Tom Doyle :: TALK

If profanities offend you…. don’t watch this!

The illegal 1Rom.net website has been taken down due to a legal threat from ESA. 1Rom had been online for over a year and allowed people to illegally download game roms that they could use in their modified games consoles.

We wrote an article a couple of months ago about how you could get a card for your Nintendo DS called the R4DS. This allowed you to play games downloaded from the 1Rom website. It will be interesting to see how many more websites fall foul to this latest bout of legal action threats.

I recently purchased a Nintendo DS Lite for my wife, who became hooked on the Brain Training game while playing one at a friends.

A friend of mine then put me wise to a “backup” tool called R4DS or Revolution for DS. 

It’s a small cartridge, exactly like a normal game cartridge which has a SD Card slot, in which you can download games from the Internet and load them on to it. In fact, depending on what size SD Card you get, you could in theory put thousands of games on this one cartridge.

So off I went on my merry way to find out about these little thingys. It wasn’t long before I found plenty of information on the Internet about the R4DS, but I also found out about another, more expensive one called the M3 DS Simply. Anyway, after much research, it turned out that the more expensive one, the M3 DS Simply, didn’t offer much more than the R4DS. So my next goal was to find the cheapest place to buy it.

So my searches lead me to www.consolesource.com - a website that seems to be dedicated to tools like this (in some fashion) for all consoles! I purchased the R4DS with the 2 gig SD Card - it cost me just $95 when delivery charge was included. It arrived within 3 days!!!

The R4DS came in a small box which includes the cartrdige, a USB SD Card Reader and a CD with the software required. When you receive it first, you need to put the little what can only be described as, operating system onto the SD card (this is included on the CD). You then need to get your Nintendo DS ROMs and put them on the SD Card too.

When you turn on the Nintendo DS, it boots up into the R4DS operation system. You have 3 options, one is to load games from your card, the second is to play media file such as MP3’s or video files (they must be converted) and the third; I’ve yet to figure out! To play a game, you simply select from your downloaded roms.

Since it’s possible to download 1,000’s of pirated ROMs from sites like www.1rom.net, it means you’d never have to buy a game again, if you were tha way inclined…. quite a worrying thought for Nintendo.

It the last few years, there has rarely been a time when I’ve been blown away by new technology. The last thing that struck me as innovative was the Nintendo Wii and it’s excellent new controller. For a company that I thought were dead after Sony blitz’ed the game console market, they’ve really tapped into a brand new market.

Now, they’ve gone another step forward and could potentially open up a whole new market for themselves. The Wii Fit is a new suite of games that uses a “balance board” for a new fun, active and dynamic way of playing games. It comes with many games such as aerobics, yoga and muscle stretches with main focusing on providing core workouts.

Already, the missus wants one…. that’s someone who typically hates anything to do with computers!

Have a look at the video below to see their new Wii Fit in action - looks like a whole lot of fun!

Well two weeks ago we headed up north, to my brothers for a Christmas party. The whole idea of going up north was to coincide with the release of the much anticipated Nintendo Wii. My brother had pre-ordered one months before its release and we all just couldn’t wait to get ago.

After 10 minutes of boxing, even though I would class myself as being fairly fit, I was out of breath.  It was pure madness, to guys going hell for leather punching air, hoping the character on screen would actually mimic exactly what we were doing. An old man passwed by the window from outside the house and stopped and looked at us making complete twats of ourselves. God knows what he was thinking!!!!!

Eventually, I figured out that it didn’t need all that exserion to actually win a game of boxing. But we movd on to the next game, which was tennis. An absolute great game. As I sat down in between games and watched to grown men make stoopid looking movements at a television, it struck me that gaming has now changed forever.

The whole concept is brilliant, physical movement whilst playing console games - we’ve only just seen this type of thing in “toys for big boys” events or similar events.

Now it’s accessbile to everyone, through the Nintendo Wii - the next generation of gaming has arrived…. lets see if it will last!