchay’s programming exploits. I have a crack at bedroom coding in this issue too and go a bit wrong in the head.

We also present Rodent Ware, which, quite frankly, pisses all over Wario’s efforts. Do feel free to submit your own offensive, funny or potentially quite playable attempts to the comment thread and why not have a crack at our competition? We want the worst game ever – designed and written by you.

We may have survived last month’s war issue but we lost one of our boys last month. Well, kind of. Swith has packed his Amiga 1200 away to make space for the Xbox 360. We’ve dispensed with the traditional military send off and sent him round London with his little Commodore pensioner for one last journey.

Oh yeah, one last thing, fucking T-shirts: boys and girls we've created a bunch of quality designs and that and we are over the bloody moon with them. Click here to buy the bastards and then send us pictures we can pleasure ourselves over.

Also - PLEASE put in your votes and comments for game of the year. Your opinions, your actual farkin' words themactualselves will appear in our bumper end of year thing.

At ease gentlemen, my new 14 year old buxom tea girl has put the kettle on for you. Feet up and read on for another dose of original spirit!

Russ, Deputy Editor - November 2005

Rodent T-Shirts
We love them videogames, we love wearing clothes too, so what we thought we should do is combine the two. So we have. There's a lot of love in here, readers and please feel free to contribute your own designs - it's all good. Love you all!

RSS Feeds
We're delighted to be able to announce that Rodent is now all RSS'd up.
Useful overview of RSS & Rodent

Next month:
End of The Fucking Year!
This is your chance to contribute. PLEASE put in your votes and comments for game of the year. Also, if you want to: write some sheat about Christmas, or 2005 or whatever the fuck you fancy.
Don't be shy - it's about your perspective not your technical writing profitiancy.
editor@retailkings.com is your friend in this.