PSP Genesis Competition, And the winners are…

Wow. 5 months after we announced the PSP Genesis competition, there we are with our final list of winners. First of all, I want to say choosing those was tough. We tested all the entries for almost a month (and this taught me a lot, from an organizer point of view, a judge point of view, but also as a homebrew developer… I’ll probably blog about that one day), and debated for a few days to decide who would be the 3 winners… this ended up in a 2h hot discussion on IRC in which we reached our conclusion.

Here goes, in reverse order:

They didn’t win, but were nominated by some of the 4 judges

These entries almost made it, but were eliminated by stronger opponents in the final vote. It’s probably not gonna feel so good for their creators to know that they were that close to getting a nice cash prize, but we want as many homebrews as possible to get recognition in this competition, so I hope that at least mentioning the quality of these entries will help raise awareness on those:

• Localizer by Draan. This plugin lets you translate your XMB and all PSP Messages into the language of your choice, even if (especially if ?) Sony didn’t include your language on their device. The source shows a huge investigation of all the strings of the system, and a very solid and useful concept.

• PSP3D by PSPWizard (aka AnMaBaGiMa). This plugin allows you to see actual 3D with the help of colored glasses, in many 3D games. What’s amazing is that it does it in a clever way, actually finding the 3D shapes in the game. A brilliant concept, and a nice implementation.

I also have a personal list of my 28 favorite entries, and I’ll blog about that one day.

Guys, this is not over, there are other prizes in this competition and you might still get those.

4th. SHELL by Arnold. He didn’t win, but we have something for him

After a long discussion, the judges were still split on Arnold’s SHELL. This is a great concept, extremely promising, but we thought there is a risk this doesn’t live up to its expectations if the scene doesn’t follow up. SHELL doesn’t get one of the 3 prizes, but what we are offering here is a promise for dev help. I can’t reveal too much in there yet as the right people still need to be contacted, but some of the judges personally committed to help big time with this project.

3rd. Some1′s Failsploit gets 400$

Congratulations to the first Kernel Exploit to ever join a Homebrew competition. What can we say? Kernel exploit ARE a big deal, and there’s no way the judges couldn’t acknowledge that. This exploit brought freedom to thousands of PSP users around the world, and is what allows us to run Custom Firmwares on the latest OFW as I type this. Congrats to Some1.

2nd. Team pro’s Pro CFW get 750$

CFW Pro was my personal favorite. I am actually still running 5.00 m33 on some of my machines, but there is no doubt that Pro CFW is shaping the future of Custom Firmwares on the PSP. The pro team has been consistently delivering quality updates over the past months, turning what was initially a “simple” Hen into a CFW working in several environments. Icing on the cake, it went open-source recently, which is the first time a custom firmware does that on the PSP, and let me tell you, it was about time .  This is one of the most promising projects in this contest, but also one of those that accomplishes the most already. Congrats guys!

1st. Drakon’s Lamecraft gets the big 1900$ prize

Our big winner is Lamecraft. It’s always difficult to choose and announce the winner. There will always be people to say that this one is not even a game. Or that it is just stealing a concept. Or that we shouldn’t even dare compare a simple homebrew game to a brilliant plugin or a CFW. But the thing is, this entry came out of the blue, and in the course of a few weeks, created a massive community of players. It is pushing some of the limits of the PSP, and doing things nobody thought was actually doable on this small hardware. It also went open source recently, so we are confident that it will keep improving. To us judges, this homebrew was a massive shock in every aspect, and we sure hope this keeps going. Congrats Drakon!

The Genesis compo is not over!

This is not over yet! We at /talk are still voting for the audience prize (Note that it won’t go to Lamecraft, Pro CFW, or some1′s exploit, as per the vote’s rules I won’t give this prize to one of the 3 winners), I myself still need to decide which open source entry will get my 100$ prize, our sponsors at Daxhordes.org also have a 100$ audience vote, psp-hacks.com are also voting for a psp go + a 50$ cash prize, and pspgen are also choosing 3 entries that will respectively get 500$, 300$, and 200$.

So keep voting!

Note: We will be contacting the winners very soon to send them their prizes. Please note that each sponsor is supposed to contact the winners individually, so once I get the winners’ email/paypal information, I will contact the sponsors with this information, and let them send the prizes directly.

You can discuss these results in the comments below, or in our forum, where npt just announced the winners as well.